Mulroney was irked by the negativity of her reporting, as Wallin would later write and as I heard at the time as a member of his parliamentary caucus.
“Maybe I should just appoint Wallin to the Senate,” he proposed, as a way of curbing what he considered her relentless attack on the trade initiative. Dalton Camp, a long-time Tory insider and past president of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada who was working at this time in the Privy Council Office, tried to discern whether Mulroney was joking or hatching an ill-advised plan. Not taking any chances, Camp squelched the idea, reminding the PM “what an even bigger pain Wallin would be inside the fold as a Tory-appointed senator.”
If Pamela Wallin zeroed in on issues in ways political leaders disliked, that was just the quality of her journalism, which, when also factoring in her good looks and nation-wide popularity, made the CBC covet her. In a highly publicized 1992 coup, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation hired Wallin away from CTV. The public broadcaster wanted her star status to boost and reposition the network’s entire approach to television news programming.
That fall, Pamela Wallin and Peter Mansbridge went on air as co-hosts of Prime Time News, featuring both news and interviews. The trail blazer had now become the first Canadian woman to co-anchor a nightly national television newscast. By 1994, CBC Television news, juggling for better ratings, rejigged the format so Mansbridge read the news after which Wallin hosted a magazine segment of interviews and special stories. It seemed a demotion. In 1995 Canadians and other news media were stunned when, as the result of further backstage struggles, the CBC replaced Wallin with Hanna Gartner. Non-CBC broadcasters, newspapers, and magazines across the country were full of the story. Wallin herself was now news.
Sidelined at the height of her career by CBC’s humiliating dismissal, she retreated home to recover. In Wadena, she found her legion of loyal supporters boycotting the CBC. She took her bearings, then responded by creating Pamela Wallin Productions and successfully launched a daily interview series, Pamela Wallin Live, which CBC Newsworld, and intermittently CBC’s main network, carried over the next four years. The engaging series featured Wallin interviewing newsmakers, celebrities, and other personalities with clarity and intimacy akin to CNN’s popular Larry King Live. She was famous again. Young women once more were inspired by her example of resiliency, first in getting to the top, and then finding ways of staying there.
Wallin was again a media success, but her life would make an unexpected change at this point. Following the horrors of the 9/11 attack on New York and Washington, when the world was aching to help wounded, devastated America, Canadians were at the forefront. In the early rush to support New Yorkers, a “Canada Loves New York” rally was pulled together in Manhattan. Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, who’d just come off a U.S. trade mission and was mindful of new opportunities for Canadian businesses in the conveniently close American markets, was present. So was Canada’s athletic foreign minister John Manley, who ran New York City’s marathon. A key rally organizer was their fellow Liberal Jerry Grafstein, mastermind of many campaign victories who’d been strategically placed in the Senate of Canada. The deeply moving, star-studded tribute in still-reeling New York City drew some twenty-six thousand Canadians, many travelling south by train, plane, and motor vehicles, including thirty-three buses from Toronto alone. The emotionally searing event with its throng of performing Canadian celebrities was hosted by popular Canadian television personality Pamela Wallin.
Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, immediately grasping the importance of embracing this new connection between Canadians and Americans, did not hesitate to appoint Ms. Wallin as Consul General of Canada to New York. Her mission was to knit together as many new relationships as possible in cultural projects, commercial initiatives, and foreign policy. Canada’s prime minister and foreign affairs minister both, having seen her skills on full display at the “Canada Loves New York” rally, embraced her potential to open doors in New York the way nobody else could.
Wallin was in her element, providing lavish entertainment, having her own car and driver, and staging an unending parade of prestigious receptions featuring notable Canadians to attract New York’s biggest players. She forged a wide array of important American contacts, opening doors for other Canadians. Among numerous Canadians witnessing this tour-de-force on behalf of our country was John S. Elder, Q.C., a prominent Toronto lawyer who four times accompanied clients to Wallin’s receptions to develop new business. “She was one very impressive lady,” he recalled in 2014. “She could make things happen.”
Canada’s consul general was leading a heady, exhilarating life in Manhattan, deploying an over-the-top style compared to other Canadian diplomatic pushes that, in comparison, were long on frugality but short on results. In 2005, Wallin bought an oversized studio unit at 118 East 60th Street, a proper “white glove” address with covered circular driveway, doorman, and concierge. The high-end custom renovations to her thirty-fourth-floor Lenox Hill residence rendered it as charming as it was functional.
Her expenses were a contentious subtext, but this was not news. At the CBC, where money flowed and budget management was so loose that at one point program director Trina McQueen had to face the public and explain some $28 million was missing and nobody could trace it, Wallin learned nothing about restraint with public dollars. For Toronto power lunches, to which other movers and shakers arrived by taxicab, she was delivered by a CBC limousine, and later fetched and whisked away by the shiny black vehicle. When she had her own production company, it was standard industry practice to run all expenses through it, since they related one way or another to the TV shows she was creating and selling. Now in Manhattan as consul general with a specific mission from the PM to forge new Canadian-American business links, she just shifted from high gear into overdrive. Wallin excelled in her social and cultural task of bringing American high-rollers into a Canadian orbit, creating a positive glow about Canada by imparting the sense that our country had verve on a par with New York’s.
Officials in the Department of External Affairs “had their hair on fire,” as one insider told me, trying to control Pamela Wallin’s spending, driving departmental comptrollers to complain to the Prime Minister’s Office that she was throwing around money like no other diplomat even knew how. This apparent concern for financial rectitude disguised their real agenda, however. Wallin was getting results that bread-and-butter career diplomats could not even dream about, and jealousy was a factor. But appointment of a non-diplomat to a foreign posting was an especially sore point. The reason for complaining directly to the PMO about Pamela Wallin’s expenses was that it was a choice way to rap Mr. Chrétien’s knuckles under the pretence of financial management.
While that sideshow played out, though, Wallin would continue in what by now had become an indelible pattern in her successful career — incurring costs while getting the job done and, as an after-thought, either tossing receipts to somebody else to process or accumulating them to deal with “someday” as part of her never-finished paperwork. What a nuisance!
Two other patterns had emerged that were by this stage also definable hallmarks of the Wallin style: air travel and a whirlwind work schedule. Wallin could never have had the career she did without civil aviation. Wadena is a fine town, with the best wildfowl festival anywhere, but, two hours east of Saskatoon, it is not a crossroads of the world. From her teen years when she left town for high school, then university, then working at the penitentiary, next getting into broadcasting, Wallin was operating within the province, travelling by bus or driving her own car. After that, getting from Saskatchewan to the next places she worked, in Ottawa and Toronto, or flying down to Buenos Aires to cover the Falklands War for CTV, was only possible by airplane. Across Canada and around the world, Wallin’s continuing career in television reporting put her into aircraft travelling with prime ministers, covering dramatic developments, and staying connected with the many people in her peripatetic life. As colleagues and friends routinely joked, “Pam lives on an airplane.”
She knew airport facilities like the layout of her own home. She knew airline schedules by heart. She commuted between Ottawa and Toronto for many years as a national broadcaster, and
