YOU’VE JUST SAT down for dinner at a friend’s place when your cellphone rings. Embarrassing. And then you answer it. Rude. But it’s the prime minister, and he wants you to become a Canadian senator.
Oh.
So what’s next?
“I agreed,” says North Toronto’s Pamela Wallin with a laugh. “It’s amazing what happens when you say ‘yes’ to things that you hadn’t contemplated, [when] you didn’t know you were the right person or up to the job. But if someone gives you this opportunity, you just take it, just run with it and do the best you can,” she says.
As a senator, Wallin will divide her time between Ottawa, her hometown of Wadena, Sask., and her beloved Midtown neighbourhood. “I live in airports,” she says with a long exhale. “It’s insane.”
When in Toronto, Wallin will continue to call Midtown home. “One of the things that is so compelling about big cities is the energy that they just generate,” she says. “[The area] is a great neighbourhood with shops and stores and restaurants and coffee places and all the rest of it,”
It was probably that kind of Ontario-friendly comment that recently prompted one Regina academic to call into question the validity of Wallin’s connection to Saskatchewan, the province she represents as senator. It’s an argument that Wallin has little time for.
“Nobody that I’ve spoken to, save the one gentleman, has raised any concerns about whether or not I’m an appropriate representative of the province,” says Wallin. “I’ve spent most of my life as the unofficial ambassador of Saskatchewan regardless of where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing.”
The province can lay claim to another title, too: launching pad for one of Canada’s most high- profile accidental journalism careers.
The year was 1973, and Wallin had just graduated from the University of Regina with a degree in psychology and political science. She was working at a maximum security prison as a social worker when, out of the blue, a friend from CBC Radio called to see if she’d be interested in filling in as a weekend host. With zero radio experience but no shortage of ambition, 20- year-old Wallin simply said, “Yes.”
A match was struck. Within a few years, Wallin was hosting her own radio program and working the federal political beat for the CBC. By 1978, she was covering Parliament Hill for the Toronto Star and doing guest spots on CTV’s Question Period.
Wallin was clearly a natural reporter and interviewer, but she had her share of missteps. At one point in her young career, she found herself across the table from then–prime minister Pierre Trudeau, whose approval numbers were at an historic low. Live on television, and “with the arrogance of youth,” she says, she pointed out that the PM had lost the moral authority to govern and should therefore resign.
“[I remember him] looking back at me and saying, you know, ‘Interesting theory of democracy, Ms. Wallin,’ and giving me a civics lesson live on television that I never forgot. [He] taught me that very fundamental lesson in journalism, which is to think through what the answers to your questions might be. Just do your homework.”
Wallin proved to be a quick study. In 1992, she was wooed back to the CBC to become the first woman to co-anchor the nightly national news program Prime Time News, alongside Peter Mansbridge. However, the coed anchor team failed to resonate with viewers accustomed to a single (male) anchor, so Wallin was reassigned to the nightly magazine segment of the show.
Then suddenly in 1995, Wallin was fired from Prime Time News. Internal politics and Wallin’s confrontational style were said to be at the heart of the highly publicized dismissal.
Still, while the Prime Time News experiment had ended badly, Wallin had cemented her reputation for asking probing, intelligent questions without seeming salacious or muckraking.
Her next project, Pamela Wallin Live, on CBC Newsworld, mixed the celebrity cachet of Larry King Live with the intellectual angle of Charlie Rose and provided the perfect forum for Wallin to showcase those interviewing skills. The show ran for four years.
In late 2001, Wallin’s world was given a shake. As North America was dealing with the shock of 9/11, Wallin underwent surgery for colon cancer. The experience gave her pause to consider the bigger things in life. “It really does offer a perspective, you know, when 3,000 people get up in the morning and simply go to work or get on with their work and their business, and they lose their lives.”
Wallin came out of the surgery thankful to be alive and determined to make a difference. “You really do feel like you’ve been given a second chance and that you better do something that matters with that second chance.” she says. Fortuitously, opportunity came calling in the form of a new challenge. Then-prime minister Jeฬan Chretien asked Wallin to serve as Canada’s consul general in New York. And so, with another “Yes,” the journalist became a diplomat, a role she held from 2002 to 2006.
Wallin’s performance as consul general evidently impressed Stephen Harper, who came calling in December with a new opportunity: Canadian senator.
During this tour of duty on Parliament Hill, though, she’ll no longer be the one holding public officials’ feet to the fire, but rather the one on the receiving end of irreverent questions from brash journalists.
One question that has already been put her way: With a salary of $130,400 and a generous pension, what’s to stop her from becoming an entitled, toe-the-party-line member of our federal government?
“Well, because I think the prime minister, of sound mind, asked us to sit in the Senate,” she says. “He knew who we were when he asked us to be there. So I don’t think he went in there deliberately and found a group of shy and retiring wallflowers.”
But for all of Wallin’s good intentions, with the position’s perks and its meagre accountability (does anyone actually keep a record of senators’ accomplishments?), it mustn’t take much to lapse into a blaseฬ state of senatorial comfort.
Hogwash, suggests Wallin.
“I’ve had the good fortune over my years in Ottawa covering Parliament Hill to know what the Senate actually does,” she says. “For those of us who have been given this opportunity, it’s an opportunity to work very, very hard if you choose to do it, and that’s what I intend I do.”