Off the Record

by Peter Mansbridge

Overview

INSTANT #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER

A candid look into the life and career of one of Canada’s most trusted journalists, in his own words.

Today, Peter Mansbridge is often recognized for his distinctive deep voice, which calmly delivered the news for over fifty years. Even though he never considered becoming a broadcaster, in some ways he had been preparing for a life as a newscaster from an early age. Every night around the dinner table, his family would discuss the latest news stories, from Cold War scandals to the Beatles.

So in 1968, when a CBC radio manager in Churchill, Manitoba, offered him a spot hosting the local late-night music program, Peter embraced the opportunity. Without a teacher, he tuned into broadcasts from across the world to learn the basic skills of a journalist, and he eventually parlayed his position into his first news job. Twenty years later, he became the chief correspondent and anchor of The National.

With humour and heart, Peter shares behind-the-scenes stories from his distinguished career, including reporting on the fall of the Berlin Wall, walking the beaches of Normandy with Tom Brokaw, and talking with Canadian prime ministers from John Diefenbaker to Justin Trudeau. But it’s not all serious. Peter also writes about finding the “cure” for baldness in China and landing the role of Peter Moosebridge in Disney’s Zootopia.

After years of interviewing others, Peter turns the lens on himself, reflecting on the people and places that have shaped his life and career.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781982169640
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	04/25/2023
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Peter Mansbridge is one of Canada’s most respected journalists. He is the former chief correspondent for CBC News; anchor of The National, CBC’s flagship nightly newscast where he worked for thirty years reporting on national and international news stories; and host of Mansbridge One on One. He has received over a dozen national awards for broadcast excellence, including a lifetime achievement award from the Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television. He is a distinguished fellow of the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto and the former two-term chancellor of Mount Allison University. In 2008 he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada—the country’s highest civilian honour—and in 2012 he was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal. He is the author of the instant #1 national bestsellers Off the Record and Extraordinary Canadians, as well as the national bestseller Peter Mansbridge One on One: Favourite Conversations and the Stories Behind Them. He lives in Stratford, Ontario. Follow him on Twitter @PeterMansbridge, visit him at ThePeterMansbridge.com, or listen to his daily podcast, The Bridge, with Sirius XM Canada.

Read an Excerpt

Beginnings

As the story goes, Julia Turner was just sixteen years old when she crossed Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood to go for a Coke in a soda shop on the other side of the street. Inside she was spotted by a reporter, who introduced her to an agent, who changed her name to Lana, and the next thing you knew she was a big star, a leading lady in the movies.

Well, I wasn’t sixteen, I was nineteen, and I wasn’t in Hollywood, I was in Churchill, Manitoba.

But after that, there are, as strange as it seems, some similarities to our stories.

I was a high school dropout, fresh from a short, unsuccessful stint in the Canadian navy, who moved west in 1968 looking for a new start. I found work as a baggage handler slash ticket agent for a little regional airline called Transair. How I got the job is a story I’ll tell later. As I said, I was looking for a “new start,” and tossing bags was certainly that. Transair trained me in Winnipeg, then sent me first to Brandon, Manitoba, and then to Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. I’d only been in PA a month or so when they decided to close down the station. They told me I was going to Churchill to fill in for a guy who was on two weeks’ holiday. I got there. He never came back. And I didn’t leave.

Which leads me to the day I was asked to announce a flight departure on the little public-address system. The PA system was set up on a podium right in the middle of the waiting room, which was filled with anxious passengers ready to board the daily Transair DC-4 flight to Winnipeg.

I clicked down on the microphone button: “Transair Flight 106 for Thompson, The Pas, and Winnipeg is now ready for boarding at Gate One.” We only had one gate, but it sure sounded like something you’d hear the big airlines say. “Passengers travelling with children or those requiring boarding assistance, please see the agent at Gate One.”

As passengers started moving toward the gate, one person came in the opposite direction. Toward me.

“You have a really good voice,” the man said. “Have you ever thought of being in radio?”

His name was Gaston Charpentier and he introduced himself as the manager of the CBC Northern Service Radio Station, CHFC, just down the road in Fort Churchill.

And that’s when opportunity knocked. My “Julia Turner” moment. No experience. No background in the business. Turner had the looks, I had the voice.

Charpentier explained how the station was looking for a late-night announcer who could host a two-hour music show between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m. and then sign the station off the air for the night. He said he couldn’t find anyone in town who was interested and asked whether I was. No audition. No HR interview. Part-time job for the asking.

I grabbed it. It meant more money, as I was only making $225 a month at Transair. And it sounded a little more interesting than “baggage handler.” Charpentier said I could start the next night.

After completing my regular day shift at Transair, I went over to CHFC to learn the ropes. One of the regulars, a fellow from Calgary by the name of Bill Gray, gave me the rundown. We started in the record library, which in those days was a set of long bookcases with hundreds and hundreds of 45s, and dozens and dozens of LPs. Bill showed me how the cataloguing system worked and then we moved into the studio for the real training session.

