Canada suffers from an outrage shortage, CBC's senior political correspondent reports.
But don't blame Terry Milewski: If anyone can turn that shortage into a surplus, it's the cultivated 61-year-old with the bushy mustache, the unplaceable accent and the gift for antagonizing people who wish he would shut up.
Both as an instigator of outrage and its target, the attack dog of Ottawa's media pack is an equal-opportunity offender.
The Conservative faithful loathe him for his “answer-the-question” berating of Stephen Harper during the election campaign.
But Jean Chrétien's operatives also accused him of bias for his coverage of protests at the 1997
“I have no friends,” Mr. Milewski says proudly. Of course, he has friends, or, at the very least, admirers: Colleagues affectionately dubbed him Old Yeller for his eagerness to hound Mr. Harper, the new civility be damned.
“I happen to think that Canadians can be a little too complacent and pacific,” says Mr. Milewski, the lone-wolf outsider slotted in among the power-lunchers at Hy's Steakhouse. “Our job as reporters is not to meekly accept whatever answer we're given, but to challenge and provoke and press.
“If you're on TV every day for 30 years, as I have been, you're not scared easily. This job isn't an easy one to do, not if you've got 200 partisans watching you while you do your stand-up, heckling you while you're trying to do your ‘Hello, Peter …' If you've got the gumption to plow on and do it until they shut up, then you're not the kind of person who's going to be shy about asking questions.”
We know Mr. Milewski has gumption, especially for asking pointed questions of public figures. One 300-word poser at a Tory election rally touched on a Conservative candidate linked to Tamil terrorists, the Prime Minister's failure to create a national-security commissioner and a candidate's decision to meet a member of the Babbar Khalsa terrorist group who paid $100,000 to the Air India bomb-maker. For 1½ minutes, Mr. Harper maintained an icy stare as his tormentor plowed ahead with inquisitorial comments (“you broke your promise … completely preposterous statement … slap in the face to the Air India victims' families”) that managed to incite rather than shut up the Tory crowd.
Does Mr. Milewski play into the hands of the Harperites with his provocations? Conservative strategist Marjory LeBreton says Mr. Milewski's shouts of “You didn't answer the question” fired up the party's base. “I told him, ‘Keep that up, you're doing a great job confirming what we have to put up with every day in Ottawa.' ”
Mr. Milewski disagrees: “If that was a brilliant strategy to make their man look good, I'm not sure it succeeded.”
Yet he's comfortable with his part in the theatrics. “It's my job to try and stop people tuning out,” he says. “People imagine that the CBC is this grand public service funded entirely by taxpayer dollars, but my job is to sell ads. You won't catch me saying, certainly not on tape, that we at CBC have some grand mission to speak truth to power.”
Is crafty Terry Milewski trying to throw his right-wing critics off the scent?
The married father of two teenagers likes to position himself as a no-nonsense conservative, if only to blunt Tory complaints. “There are these numberless yahoos of the right who are convinced that this greying, 61-year-old, mortgage-paying, tax-fearing, white establishment reporter must be a leftie because he asked a Conservative Prime Minister a difficult question.”
And yet he's definitely subversive, deploying his outspokenness against people and agencies that benefit from a polite, less aggressive approach to the news – in the Air India case and the Robert Dziekanski affair in particular.
“Terry does rub people the wrong way,” says Carleton University's Chris Waddell, a former CBC manager. “But that's because he's not prepared to take the drivel most politicians spit out.”
So who is this outsider at the centre of power? As Terry Milewski well appreciates, nothing is quite as it seems.
Is he English? Yes and no. “Confusion is the family trait,” he says. “We were a family of mongrels in postwar Britain.”
