Office politics

A July workplace grab-bag, with tales from the Nova Scotia RCMP, the PMO, and... Maclean's

So that happened.

We’re overdue to catch up, dear reader. I generally prefer single-issue posts here — you know, articles — but today I have a few items from all over. If anything connects them, it’s that they’re on the general theme of workplaces, and how they change.

I want to put some stuff on the table about the Nova Scotia Mass Casualty Commission. First, some thoughts on roles and protagonists. Then, a valuable lesson in modern media relations from one of the commission’s witnesses.

After that, I want to shine a light on an exit memo that’s heavy with hints about how things are going in Justin Trudeau’s Prime Minister’s Office.

Finally, an update on my own comings and goings, and a probably futile attempt to correct some impressions about changes at my old employer.

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Blair, Lucki, Campbell, Scanlan

On the matter of whether Bill Blair and the Prime Minister’s Office pressured RCMP commissioner to make details of the Nova Scotia killer’s arsenal public to help rally support for gun control, a few thoughts.

First, nobody should take anything Blair or the PMO say at face value, of course. You can drive a truck through terms like “no undue pressure.”

But it’s also important to note that there is no blanket prohibition in law or lore against a minister directing the RCMP. From the RCMP Act, with my emphasis added:

• 5 (1) The Governor in Council may appoint an officer, to be known as the Commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, to hold office during pleasure, who, under the direction of the Minister, has the control and management of the Force and all matters connected with the Force.

What does the direction of the minister look like? We needn’t speculate. Blair published a mandate letter to Lucki in May. It says things like this:

[T]he RCMP, under your leadership will serve of Canadians by:…

• support[ing] the implementation of measures to counter the smuggling of handguns and the implementation of a buyback program for prohibited firearms.

The extent of the minister’s direction over the Commissioner is an object of perennial dispute. Case-by-case management would, it’s generally agreed, go too far. Where does “too far” start? This has been argued for decades. Lawyers have pleaded many times for clarification. There’s been no clarification. It’s a judgment call. One of many the Mass Casualty Commission will have to make.

My second point is that it was Commissioner Lucki’s bad luck, on the day she uncorked a tirade against the Nova Scotia RCMP detachment for refusing to make the details of the killer’s firearms public, to be on the other end of the line from Darren Campbell.

There’s quite a bit about Campbell in Paul Palango’s bestselling book 22 Murders. Campbell is, by all appearances, a Mountie’s Mountie. As a sergeant in BC’s lower mainland, Campbell and three colleagues captured an armed killer on a murder spree. In 2015, Campbell was promoted to Corps Sergeant Major, the highest-ranking non-commissioned officer in the RCMP, a post of national prominence in the force. Palango quotes the RCMP’s definition of the job: the Corps Sergeant Major is “responsible for… RCMP traditions. He is also responsible for maintaining a high standard of leadership, mentorship and accountability…”

After his term as Corps Sergeant Major ended, Campbell spent two years as the commander of the RCMP’s National Office of Investigative Standards and Practices. It’s specifically designed to “provide expertise and oversight on major case investigations,” the RCMP says.

So Darren Campbell is the son of an RCMP officer who had already held national responsibilities for accountability and for oversight on major cases by the time he found himself on that call with Lucki.

Be careful on calls. You never know when you might be talking to a stickler for detail.

Finally, as far as our RCMP segment goes, I want to take another look at testimony Lia Scanlan gave in two interviews with the commission.

Scanlan was the senior civilian member of the RCMP responsible for communications at ‘H’ Division, the force’s Nova Scotia detachment. She’s been in the news because she sent a furious letter to Lucki, after the call in which Lucki berated Campbell for refusing to make details of the killer’s weapons public.

It’s not so much Scanlan’s testimony about the shooting and its aftermath that I want to discuss. It’s the portrait she paints of the nature of modern communications strategy, and of relations between journalists and the people journalists call for information.