CHFC was basically a one-person operation. During the early morning and late-night slots, the only person there was the on-call “announcer,” so that person had to do everything. Cueing up records wasn’t that hard, though there was a knack to it that had to be mastered. Same with the microphone. But this wasn’t rocket science and if I could calculate the weight balance of a fully loaded DC-4 ready for its run to Winnipeg, I was pretty sure I could cue up a record. By the time I left the station, I was feeling comfortable about the next night when I’d be on my own for my debut.

The graveyard shift, as it was, actually ran from roughly eight thirty in the evening until signoff just after one a.m. I said good night to the announcer going off duty at eight thirty and was the only person left in the station. CHFC aired the CBC Radio network feed from Winnipeg for most of the evening, so my duties were minimal until the record show “Nightbeat” would start at eleven p.m. My first on-air moment was a thirty-five-second station break at 8:59:25. At that time, I would click open the microphone and confidently say the station identification and give the local weather report.

“This is CHFC Fort Churchill where the current weather shows a temperature of (whatever) with the winds from the (whatever). The wind chill factor is (whatever). Next on our schedule is (whatever).”

Those words were all typed out on a piece of paper and I just had to fill in the blanks. Easy peasy, right? Nope. Not that night.

I practiced the script—with the blanks filled in—over and over. But at about 8:50, the network line from Winnipeg suddenly went dead in the middle of their programming. Nothing, not even a hum. I was in shock. No one had briefed me on what to do with a situation like that. So, I had to draw on my memory as a youngster in the 1950s listening to the CBC at home with my parents, where things like that happened somewhat frequently.

I reached for the microphone switch, leaned toward the mic. And then uttered the first words I would ever say on the CBC: “One moment, please.”

And then I switched off the mic and wondered what I would do next. Five seconds went by, then ten. I was about to really panic when, just as quickly as the feed had disappeared, it came back on and everything returned to normal.

The rest of my debut evening went fairly well. I was nervous and probably said some dumb ad-lib music things between records on “Nightbeat,” but no one complained. I’m not even sure if anyone was listening, but by the time I left the building I felt pretty good.

Over the next few months, however, I quickly realized that if I was going to make broadcasting a full-time career, it wasn’t going to involve music. It just wasn’t my thing. Even back in my high school music class, the teachers could tell that I didn’t, and wasn’t going to, “get it.” They started me on the trumpet but I couldn’t hit the high notes, or in fact, any notes. Then the trombone. Finally the tuba. Nothing worked.

At CHFC, each week new records would arrive from the record companies. We’d sit around and rate the chances for each record. I remember the day Simon & Garfunkel’s song “Bridge Over Troubled Water” arrived. It was so long, I said. Boring. It’ll never make the charts. Bill Gray just shook his head.

As I said, music just wasn’t my thing. But I knew what was. News and current affairs.

Ever since I was a child, I had been fascinated by the news of the day, whatever that news was. Along with history, current affairs was, as a result, my favourite topic.

So, in 1969, shortly after being offered a full-time job at CHFC, I suggested moving off “Nightbeat” and starting a daily newscast, which at the time the station did not have. They agreed and “The News with Peter Mansbridge” was born.

In the beginning, it was only a few minutes long, each evening at 5:30. I’d talk to the RCMP, the town office, the Port of Churchill, and the National Research Council, which operated the Churchill Rocket Range. Between them, there was always something to discuss on air.

And then, of course, the polar bears. You couldn’t miss with a story on the bears.

But I needed more than content to do a newscast. I needed to know how to write, to interview, to edit, to line up, and to do all the other things real newscasters and producers did. But there was no one to teach me. I was all alone. So, each night, I would listen to the CBC newscasts from Toronto and Winnipeg, and to shortwave radio—the BBC, the Voice of America, and, when I could tune them in, the big radio networks in the United States like CBS, NBC, and ABC—eagerly devouring how others did what they did. I didn’t copy, I learned, and soon “The News with Peter Mansbridge” expanded to thirty minutes and included interviews often done on location on a big, heavy, Nagra tape recorder that I lugged around town and then edited back in my office.


The only known picture of me at the CBC in Fort Churchill, Manitoba, circa 1969. University of Toronto Archives

I even started an open-line radio show in the mornings, called “Words with Peter Mansbridge.” It was a big deal for a little town of less than two thousand where most everyone knew everyone, so there was no anonymity if you were suddenly “on the air.”

That first day was interesting. I opened the program with some nice theme music and welcomed the audience to the new age of broadcasting: we were going to be just like the big cities down south. I asked them to call in and share their thoughts on the topic of the day and then waited for the lines to light up.

Nothing.

The show was thirty minutes long and no one called. Not one. Not even a wrong number. I talked for thirty minutes nonstop. By the end, I was almost begging. By day two, the show was called “Words and Music with Peter Mansbridge.”

Over time the callers started dialling in, and that program and the daily news picked up a good audience. I began making a name for myself in both Winnipeg and Toronto because I would offer cut-down versions of my stories for their newscasts. They were almost always human-interest stories dealing with living in the north, or they were about polar bears. A polar bear story was a ticket to network exposure.

