As one who spent many years opening doors in Ottawa, you look with distain on those who so brashly try to sell themselves as door openers because they know this or that politician. It is not that over the years, I did not do many millions of dollars of business in Ottawa. It is not that I did not have access to the top levels of government and civil service. The facts were that the real work had usually been completed much lower on the department food chain before people at top levels became involved with a project.
Anyone who thinks they can sell with just political clout is a fool. As a very young political apparatchik, I once got a quite severe dressing down from a deputy minister. He was angry. I had proposed a rather radical approach to a problem faced by his department directly to his minister. The deputy minister considered my solution to be nothing short of a declaration of war by the minister against the department. It went against everything in which the Deputy believed. I had committed heresy. What further infuriated the deputy was that the minister was quite amused by my solution and had rubbed the deputy’s nose in it. “Here’s how it works, young man,” the deputy told me: “you bring the ideas such as that to the department first. We are the people who have to make it work. In the process, we will also look after your minister.”
He was right. Nothing replaces the time-consuming, painstaking steps needed to bring the department on side with a new endeavour. And no amount of persuasion can get a smart politician to argue with his department people if they oppose your plan. During the Trudeau era in Ottawa I put together millions dollars worth of projects for business in Ottawa. What proved my case was that little changed and the business kept flowing when the Conservative government of Brian Mulroney took over.
It was during the Brian Mulroney government’s tenure that I accepted some consulting contracts with government departments. The most fascinating assignments were in selling the political masters on objectives brought forward by the departments. It led to some very unusual events. I will never forget the time I was enjoying dinner with someone in a back corner of one of Ottawa’s more obscure but quite fine restaurants. Inadvertently, the restaurant seated another party next to us before we were finished. The new party included the then president of the Liberal Party, a Liberal Senator of long acquaintance and other people from the party. I had no choice but, when leaving, to stop by the table to say ‘hello.’ It did not seem necessary to introduce the person I was with but it must have been a hot topic for a few days, with people asking what the heck I would be doing, having dinner with Prime Minister Mulroney’s chief of staff.
Political Ottawa is a very small town.
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