Who will write 'Ottawa Inside Out' today

Stevie Cameron's forgotten classic needs a sequel - and a reissue

I’ve been dipping into Ottawa Inside Out (Key Porter Books, 1989) by the late Stevie Cameron, investigative reporter & social chronicler extraordinaire who was best known for her books on the Mulroney era scandals. Ottawa is the kind of book that is hard to come across today. Deeply insider-ish while also irreverent and libel-unworried, every paragraph suggesting that multiple people directly familiar with the matter have been spoken to in confidence. There are no endnotes and no formal references outside the 3-page bibliography in the back.

One of the reasons why such books are hard to find now is, obviously, the dearth of that kind of writer. Longform magazine writing, what’s left of it in Canada, does not favour Ottawa topics. (The last big generous-access profile of a politician that I remember reading was Jason McBride’s of Chrystia Freeland in TL, many years ago.) Editors are not commissioning this kind of thing, probably because politicians are not agreeing to give access and the shadowing privileges and multiple sit-down interviews to one gal/guy for a single piece which is bound to dig up a grandpa with unsavoury politics - for example. As Ken Whyte observes in a recent SHuSH, we’ve had a leadership campaign, a change of PM, an election and now a new government without anyone doing any long form, deep dives into any of the main characters or campaigns. Michael Wolff’s All or Nothing, at the heels of the Trump WH win, would not happen here.

Chroniclers of Ottawa as a comedy of manners - with an insider view of how class and power work - don’t exist either in the age of the fast op-ed.

Another reason is technological change. Cameron wrote in an era of the gatekept media - of the scarcity of publishing outlets - whereas today we operate in a world in which the sources, the readers and the political staffers all walk around with own video recording, research and streaming devices in their pockets. If you write “no one has the kind of parties that Sondra and Allan Gottlieb threw in the previous decade” there are bound to be people who will object publicly in some manner with a “wait, no, I was there, dreary was the mean”. What gets written today comes out as part of the tsunami of other internet matter. Counterintuitively, the lack of competition for eyeballs and attention made the writing better in the time before social media. If you don’t write for virality, you won’t aim to please.

It’s the writing that says, you were not there, I was, and here is what I saw. Tina Brown’s writing assumes this tone as well: I have exclusive access, trust me to convey the important things. (She too is of another tech era, though I hear her Substack is becoming very popular.) None of what was gathered from the brilliant and witty guide with exclusive access was falsifiable to the reader. Maybe that’s why the writing is so full of charm and verve: it had to be confident, and drop dead gorgeous, and not scared of presuming, inferring and speculating. I sometimes still find this in British magazines, the Spectator most of all, and as of late in certain corners of Substack. The remaining contingent of editors of longform in Toronto, for example, take the American side of the road: shoot the sentences through with links, don’t mind if over-explanation kills the flow, don’t object to repeating the obvious, and favour documentarist approach to the beauty of writing. Writing as corroborating - rather than writing as ideas taking flight.

For all of these reason, a Stevie Cameron-like chronicler of Ottawa would be unlikely today. But we need an Ottawa Inside Out for our age, because, what has changed? what hasn’t it? is the power still where it was back then?