Gerald Butts

Oh, well, this is dancing through a minefield for me, Peter, because I know some people involved.

I'll try and stay true to our obligation to our audience here and just tell people what I think.

I always find these stories, and every prime minister or premier deals with a version of this story at some point, that there are disaffected members of caucus or there are

people who don't like the way he or she does business.

And there's always, as Richard Brennan once said to me, you need to learn that plain lands is not a story.

So there's always a market for problems being caused by the prime minister's behavior or his relationship with caucus or a premier, et cetera, et cetera.

And I kind of put these stories in that context, but there are a couple of really interesting things about them to me.

And the most interesting question is never to me the story itself, but why those stories are happening now.

Right.

And I think that a couple of things are worth observing.

One is that these are three very senior women journalists on Parliament Hill that have a lot of respect because we talked about Althea Raj, but it's also Stephanie Levitz and Marika Walsh.

These are people who have broken stories themselves in the past and who command the respect of their colleagues.

So the thing you're worried about when you're the subject of these stories, and we all in different ways have been the subject of these stories over the years,

is when is it going to stop?

Is it going to create a trend?

And what can I do to arrest the worst case scenario?

And another thing that's a perennial complaint from journalists is that they don't have enough access to what's happening in the prime minister's office or what's the prime minister's thinking behind things.

Those complaints are around Parliament Hill now with this prime minister.

So to me, I do agree with James that it is a normal cost of doing business, but sometimes normal costs of doing business can kind of get out of hand and you have to arrest them before they become a negative thing.

I think in this particular case with this particular prime minister and this particular caucus, and I'll try and talk about the structural issues,