And then in late 1970, Herb Nixon, one of the most powerful names in CBC News at the time, called me up and said, “Peter, we’d like you to apply for an opening we have here in the Winnipeg newsroom.” But there were more Churchill adventures to come first.

Table of Contents

My First Prime Minister 1

I A Penny on the Floor 7

Beginnings 21

Bear Trap 27

A Wake-Up Call 31

The Prince and the Papers 35

The Three-Year Mark 39

Winnipeg Days 45

Diversity in the Newsroom 49

The Wings on Her Lapel 53

Russell Means 55

Hair Raising in China 57

Heroes in Broadcasting 63

The Mystery Building 69

Dead Air 71

Diana 75

A Name in a Versailles Hat 79

The Final Ballot 85

The Right Stuff 91

A Call from CBS 93

Airport Connections 99

The Twenty-Four-Hour Suit 101

John Turner 107

Rigging the Election 113

The Wall 117

The Soldier at the Door 123

High School Crush 129

A Man, a Feather, and a Statue 133

Seat 1A 137

The Iron Interview 139

Mothers and Monarchs 143

Lead Foot 147

The Highest Blessing 149

Thumbs Up, He's Dead 153

Chretien Style 159

In the War Zone 165

It Can Be Ugly Out There 167

A Call in the Night 169

The Pilot 173

Buying Time 175

The Gathering Storm 179

King David's Chocolate 185

Hacks and Flacks 189

Acts of Kindness 193

The Pope and the President 199

Beg, Borrow, or Steal 205

Flight of a Lifetime 209

The Colonel 215

Pearl-Coloured Toyotas 221

The Northwest Passage 225

True Celebrity 231

The Obama Thing 237

The Edge of the Earth 243

King of the Sea 247

Wrong Table 251

Jack Layton 253

The Secret of Beechey Island 259

Searching for Franklin 263

John McCain 271

Johnny Hihgney 277

Chancellor Mansbridge 283

The Real Stephen Harper 287

Peter Moosebridge 293

II What Is "It"? 299

Paris 311

Ringo 315

The Burden of Service 317

High Flight 319

Trending 321

Gord Downie 325

The Trudeaus 331

A River Runs Through It 337

III Canada 339

Traffic Agent Required 349

Acknowledgments 353

Editorial Reviews

Captures—with an unerring eye for humour, delightful contradiction, national setbacks, and high achievement—the evolution of a great nation. With the skill of a celebrated journalist, Mansbridge chronicles his own rise from obscurity in Northern Manitoba to his emergence as Canada’s voice covering the greatest and most consequential events around the world for four decades. This is an absolute page turner.”
— THE RIGHT HONOURABLE BRIAN MULRONEY

“This book is Peter’s handshake. I’m willing to bet a penny—the book explains why pennies matter while money does not—you will be grateful to take the hand which is offered.”
— RON MacLEAN

“Mansbridge was front and centre for so many historic events. His behind-the-scenes dispatches are fascinating, moving, and funny.”
— RICK MERCER

“Peter’s emergence from beneath the colonial cloak that normalized injustices toward First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples to being a strident supporter of truth, justice, and reconciliation sets a path for others to follow.”
— CINDY BLACKSTOCK, executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society

“Mansbridge is more than an institution. He’s a warm and thoughtful man with great stories to tell. This book is convincing evidence of that.”
— BOB RAE

“When you welcome a person into your home, night after night, year after year, you figure you’ve gotten to know him. Millions of Canadians feel that connection to Peter Mansbridge, an intimate bond formed by trust and familiarity. Turns out, there’s plenty we didn’t know. Chock-full of behind-the-scenes insights into the world’s major news events and revealing anecdotes about his formative years, all delivered with self-deprecating humour and sage wisdom, Off the Record is Peter at his best.”
— DUNCAN McCUE, CBC Radio host and journalist

“Mansbridge treats us to the tales that journalists like best: the stories behind the stories, big and small. What do prime ministers say when the camera isn’t rolling? Does being Canada’s most recognized news anchor mean you can get out of a speeding ticket? Reading this book is like sitting down with a trusted old friend, who saw everything you saw—and more. Peppered with insight, reflection, and yes, a few laughs, too, Off the Record will leave you wanting to say to Mansbridge what he said to Canadians for thirty years: ‘Thanks for watching.’”
— SUSAN DELACOURT, political journalist and author

“Always a beacon of composure and trusted information, Peter is someone I have admired since I was a child. This page turner is an intimate look at his life behind the scenes with some of the world’s most fascinating news stories and engaging newsmakers of our lifetimes.”
— DR. HAYLEY WICKENHEISER, four-time Olympic gold medalist

“A news junkie’s dream for its stories behind the news stories.”
— Zoomer

“[Mansbridge’s] quick, dry humour, often self-deprecating, is well-known to friends and in ample evidence here. . . . He retains the sense of wonder of someone who knows they have been given a particularly privileged seat from which to watch the world. . . . [An] often-compassionate, always-engaging book.”
— Policy

“Have you ever wanted to have coffee or a beer with the longtime anchor of CBC-TV’s The National? Reading Off the Record is the next best thing.”
— Winnipeg Free Press

From the Publisher