It`s been a while since Sandra Buckler was in charge of communications for Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
She is now chief of staff for Trade Minister Peter Van Loan. And what she thinks of the national press gallery, with whom she had a somewhat, er, difficult relationship, is not necessarily indicative of the mindset of her colleagues within the Conservative government.
But, it was interesting, nonetheless, to hear the advice she gave on dealing with the media to a training school for Toronto`s Conservative-minded municipal candidates one Saturday morning in July.
Ms. Buckler was asked whether social media and blogs were becoming more important than the mainstream media.
"For me, if you have a bad story on the front page of the Globe and Mail, it's a bad day for you,`` she replied. ``If you have a bad blog about you, it's probably not so bad if you can deal with the blog right away. But if the story is already printed on the front page of the Globe, now you are in a defensive, reactive, totally fighting rear guard, not happy, off message program. So I think social media is here to stay, yes, but I think print, TV, radio are not going anywhere and soon we will have a new TV station in Canada called Sun Media, so there's hope yet.``
Sun TV is, of course, a current project of Kory Teneycke who was Ms. Buckler`s successor in the PMO communications job and is now vice president of development at Quebecor Media Inc.
Ms. Buckler did not respond to requests for comment about the lecture she gave to the municipal candidates - a tape of which found its way into the hands of the federal Liberals who shared it with the media.
For the most part, she advised the aspiring politicians to treat reporters professionally.
And she reminded them to always be on guard. "It's very important,`` she said, ``that even when you're out shopping, or you're at an event, you're always on, people always listen to you, they may be tape recording you, they may be videoing you"