Posted by Tim Murphy OTTAWA -- Just before 8 o'clock on Thursday morning, the Prime Minister's chief of staff, Tim Murphy, placed a call to an Ontario MP. Mr. Murphy, according to Liberal sources, informed the MP that Deputy Prime Minister Anne McLellan was about to announce changes to the $1-billion gun registry. The MP had been a critic of it for years. But this wasn't just a heads-up. Mr. Murphy was calling to tell the MP not to criticize the announcement as inadequate. "Keep quiet about it," an insider said Mr. Murphy told the MP. And with that, the MP had just experienced a taste of the Martin PMO -- a sometimes heavy-handed shop that seems to run on equal parts of tension, anxiety, bravado and testosterone. They came to power on Dec. 12 as the brilliant generals of the 13-year guerrilla war that had finally led to their man, Paul Martin, becoming Prime Minister. They had helped turn record deficits into a string of surpluses while with Mr. Martin when he was finance minister. Now, they were moving on -- as if by primogeniture -- into the royal suites. They were fun, they were hip, they were good communicators and they knew how to win. They held great promise -- Mr. Murphy, Scott Reid, Brian Guest, Ruth Thorkelson, and Paul Corriveau. Others such as David Herle, Terrie O'Leary and Elly Alboim had stayed outside the official structure of the PMO, although they were hardly any less influential. But something changed when they finally got the keys to the PMO. Lately, they have lurched from crisis to crisis. Publicly, these denizens of the Langevin Block (the stone office building overlooking Parliament Hill, which also houses the country's senior bureaucrats) have championed reforms to eradicate the so-called democratic deficit, encouraging backbench decision-making and even dissent. Privately, however, the PMO usually calls the shots, exercising control over its MPs and ministers. The Martin PMO -- sometimes referred to simply as "the board" -- is known for often vetting the speeches and hiring practices of cabinet ministers. In some cases, there is a specific PMO aide assigned to monitor a minister's activities. At the public-accounts committee hearing into the sponsorship scandal, for example, there was a constant PMO presence. PMO staffers sometimes would pass notes to MPs during the proceedings. Even those ministers closest to Mr. Martin have felt their wrath. Recently, Health Minister Pierre Pettigrew's staff received an e-mail from PMO senior strategist Brian Guest. In the e-mail, the minister, who has known Mr. Martin for 20 years, was taken to task for suggesting that the government was prepared to allow the provinces to experiment with private health-care delivery. Mr. Guest, according to sources, told the minister's staff that Mr. Pettigrew had made a "serious error," which must be corrected immediately. It was. Mr. Pettigrew was forced to publicly clarify his remarks, in a manner that some Liberals thought humiliating. "Brute force is not going to make it for them," a senior Liberal said. To some extent, their growing pains have been Mr. Martin's growing pains. When Mr. Martin worked blocks away from Parliament Hill in the Finance Department's nondescript office tower, the workday was also jammed, but in a different way. The Finance Minister's job, in effect, is to make one big decision a year: what's in the budget. The Prime Minister's job is to make a dozen decisions a day. That kind of frenetic activity, Ottawa insiders suggest, doesn't lend itself to the kind of "flat" office structure that Mr. Martin prefers -- meetings with large numbers of advisers that give him a full taste of the issue. Not for him a one-page synopsis of an issue, then a quick yes or no. That is so Chrétien-era. "Events happen in the Finance portfolio too, knocking you off stride," said a veteran Ottawa insider close to the Martin camp. "But not with the machine-gun rapidity, and continuously, that occurs as Prime Minister." Have they adjusted? Not so well, at least according to public-opinion polls. The Martin government was at 48 per cent in the polls when it took over. A cabinet was sworn in that showcased new faces and offered a fresh approach. The Prime Minister gave well-received year-end interviews, musing that forced retirement at 65 might deserve to be retired. He was, of course, 65. And he talked about a decade-long plan for governing. His first meeting with President George W. Bush went well in Mexico, as did his trip to the World Economic Forum in Switzerland. Mr. Martin was brimming with ideas. They would be unveiled in a Throne Speech, followed quickly by a budget and then, likely, the calling of a spring election. The introduction of the democratic reforms in Parliament, one of Mr. Martin's main leadership planks, turned out to be the first bump. Liberal MPs were told they would not be allowed to vote freely on controversial gun registry spending estimates. This edict came a day after the government introduced its "action plan" giving backbenchers more clout. There were other headaches: former deputy prime minister Sheila Copps wouldn't go quietly into the night; Mr. Martin's former shipping company turned out to have received far more government contracts than originally thought; the Arar controversy deepened. And then, on Feb. 10, Auditor-General Sheila Fraser delivered her devastating report on the sponsorship scandal. That night at the Chateau Laurier Hotel, a handful of ministers relaxed after their most white-knuckle day yet. The Prime Minister had announced a public inquiry and taken other remedial measures. The worst, they thought, was over. Hardly. That night, a senior Conservative suggested that this scandal had the potential to bring the government down. It hasn't, at least not yet. But it has ridden roughshod over the government ever since, exacerbating the Liberal divisions between the Martin and Chrétien camps, and drowning out the PMO's efforts to focus on policy in key areas of health care, cities and education. The former finance minister's well-deserved reputation for knowing his sums has come back to haunt him. How could he not have known that money was flowing to Liberal-friendly advertising firms? Try as they might, the Liberals couldn't get above 40 per cent in the polls. And the weeks ticked away. The original date to call the election, April 4, came and went amid public focus on the Commons committee looking into the scandal. It seemed to be the only thing on the media's radar screen; that and speculation about when the election campaign would start. And Mr. Martin wavered over this. Insiders suggest he never seriously considered delaying an election until the fall or next spring. But he did wait until virtually the last moment before deciding that the vote would happen before Canada Day. On Tuesday, April 27, sources say, he made up his mind: The public would go to the polls on June 28. The next day, Mr. Martin travelled to Washington. Both he and Mr. Bush were immersed in election-year politics, but Mr. Martin didn't let the President in on his secret. Nor did his PMO advisers do so with their American counterparts. They flew back from Washington together on the Prime Minister's Challenger jet. Mr. Martin's criticism of the Chrétien era boiled down to one sound bite: "Who do you know in the PMO?" Now, Mr. Martin has a track record on which he, too, will be judged. He is about to go to the people. And he is rolling the dice.
on 6/9/2004, 12:45 pm, in reply to "SENATOR Anne Cools leaves Liberal fold to join CPC"
"Who did you know in the PMO"