Exhilarating look at Oliver’s decades as newshound

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This article was published 19/11/2011 (5419 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

LONGTIME CTV parliamentary correspondent Craig Oliver’s illustrious career could have ended before it started.

A young Oliver was working in his tiny hometown CBC radio station in Prince Rupert, B.C., and the local staff suspected they had no listeners to the baroque music program they were relaying from Montreal.

So they opened up the mike and hollered in unison, “F-off!”

When no one complained, and no one in management noticed, they’d learned they were right — no listeners.

Oliver is 73 and still working, and in his lively new memoir he makes no apologies for being an unapologetic newshound.

Indeed, for what should he apologize?

His is an exhilarating inside-look ride through decades of Canadian politics and history. For a TV guy, Oliver writes so well he could be in newspapers.

Take this for an opening paragraph: “My father was a bootlegger and, for a short time, a jailbird. My mother ran a successful taxi business, also for a short time. Both were alcoholics.”

Oliver is unstinting in recalling what it was like to grow up on the wrong side of the tracks in a depressed coastal town.

Like many Canadian journalists, Oliver started in small towns with incompetent bully-bosses who demanded he work 24 hours a day. He had made it Toronto with the CBC when he was hired by CTV to start up Canada AM in 1972. He has been with CTV ever since.

His anecdotes are amazing. For the first time, Oliver recounts off-the-record conversations with both Prince Philip and Prince Charles making observations on Canadians and the monarchy.

There’s the time in the ’80s he was languishing in the CTV Washington bureau, reporting for a country the U.S. barely notices, when he got invited to a private dinner party with President Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan. “When I was announced to my hosts, a startled look crossed Mrs. Reagan’s face, but Ronnie welcomed me warmly.”

Turns out they had invited the wrong Craig Oliver.

Oliver was with Tommy Douglas and John Diefenbaker when they were more than names in a history book. He survived shooting war assignments in dictatorships such as El Salvador, where people were executed right in front of foreign reporters.

He was working for CBC Winnipeg in 1967, when his son, Murray, now a TV newsman himself, was born.

Oliver worked in a time when lines between reporters and politicians and backroom people blurred. He had personal access to people we’ve never seen quite this way before. Check out his candid assessment of his private meetings with one Stephen Harper.

Interspersed are chapters of 30 years of month-long canoe voyages to some of the least accessible parts of Canada’s Far North, spent in the company of some of the nation’s leading media and political figures. Those chapters contain the best writing in the book.

Not until the last few pages does Oliver talk much about being legally blind from the glaucoma that hit him in his 30s.

Oliver’s Twist is superb stuff, proving again that a word is worth 1,000 TV clips.

Nick Martin is a Free Press reporter.

Oliver’s Twist

The Life and Times

of an Unapologetic Newshound

By Craig Oliver

Viking Canada, 331 pages, $34