By Kelly Patrick
The National Press Club was conceived in Ottawa’s grimy city police courtroom. In January 1928, about 20 reporters and editors, breaking from the daily grind of covering William Lyon MacKenzie King’s Liberal government, met there to plan a club for newspapermen in Canada’s capital.
Francis Rowse, an Ottawa Journal reporter who had teamed up with Ottawa Citizen reporter Guy Rhoades to post invitations at the Journal, the Citizen, LeDroit and the Canadian Press, chaired the meeting. The others took seats at the barristers’ tables and the prisoners docks.
There was a brief discussion, a committee was formed, and the Ottawa Press Club -— harbinger of today’s National Press Club — was born.
Seventy-five years later, after hosting historical watersheds such as the launch of Pierre Trudeau’s bid for the Liberal leadership in 1968, the club is on financial life-support. Drowning in more than $325,000 worth of debt, its 11-member volunteer executive committee filed for bankruptcy protection this July and sent a refinancing proposal to its creditors at the start of this month.
“Unfortunately, the club has been limping along for the past three years, and then (the situation) became dire this year,” says Mary-Ann Porter, the club’s membership secretary and a television editor.
Past executives warned the club’s mounting debt might force its closure, says Porter. “But this time we were not crying wolf anymore. This was a serious situation where the doors were going to be closed.”
That’s a harsh reality for a club that — in the heady days at the height of its popularity in the 1970s and 1980s — had between 800 and 1,000 paying members and attracted princes and prime ministers alike.
Les McLaughlin, a 61-year-old freelance writer and broadcaster who worked for CBC Radio’s Northern service for 30 years, says he rubbed shoulders with a few first ministers at the club in the early ‘80s.
“Mulroney wasn’t a regular visitor, but he would often drop in for lunch and he’d associate with the media at the lunch tables,” he says.
Rosaleen Dickson, the 82-year-old former editor of The Equity, a weekly newspaper in Pontiac County, says she’s run into the last eight prime ministers over four decades of visiting the club. But it’s the club’s atmosphere she treasures. “The press club has always been a lovely place to come, where you could talk with intelligent, like-minded people.”
That was the goal Rowse and Rhoades had in mind when they founded the club. For a quarter century it had no home. Until 1953, members met at the Ottawa House Hotel in Hull and held their annual dance at the Chateau Laurier. Then a Sparks Street jeweller donated a room above his shop.
It moved once more — to an Elgin Street restaurant — before settling into its permanent digs in Parliament’s shadow, on the second floor of the National Press Building in 1967. Three years later, it finally opened its doors to women.
How did a formerly popular club with such a storied history end up on the precipice of bankruptcy?
The club simply doesn’t attract the crowds it used to — not even on the night after this month’s provincial election.
At 8:30 p.m. on Oct. 3, the press club’s stately maroon and mahogany main bar is near-empty. Two clusters of older women chat quietly in round-backed lounge chairs. A man and woman sip wine and finish the last of their dinner.
Through a set of white French doors, in the club’s games room, the atmosphere is a bit livelier. A dozen people drink, play shuffleboard or snooker, and — in violation of the city’s no-smoking by-law — puff away on cigarettes.
Ian Perkins, the club’s treasurer, argues the press club is within its right to allow smoking in a sealed room in a private club.
Perkins, an executive assistant to Liberal MP Jim Karygiannis, insists the slow evening doesn’t necessarily paint an accurate picture of the press club. “Some nights are busier, others are slower,” he says.
Indeed, the following Tuesday at lunch hour the club’s first-floor dining room is packed, and a few media bigwigs — CBC Newsworld’s Don Newman and the Toronto Star’s Susan Delacourt — enjoy lunch in the bar.
But the slow Friday night is symbolic of how the capital’s political and media circles have evolved. That’s one of a slew of reasons suggested for the club’s descent in the last decade.
The decline may have started when a few journalists broke the club’s sacred, but then unwritten, off-the-record rule by reporting comments members of the Mulroney government made over drinks. A rumour circulated that the violations prompted Mulroney to ban his caucus from the club. In November 1986, the club issued an edict banning eavesdropping, but the board stayed mum about what part the Mulroney rumour played in their decision.
But McLaughlin says it was budget cuts at major media outlets in the early ‘90s that really hurt the club’s fortunes. “For whatever reason, government and industry stopped paying for memberships for their employees,” he says.
Today, annual membership fees range from $200 for members of the media to $650 for associate members like public relations specialists. Membership is free for MPs and senators.
But there are other ways for journalists, politicians and communications specialists to stay in touch, says Chris Dornan, director of Carleton University’s School of Journalism.
“There are ways now to congregate that don’t require these sorts of formal, institutional clubs,” he says. “A good example is the Internet. It brings together people with similar ideas.”
Dornan hesitates to endorse the most common excuse for the club’s troubles – that journalists aren’t the hard-drinking ruffians they once were. “Every generation complains about that — since the 1800s,” he says.
Even if reporters’ lifestyles haven’t changed dramatically since the ‘80s, their work has. All-news networks and constantly-updated Internet sites have imposed tighter and more frequent deadlines.
“Twenty or 30 years ago you didn’t have as many deadlines because of feeding capacity,” says Alex Fawaz, CHUM-City Television’s Parliamentary bureau chief.
With a pair of reporters, two cameramen and a producer, Fawaz’s bureau feeds Toronto’s City-TV, all-news station CP 24 and 11 other stations from Victoria, B.C., to Barrie, Ont.
“With all-news there is more appetite for material. It leaves you less time to socialize,” he says.
Despite all this, there is hope for the club.
Perkins, says he’s confident the creditors will accept the offer the club filed on Oct. 2.
Mark Rouleau, the club’s bankruptcy trustee, says the club will likely have to pay about $44,000 before next May. They’ve offered to pay the $280,000 worth of debt left on theirbooks before 2005.
Since the current executive took over, changes to the club’s membership structure and an aggressive membership drive have brought about 40 new paying members to the club, bringing the total to 472.
Since going public with its financial woes in July, the club has raked in more than $11,000 in individual donations from members.
And one night this summer convinced Porter and Perkins the National Press Club needs to stay open for another 75 years
The Ottawa press gallery dinner is always one of the hottest events on the capital’s social calendar.
After the prime minister and various other Hill types poke fun at themselves at the banquet, Perkins says it’s a long-standing tradition for the crowd to come to the club for bacon, eggs and croissants.
This year, acutely aware of the club’s money troubles, the executive was literally banking on a successful breakfast.
“We were sitting here until about one in the morning and we had maybe 10 people in the club,” says Porter. We had the cook on overtime and it was getting more and more expensive as the evening went on.”
Porter finally phoned Perkins at the back of the club to ask him to start bringing up the first servings of eggs and bacon.
“As I was talking to him on the phone, the doors opened from both sides and it was a flood of drunken people,” says Porter. “They came walking in and all hell broke loose.
It was an incredibly successful night.”