I should emphasize that I found Scanlan easy to empathize with as I read her testimony. I intend no criticism of her here. She’s always had important and difficult work to do. That work got much harder in the aftermath of a bloody mass murder in 2020. I don’t have the faintest interest in piling on. Indeed, it was refreshing to read somebody explaining at length — at last! — why increasing numbers of communications professionals prefer to do as much communicating as possible without reporters.

I think the story she tells should be of particular interest to journalists. We tend to equate “the public’s right to know” with our right to get answers to our questions. Somebody needs to tell us how thoroughly those two ideas have diverged — probably in the public’s own mind, and certainly in the minds of many public officials.

In a Sept. 21, 2021 interview with the mass-casualty commission, Scanlan talks about her history with the RCMP. She was hired as a student after finishing a degree in communications in 2009 and never left.

“It was old-school reporting then,” she says about her early days at ‘H’ Division.
It was — journalism was different, it was in 2009. Like, [the ranking officer] would get a phone call and do an interview. There was no social media and… there was actual news cycles; it was old school, totally different. I mean, it sounds old school, it’s lovely now [i.e. in retrospect]. Like, I would take that any day over what it is today.”

Most reporters who’ve been working longer than a few years remember times like that — when an official in some position of authority would “get a phone call and do an interview.” This has been replaced by a system, not just in police work or in politics but in just about every area of inquiry, where communications staffers collect questions and then, some time later, emit responses, which are often only distantly related to the questions.

Scanlan has thoughts on why that happened.

With a colleague, she says, she created one of the first Facebook pages for an RCMP division in Canada, in 2010. Twitter followed soon after. And they changed everything.

“Actually, this unit used to be called the ‘media relations’ unit or something,” she told her commission interviewers, “and it’s so much more than media. Like, the media is but one component. Like, [what Scanlan’s office has done in recent years] is strategic communications. So, it’s communicating. We don’t rely on the media to communicate to our stakeholders. That’s the old-school days. That’s the Sgt. Mark Gallagher days [Gallagher was her first boss, the one who’d get a call and do an interview] where that’s all you had. You had one in and out.” That is, one reporter asking questions, one set of answers going out.

These days, strategic communications involves keeping not just reporters informed, but a long line of stakeholders — ordinary citizens, local municipal councillors, the national RCMP HQ in Ottawa, the federal and provincial governments — up to date on police operations.

For most of us, 2009 isn’t that long ago, but for Scanlan and her colleagues, it might as well be steam-engine days. “There’s not a lot of time really to do the traditional, what you would call public relations,” Scanlan said. “It’s like what you go to school for — most of the people that I graduated with, if we were to all sit in a room, it’s night and day what we do. Not just me and them, but amongst all of us, yeah.”

How do you keep a long trapline of stakeholders, potential allies or adversaries, worried citizens in the loop? “We have been for… let’s say eight or nine years, using Twitter and Facebook as our primary means of communicating to the public,” Scanlan said, and I’m going to italicize some of the next bit. “It allows us to not have to pitch a story to the media, hope that the facts get correct. What we do is we tweet out.”

Scanlan’s hopes for the facts were, in her account, dashed after the province’s then-premier, Stephen McNeil, gave a news conference wondering why the RCMP had used Twitter instead of its emergency-alert system to warn Nova Scotians about a mass murder that was, at the time the tweets were going out, still underway.

‘H’ Division had already fielded “thousands of media calls” and given two “long press conferences,” totalling over six hours, when McNeil made his remarks, Scanlan told the commission. “Whenever the Premier of this province started making comments, I think he changed the narrative. And then things got really muddy.”

There follows, in the transcript of Scanlan’s testimony, some detail about her extended sick leave, and notes that she was crying as she spoke to the commission.

“Well, we all know what the public sentiment, like, and I’ve sheltered myself from it since January, but it was bad. Yeah, it was just bad. I care a lot about the Force and the people I work with and to see the media spew the misinformation and amplify it, disgusted me, and it still does. It’s at the centre of what a lot of the problems are right now. And you could get me in a room with the media and they would say, ‘There’s a common belief, oh, you guys didn’t say anything.’ Well, you show me where any other police agency ever that has had an ongoing investigation has done six hours of live press.”

