Craig Oliver, CTV's chief parliamentary correspondent, has keen political antennae -- and eyes clouded over by glaucoma.
Craig Oliver peers at a map hanging on the wall outside his office at CTV's Ottawa bureau. "Is this Canada?" he asks. Told it is, he traces his finger up to Ellesmere Island, asking directions to the highest tip. It is there that, years ago, he and group of friends paddled the most northerly river ever canoed.
"I could still do it," the 70-year-old veteran broadcaster says. Except that he can no longer see the water, let alone rapids. Even a map of the country whose politics he has covered for nearly five decades is now just a blob of colour. "If you aren't moving," he tells a reporter, "you could be a tree stump."
Next week, in honour of his recent birthday, Mr. Oliver, who is legally blind, is hosting a fundraiser for the University of Ottawa Eye Institute, where doctors have tried, with limited success, to slow the glaucoma that has fogged his vision into "the school of Monet, on amateur night." His dinner, which will be attended by long-time friends and politicians, including CTV news anchor Lloyd Robertson and former prime minister Jean Chrétien, will create an ophthalmology fellowship named after the institute's former director, W. Bruce Jackson. ...
Born in Vancouver, Mr. Oliver grew up an only child in Prince Rupert, B.C. His father drove a taxi and made extra cash bootlegging - once asking him to hide a bottle, believing the RCMP wouldn't search a boy if they were stopped.
He dropped out of a high school to get a "better-paying" gig at the local CBC station, where he also cleaned the toilets and emptied the garbage once a week. In Saskatchewan, as a national correspondent for CBC radio, he carpooled with Tommy Douglas to the occasional rally and covered the beginnings of medicare.
In 1972, he produced Canada AM for CTV and eventually became Ottawa bureau chief. He reluctantly went to Washington in the eighties, partly because his relationships with Mr. Trudeau and other Liberal cabinet ministers had complicated his job. But his time in the U.S. became a highlight of his career - he travelled with Mr. Reagan to summit conferences with Mikhail Gorbachev and witnessed the final days of the Cold War. Back in Ottawa, a favourite scoop was being the first to learn that Mr. Mulroney was resigning as prime minister. "That was glorious," he says.
Mr. Oliver is a storyteller by trade and nature - on one canoe trip, he mixed the rum daiquiris, then recited Robert Service's 74-line poem The Law of the Yukon in its entirety, says fellow paddler Eddie Goldenberg, Mr. Chrétien's former senior political adviser.
These days, though, he is cagey about giving away his stories - not wanting to scoop his memoir, the first draft of which he has recently completed.
Meanwhile, he won't consider retirement. "I like the excitement of news, the kick from telling people something they don't know."
Disclosure: If you're new to this blog, I work for CTV.ca News, which is an arm of CTV News.