Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, immediately grasping the importance of embracing this new connection between Canadians and Americans, did not hesitate to appoint Ms. Wallin as Consul General of Canada to New York. Her mission was to knit together as many new relationships as possible in cultural projects, commercial initiatives, and foreign policy. Canada’s prime minister and foreign affairs minister both, having seen her skills on full display at the “Canada Loves New York” rally, embraced her potential to open doors in New York the way nobody else could.
Wallin was in her element, providing lavish entertainment, having her own car and driver, and staging an unending parade of prestigious receptions featuring notable Canadians to attract New York’s biggest players. She forged a wide array of important American contacts, opening doors for other Canadians. Among numerous Canadians witnessing this tour-de-force on behalf of our country was John S. Elder, Q.C., a prominent Toronto lawyer who four times accompanied clients to Wallin’s receptions to develop new business. “She was one very impressive lady,” he recalled in 2014. “She could make things happen.”
Canada’s consul general was leading a heady, exhilarating life in Manhattan, deploying an over-the-top style compared to other Canadian diplomatic pushes that, in comparison, were long on frugality but short on results. In 2005, Wallin bought an oversized studio unit at 118 East 60th Street, a proper “white glove” address with covered circular driveway, doorman, and concierge. The high-end custom renovations to her thirty-fourth-floor Lenox Hill residence rendered it as charming as it was functional.
Her expenses were a contentious subtext, but this was not news. At the CBC, where money flowed and budget management was so loose that at one point program director Trina McQueen had to face the public and explain some $28 million was missing and nobody could trace it, Wallin learned nothing about restraint with public dollars. For Toronto power lunches, to which other movers and shakers arrived by taxicab, she was delivered by a CBC limousine, and later fetched and whisked away by the shiny black vehicle. When she had her own production company, it was standard industry practice to run all expenses through it, since they related one way or another to the TV shows she was creating and selling. Now in Manhattan as consul general with a specific mission from the PM to forge new Canadian-American business links, she just shifted from high gear into overdrive. Wallin excelled in her social and cultural task of bringing American high-rollers into a Canadian orbit, creating a positive glow about Canada by imparting the sense that our country had verve on a par with New York’s.
Officials in the Department of External Affairs “had their hair on fire,” as one insider told me, trying to control Pamela Wallin’s spending, driving departmental comptrollers to complain to the Prime Minister’s Office that she was throwing around money like no other diplomat even knew how. This apparent concern for financial rectitude disguised their real agenda, however. Wallin was getting results that bread-and-butter career diplomats could not even dream about, and jealousy was a factor. But appointment of a non-diplomat to a foreign posting was an especially sore point. The reason for complaining directly to the PMO about Pamela Wallin’s expenses was that it was a choice way to rap Mr. Chrétien’s knuckles under the pretence of financial management.
While that sideshow played out, though, Wallin would continue in what by now had become an indelible pattern in her successful career — incurring costs while getting the job done and, as an after-thought, either tossing receipts to somebody else to process or accumulating them to deal with “someday” as part of her never-finished paperwork. What a nuisance!
Two other patterns had emerged that were by this stage also definable hallmarks of the Wallin style: air travel and a whirlwind work schedule. Wallin could never have had the career she did without civil aviation. Wadena is a fine town, with the best wildfowl festival anywhere, but, two hours east of Saskatoon, it is not a crossroads of the world. From her teen years when she left town for high school, then university, then working at the penitentiary, next getting into broadcasting, Wallin was operating within the province, travelling by bus or driving her own car. After that, getting from Saskatchewan to the next places she worked, in Ottawa and Toronto, or flying down to Buenos Aires to cover the Falklands War for CTV, was only possible by airplane. Across Canada and around the world, Wallin’s continuing career in television reporting put her into aircraft travelling with prime ministers, covering dramatic developments, and staying connected with the many people in her peripatetic life. As colleagues and friends routinely joked, “Pam lives on an airplane.”
She knew airport facilities like the layout of her own home. She knew airline schedules by heart. She commuted between Ottawa and Toronto for many years as a national broadcaster, and added New York flights to the circuit, first as consul general and after 2006 as senior adviser on Canadian affairs to the president of the Americas Society and the Council of the Americas. Pamela Wallin continued flying to New York for three days’ work a week from Toronto, and then from Ottawa after becoming a senator in 2008. This pattern was maintained for two more years, as she continued to hold this position while also working as a parliamentarian. As a senator, of course, she was also now flying to other spots in Canada and abroad — as she had always done with CTV and CBC — to pursue her work.
Wallin not only lived on airplanes but found this form of travel ideal for her habitual networking with our country’s movers and shakers. She also used flights as her airborne office. “As I settled in for my third flight of the week,” she wrote in 2009 for her Foreword to a book I was publishing of Patricia M. Boyer’s newspaper columns, “I found that rare moment of quiet and calm, and therefore the opportunity to peruse a collection of columns written by my friend Patrick Boyer’s mother.” Pamela Wallin penned a reflective and uplifting message for the book. The quality of her effort was matched by her generosity in reading the manuscript and adding her prominent name to The March of Days: Optimistic Realism through the Seasons of Life, in tribute to a fellow woman journalist with Saskatchewan roots, my mother.
Her capacity for work overwhelmed many people. Sometimes I thought Wallin should just take a break and sort out her priorities. She seemed to be doing so much and, being constantly on the go, raced against herself as much as the clock. But this pattern was deep-seated. At university, she’d been involved in so many projects that “my life was one unending blur.” In broadcasting, she’d rise in the middle of the night to prepare the early morning telecast. In the urgency of her stop-watch-tight routines, Wallin’s need for efficiency often led her to say to others, “I’ll do it myself.” She knew how because over her career she’d learned just about every task that journalism incorporates, and she understood it would be fastest in the brief time available to complete something crucial — check a source, cue up some audio — herself. But often, colleagues instead heard her to be saying, “I can do it better than you.” She could perform miracles, yet sometimes in an off-putting way.
In July 2006, completing her half-decade mission as consul general in New York, Wallin joined the board of Gluskin Sheff & Associates, a small but prosperous Bay Street investment and wealth management firm. The following month she became a director of Bell Globemedia, multimedia owner of the Globe and Mail newspaper and CTV television network. In 2007, she added the Calgary-based exploration company Oilsands Quest, Inc. to her roster of directorships. In March 2007, she became Chancellor of the University of Guelph. In 2008, adding a couple more corporate directorships, Wallin joined the board of Porter