I’m not going to arbitrate between (1) Scanlan’s perception that reporters started ignoring her messaging after McNeil raised the possibility that the RCMP hadn’t communicated properly; and (2) reporters’ belief, including Palango’s in his book and in several articles for my former employer, that the RCMP is actively hiding the facts. That question is on the long list of issues the mass casualty commission has to illuminate, and good luck to them. I will note that Scanlan delivers an extended harangue against Palango in very strong terms.

Of course it matters who’s correct, but not really for the purposes of my line of inquiry here. What matters to me today is that a person who was in a position to answer reporters’ questions, and had already become adept at finding ways to get information out without going through reporters, became progressively much more soured on the work of reporters. And when that happens, typically it’s not one or a few reporters who get shut out. It’s the entire profession.

“What turned into a shit show for us, because you’re not responding to questions related to the investigation, you’re responding to questions that are related to 85,000 stories out here that have no basis in fact, but I … can’t say that’s bullshit,” Scanlan said. “We’re a team of however many people I’ve got there and it was no end.”

The transcript suggests this was another difficult moment for Scanlan “When I started to feel like work was meaningless, it was super tough. Darren Campbell does a press conference and… that night on the news, they’re saying the complete opposite. It’s really shitty, and it impacts all police officers. It’s not about the RCMP, it’s about police officers.”

The commission called Scanlan back on Feb. 2 of this year for a follow-up interview.

“Do I think it’s a good media strategy to release new information every single day when you might have one new thing to update? I don’t. I would never do that. … Then you get shit on for, ‘You have nothing to say? Like, this is all you have to tell us?’ Like, yeah, this is what we have right now, and, like, we can’t change that. This is the investigation. The public doesn’t understand that; the media doesn’t understand that.”

Scanlan is entirely unimpressed by journalistic notions that our questions have any particular societal significance. “Just because you want to know, there’s a need-to-know and a nice-to-know,” she said. “We’ve always faced, ‘You’re hiding behind protecting the integrity of the investigation.’ No, like, we weren’t. There was nothing to hide behind. You’re dealing with an investigation and it is what it is.”

Eventually — after taking a very large number of reporters’ questions — Scanlan’s office simply stopped taking any more. “At a certain point, a decision had to be made that we were no longer communicating with them; it was done,” she says, while talking specifically about requests from Maclean’s while Palango was writing for us. (I’m making this clear purely in the interest of full disclosure.) “Because it went on for weeks and weeks…. and to what end? You were playing, now, a game. It was a game and the media — I’ve never seen anything like it. That’s why I’ll never work in that unit again. I will never work with the media again, ever. Like, I think it’s gross.”

What is the point of this story?, as Paul Simon asks. What information pertains? A few things, I guess.

First, reporters used to be gatekeepers. We simply aren’t any more, or much less than we used to be. In 1990 Brian Mulroney wanted to celebrate some important constitutional amendments. He called two Globe and Mail reporters in for an interview to explain his thinking. He used the words “roll the dice” to describe his strategy, and, long story short, the country nearly fell apart. For real. Ask your parents. But in 1990, Mulroney had no choice: if he wanted to get a message out to a decent fraction of the informed Canadian electorate, he had to get reporters to put ink onto paper, and he simply had to hope the ink would be shaped in ways he’d find congenial. The amount of control he had over any part of it was not great.

These days, you can tweet or bulk-email or TikTok your message to your heart’s content. Absolutely pristine. Precisely the information you want, precisely the absent information you want to hold back, precisely the hedging and fudging and misdirection you want. And if very few people actually see it and fewer buy what they’re reading as gospel truth, at least a newsmaker can take comfort in knowing they’re not delivering themselves into the hands of some… journalist.

