Prime Minister Harper's press conference in Huntsville, Ont. today was broadcast live on two networks and so a friend in Ottawa heard me ask the PM this:
AKIN: Good afternoon, Prime Minister. I'll try and squeeze a two parter in here if I could.
PM: Sure.
AKIN: It being the end of the political season in Ottawa, I wonder if you'd care to comment on or reflect upon the goals you set out in the Throne Speech eight or nine months ago, highlights/lowlights of the season and, the second part would be [about] the position of foreign affairs and international trade. I know this is something you have to deal with. Are ministers free to travel this weekend? Will you be dealing with that particular item very soon?
Upon hearing that, the friend sent me a note on my BlackBerry: “Saw your Q to the PM today. Quite the lob ball.”
And indeed it was quite the lob ball or soft question but, as I mentioned to him, I was an equal-opportunity slo-pitcher this week, asking representatives or leaders of each of the four parties the same lob-ball question.
But that got me thinking that I don't think readers/viewers know a lot about what goes into a journalist's thinking as we prepare to ask our one question of the Prime Minister. When you get one question — and you drive 700 km round-trip as I did today to ask it — you think pretty carefully about what you want to say.
So I thought I'd write this note to give those who care a bit of the thinking behind these questions. My question today was one that was looking for a more contemplative response. It's not always like that.
If you watched that presser with the PM today, you saw my friend Richard Brennan of The Toronto Star take the debating point approach. After hearing the PM criticize Dion's green shift announcement, he wanted to know how his government was going to respond to the challenge of getting consumers to reduce their carbon footprint. In other words, he was saying, “OK, fella, it's all very well to run down the other guy's plan, but you're the prime minister! What are you doing about the problem?”
Reporters don't get lots of opportunities to ask this Prime Minister questions. Come to think of it: I've probably had a half-dozen in the last year and that's probably a pretty high number for the 300 or so Parliamentary Press Gallery members. We don't get much chance individually or as a group. Probably the last time a group of reporters put questions to him was three weeks in ago in Paris — and then we, as a group of reporters, were only allowed four questions. So, as I wanted to canvas all the party leaders about their impressions of the Parliamentary session that was wrapping up, I was going to have to travel if I wanted to get Harper. (He's in Saskatoon tomorrow, but that's too long a drive!) Also: When Harper is doing press conferences within Canada but outside of Ottawa, his handlers tend to let everyone get a question in. When it's just the Parliamentary Press Gallery — in Ottawa or on a foreign trip — things are a little more tightly controlled and not everyone who wants to ask him something is going to get that chance.
So I get to Huntsville and, as usual, Harper's deputy press secretary Dimitri Soudas starts compiling his list of reporters so he can moderate the press conference. He tells us everyone there is going to get a question but just one. Dimitri puts me on the list but I ask him to come to me last. The reason there is: When I'd left our bureau in Ottawa that morning, I knew that the big story of the day, of course, was going to be Dion's Green Shift announcement and we would definitely need Harper's reaction to that. There were other 'news-of-the-day' stories as well that reporters throughout our system would want to hear the prime minister speak to. But the way it works is, you only get one question. So if I was up early in the press conference, I'd probably have to ask about one of those breaking stories. But I was betting, correctly in this case, that other reporters — from the Star, CBC, CTV and elsewhere — also wanted to ask news-of-the-day questions. So with all the bases covered by the time it was my turn, I could use my question to head off in a different direction for a separate story I hope to write. You'll notice, if you look back at my question, I actually squeezed in two questions — my “two-parter” because I knew I could only speak once. Sometimes the PMO folks will let you get away with that so long as you're mighty brief with your second part … [The second part, about the cabinet shuffle, I needed for a story a story that's up online now.]
So that's an important lesson for reporters working in a group question: Use your one question wisely by listening to your colleagues and co-operating with them.
