Bad weather in Austria saw Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau grounded at a ski resort on this date in 1981. His intrepid press secretary, Patrick Gossage, was tasked with keeping the traveling press corps busy. He came up with the novel idea of arranging a media availability for the PM and reporters using a telephone hookup. With reporters in Salsburg and the PM at the resort, it seemed like a good idea at the time, Gossage later recalled.
“It was one of the strangest PM-press dialogues ever,” he wrote in his memoir, Close to the Charisma: My Years Between the Press and Pierre Elliott Trudeau. “I had a photo of Trudeau skiing and put it on the sound box, then I placed the call. ‘They’re ready,’ I told the faint PM at the other end. ‘OK, let’s go,’ he said, and I switched his voice onto the speaker in the crowded room. The TV cameras rolled, filing the still photo and the sound box.”
“The questions were of the ‘what’s it like there’ variety,” Gossage continued. “I cringed at the PM’s ebullient voice went on with this tongue-in-cheek description, ‘It’s a nice place to be isolated. We haven’t had our usual supply of fresh fish from the channel and avocado from the hot countries. We are probably going to run out of green vegetables if this lasts, and live on cheese, wine and bread.’ The picture of me and the press crowded around the sound box was used front page nationally, as was the story, told straight, of the PM’s ‘hardships!’”
Needless to say, and with a recession punishing Canadians back home, Gossage refrained from employing such high-tech to connect his PM with the press in the months and years that followed.
Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy. A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.