Second, the temptations when political organizations become their own gatekeepers are obvious and far too easily indulged. To use the example closest to my home: just about every time the Trudeau government has gotten into trouble with an ethics commissioner or a budget officer or an environment commissioner, the first step in that dance was a claim, produced by a large communications team, that turned out to be at odd angles to the truth.

One such dance preceded the convening of this very Nova Scotia Mass Casualty Commission. For months after April 2020, McNeil’s provincial government obviously wanted a full public commission of inquiry, with the power to compel and subpoena witnesses. Trudeau’s government obviously didn’t. The resulting farce, including carefully-cooked answers from press people that didn’t begin to answer simple questions, lasted far too long. I very much hope that McNeil and his former justice minister Mark Furey will testify before the commission about what the hell that was all about. At the time they didn’t seem to enjoy the process one bit. I found their refusal to simply say what was going on surprising. I hope they get their chance. Under oath.

But it’s clear that as a rule, stiff-arming the media and letting interested parties decide what to tell citizens may be easy to understand, but it’s no guarantee of transparency, completeness or adherence to democratic norms. There’s a tension in all this. I’m just glad that, in Scanlan’s testimony, we see that tension played out, rather than simply ignored.

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"We should care about who those people are”

Farewell to Alex Kohut, who was senior manager of research and advertising at the Prime Minister’s Office for nine months. This job followed work in other government and Liberal Party roles since 2016 and meant Kohut was, substantially, the PMO’s in-house pollster, a successor to the formidable Dan Arnold, and played a significant role in crafting message for the government during a turbulent time. I don’t believe I’ve met him. I assume he worked hard for a better Canada.

Kohut posted a farewell message on Twitter and LinkedIn at the beginning of the week, after he left the government.

Here's the bulk of it.

Here's what I learned working at PMO in interesting times:

1) Politics is about people. When a government succeeds, it's because of great work done by people. Sometimes it's hundreds of people working behind the scenes, and sometimes it's one person with the right idea at the right moment. Everything can be traced back to human decisions.

2) That means we should care about who those people are and how prepared they are for their roles. Fortunately, I've met tons of exceptional staffers and MPs on the Hill, it's amazing to witness their knowledge and selflessness. We must keep recruiting the best and brightest.

3) As for preparation, politics is weird. When you win an election there's no institutional knowledge and most staffers have to learn their roles from scratch. Long lasting govts have a chance to share best practices and professionalize with training. That's the path to longevity.

4) Recruiting and training talent means nothing if it isn't retained. A brilliant, trained staffer with years of experience on a file is the best asset in politics. They can find a solution to your crisis. A positive workplace culture can win you an election.

5) Even with a positive workplace culture, people will burn out. 51% of Canadians 18-29 told Abacus Data they were burned out in February and most staffers are that age. COVID has been tough. Encourage vacation days and talk about mental health in your offices.

6) If you work in politics, everything mentioned above is a part of your job. It may feel like there's always a crisis to manage and you don't have time to worry about office culture, but a little bit of long-term planning and a lot of team cohesion will pay off tenfold later on."

It’s hard to read this except as a plaintive attempt to push some pretty serious and intractable workplace-culture concerns higher up some powerful people’s priority list. The fourth point — the kind of shop you run can win or lose an election — and the sixth — you don’t get to ignore this stuff because governing is hard — seem particularly important.

In my conversations with experienced Liberals — who remain loyal to Justin Trudeau and who hope the party can win a fourth consecutive election — I hear talk about a substantially worse work environment in which departing staffers are often not replaced, and ministers’ offices often aren’t told what the plan is until they are berated for guessing wrong.

I asked a former PMO staffer about Kohut’s post. They responded: “It is an important message. Good that you noticed.”

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Cottage life

I don’t see any point saying much about the circumstances of my departure from Maclean’s magazine. Quitting was entirely my decision and, at the time, it seemed to catch the new editorial team there by surprise. Now that several more colleagues have quit, perhaps they’re getting used to it. Things seem to have taken on a certain momentum: this week the last two staff writers, superb award-winning journalists, were let go.