Part of using your question wisely is figuring out how to ask a real smart question. A smart question elicits an answer that moves your subject off the scripted response, that might move the dial on a particular story or that gives you some new or unique insight into your subject's thinking on a particular issue. It could be one of those infamous “gotcha” type questions. “Gotcha” questions are awfully tough to pull off because you're essentially trying to show up your subject and prove you're smarter than they are. More often than not, the 'gotcha' question backfires and the reporter looks like a dope. But smart questions are usually ones that show your subject you know the basics of the file at hand, that we've moved beyond laying out the facts, and now we're ready to go up to the next level, to talk about the hows, the whys, the alternatives. It takes a lot of homework to ask one of those smart questions.
If you can figure out a smart question for Harper, you'll likely be rewarded with a decent answer. Harper is arguably the best politician I've ever seen at handling reporters in a q-and-a session. He's very well briefed; almost never gets flustered and, except for one notable exception in the basement of a Laval motel in the dying days of the 2006 election, doesn't say things he's not supposed to. (Come to think of it, I'd probably say the same thing about Michael Ignatieff — he's pretty sharp in a q-and-a, too. I haven't been in enough scrums yet with Stephane Dion to have formed an opinion of how he handles q-and-a sessions.) Harper got asked once in Ottawa about economic development in Atlantic Canada and started explaining in detail about the difference in economic performance between rural New Brunswick and urban New Brunswick and how that affected the policy response. You learn stuff, usually, when you go to one of these. Reporters who come away from a Harper q-and-a often have two or three more stories than they showed up to ask about. [An aside on this point: Because Harper is so strong handling reporters, it's a bit puzzling why he doesn't get let out more often – once a week? once a fortnight? — to do these things.]
Now I don't want to sound like it's all sweetness-and-light with the PM cuz it isn't. We still have issues. Sometimes you have to track down his motorcade and yell at him as he gets in and out of the car. He usually doesn't respond but, hey, it's my job to ask the questions when and where I can; it's his job to choose to answer or not. And every now and again, it's kinda fun, in a cathartic way, to yell after the prime minister of the country.
Sometimes, on issues he clearly thinks are a waste of time — the Couillard affair, for example — he gets short and just retreats back to the same old lines he uses in the House of Commons. Of course, these issues aren't unique to Harper — there is tension between every politician and the pack of reporters that follow the person around.
In any event, knowing that Harper is well-briefed and tough to surprise, a smart question, in my view, is one that forces him to think on the spot a bit, to move away from the prepared lines and, if you're successful, to get him to open up a bit more about a given issue. I find he responds in interesting ways to questions that challenge his thought processes. The CBC's Keith Boag is good at those kinds of questions — finding a logical inconsistency in a set of assumptions behind a policy response and using that to probe deeper on a given issue. I'm a big fan of questions that begin “Describe … ” or “Can you reflect on …” because their open-ended and the PM or any subject tends to start riffing in unforeseen directions. That's good for learning new things. The aforementioned Brennan is famous for his “let's cut the b.s. and get straight to the chase” kind of questions that will come — loudly — out of nowhere from the back of a scrum that's losing steam. Weird-o questions from left-field sometimes work and here's a good example:
The very first question Harper fielded as the 2006 campaign got underway was from my friend Allan Woods, then writing for Canwest but now for The Toronto Star. Allan had lined up first behind the reporters' microphone in the House of Commons foyer and I was standing right behind him. Allan's first question was: “Mr. Harper: Do you love Canada?” I'm sure I immediately rolled my eyes and thought, what a dumb question. But then I heard Harper's answer and I thought, wow, what a smart question! (Many Conservatives were outraged we'd ask such a question) This question, of course, was one no one had prepped him for and why should they? It's simple enough, right? Wrong. Harper hummed and hawwed and tried to take a rational, cerebral approach to the question. In the end, I don't even know if he said he did love Canada. The Liberals, kicking off their campaign, had great fun with this. Harper had the last laugh, of course, when the campaign ended but I go back to that as a good example of a question that elicits an answer that gets beyond the spin and the highly scripted performances because it showed, in a pretty demonstrative way, that Harper was still having a tough time with the “retail” side of politics, the regular guy stuff that helps a politician connect with voters. The rest of the questions that day, on policy issues, he batted out of the park. (And he finished that particular press conference by laying out the same-sex marriage strategy, a smart strategic move that got that controversial issue out of the way on day one of a long campaign.) I hope Allan gets the first question in the 2009 campaign and asks that one or one like it again!
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