This led to public expressions of consternation from readers and other interested Canadians of the sort we’re getting used to whenever Maclean’s is mentioned. I share the general sentiment. I want to say, though, that some of the guesswork about what’s going on there is spectacularly wrong.

Dan Cavanagh @cavanagh_danny

BREAKING: @macleans loses some of its finest journalists today as its new editors take the magazine deeper into Trumpland. #cdnmedia #cdnpoli

Philippe J. Fournier @338Canada

Some of you had noticed: I no longer write for Maclean's. I truly enjoyed my time there, but the new editors are taking the magazine elsewhere. Best of luck to them.

I haven’t met Dan either, and I want to congratulate him on the 477 retweets. That must be such a buzz. But swing and a miss on the Kremlinology there, Dan.

I know Maclean’s has a long history of engagement with national politics, and many more recent moments of political controversy. I’ve played a role in some of those fights. And I know we’re living in a world where some people are eager to attribute every sparrow that falls to Trumpism or wokeism or cancel culture or the World Economic Forum or some other one-size-fits-all evil actor.

But sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. I left Maclean’s because, in a surprisingly small number of days after the new owners finally exercised their prerogative of replacing the excellent former editor, it stopped being any fun at all to work there. For me, personally.

But there was no element of the decision that had to do with a disagreement over partisan politics. I had no discussion with any of the new editors at Maclean’s about federal or provincial politics, or politics in the U.S. or anywhere else. I’m not aware of any such discussions between the editors and any of my colleagues who’ve since quit or been let go. And we’re a tight-knit group. We talk about the old shop a lot.

As far as I can tell — more than four months in, the new editors at Maclean’s have made no public statement about their vision for the old mansion, if any; and they sure weren’t more chatty with us in private, so I’m guessing here — the magazine’s editors view politics in general as vaguely icky, or as a downer, or as the sort of thing that people don’t want to get too close to. There may be stories about politics in the future, but I’ll be surprised if any of them is a story about political choices or political ideas. Stories about how political people decorate, maybe.

Judging from its contents, the magazine seems to be offering itself as a journal of ideas for the upwardly aspirational. Three questions keep recurring: Can I get a good house? Can I get the kids into a good school? And is there any danger of bad people hurting me?

These are fair questions. I’ve never questioned the right of a magazine’s owners to set a direction for it. They made it easier for me to set my own.

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Home news

Speaking of directions, I was thrilled this week when the Munk School at the University of Toronto spilled the beans on a project we’ve been cooking since I became a free agent.

Starting this fall I’ll be a journalist fellow-in-residence at Munk. My main project will be to produce a series of live interviews in Ottawa and Toronto, in front of audiences, with key newsmakers. Those interviews will form the basis for a regular podcast series. I’m grateful to have my old friends at the National Arts Centre as partners in this project, and I’m leaning heavily on a professional production company, Antica Productions, to make sure we run good events and put out good podcasts.

I hope the interviews will be as wide-ranging as some of my past interview projects, which included guests as varied as Jagmeet Singh, Justin Trudeau, Edward Burtynsky, Steven Page and Jean Chrétien. The Munk School’s clout, which recently permitted the school to host a Canada-wide student videoconference with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, will help me land good guests.

A strange thing happened as the week progressed. I don’t normally sell a lot of subscriptions to this newsletter when I’m not writing fresh content, which is entirely fair and an excellent motivator. But this week I haven’t been able to file until now. And even then, there was a slow but steady rhythm of subscription sales.

I take it to be the combined effect of the news from Munk and, perhaps, of news from elsewhere. Some people are just learning what I’m doing here. Others are concluding that this newsletter is a good place to find serious writing about serious things. On that score, I sometimes wish I felt a little less like the only game in town. But I will continue to try to live up to your confidence. Thank you once again.