CBC TV journalist Elly Alboim became an influential policy adviser

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Elly Alboim was the Ottawa bureau chief for CBC TV News for 15 years and then went on to have a long career as a policy adviser, in particular to Paul Martin, when he was finance minister and then prime minister.

“Elly and Paul formed a special bond, and he became unusually active, and integrated into the Department of Finance,” said David Herle, who worked with Mr. Alboim at Earnscliffe Strategy Group, an Ottawa-based consultancy and lobbying firm.

Mr. Alboim spent years totally immersed in Ottawa politics, deciding which stories the CBC should run with, and developed skills that would later prove invaluable to Mr. Martin and other cabinet ministers. His news decisions required deep knowledge and solid judgment, and had to be made on the spot.

Likewise, with politicians and government mandarins, he listened, then told them what they should do. Mr. Alboim was blunt, some might say crusty, but polite.

Elly Alboim was born on July 7, 1947, into a Jewish family in Montreal. His father, Samuel, was born in Poland and came to Canada long before the start of the Second World War. His mother, the former Helen Goldberg, managed to escape from Poland when the war started in 1939 and her family says it took her two years to reach Canada.

Samuel Alboim ran a butcher shop in Montreal.

“He was in the meat-packing business as a co-owner and then as the head of the association of federally inspected meat packers in Quebec,” his daughter, Naomi Alboim, said. “He negotiated labour contracts with the Quebec union, developed training programs and advocated for the association with the Quebec government.”

Ms. Alboim said her father had an unexpected financial windfall when he sold some property and didn’t know what to do with the money.

“He gave my mother three choices: purchase a house (they had always rented), have a big bar mitzvah for Elly, or go for a grand tour of Europe and Israel as a family,” Ms. Alboim said. Her mother chose the trip. “They took us out of school early and we travelled for four months in 1958 throughout Europe and Israel. I remember Elly spending a lot of time in our hotel room reading comics.”

Elly went to the High School of Montreal, which was downtown, beside the McGill University campus. He grew up in the Snowdon district of Montreal, and later in life would always visit the Snowdon Deli when he was in the city.

Mr. Alboim went to McGill, where he studied sociology and anthropology. He once said his first name confused the university administration and for much of his time at McGill he was classified as female. Mr. Alboim worked for the McGill Daily, which intensified his interest in journalism. It was the 1960s, and he was active in student politics. After McGill he went to journalism school at Columbia University in New York, where he earned a master’s degree.

It was the height of the Vietnam War and Mr. Alboim, the student radical, headed to Chicago with thousands of other student radicals to protest the war at the 1968 Democratic Convention. The police under the autocratic mayor Richard Daley beat demonstrators in what was later called a police riot. Mr. Alboim was clubbed and knocked out. It was his last stab at physical protests.

In 1970, Mr. Alboim began working in the CBC’s local television newsroom in Montreal. It was an exciting era, in particular on the local scene. Just after he arrived, the Front de Libération du Québec kidnapped the British diplomat James Cross, then followed up with kidnapping and then murdering Pierre Laporte, the labour minister in Quebec’s Liberal government.

The October Crisis produced one dramatic incident after another. Armed soldiers patrolled the streets of Montreal.

There was the Vietnam War and the Watergate Crisis, a strike by the Montreal Police, then the city’s fire department, and endless demonstrations. It is no exaggeration to say that working in that era, jam-packed with news, honed the judgment of reporters and editors. Mr. Alboim was the lineup editor, choosing which stories went where in the 6 o’clock local news. Once, when the power went out in Toronto, Mr. Alboim and his team produced The National out of Montreal.

In the late 1970s, he moved to Ottawa to run the editorial side of CBC’s television news bureau. It was packed with talented reporters who went on to bigger things: David Halton, Peter Mansbridge, Brian Stewart, Jason Moscovitz, Mike Duffy, Mark Phillips, Wendy Mesley and others. Mr. Alboim was like the conductor of an orchestra who knew every instrument.

“He needed to know what was going on in every government department, what was going on with the politics of every political party and every political leader in addition to being the editor of every story, because nothing went out without him seeing it,” Mr. Moscovitz said. “Elly was also the best leader imaginable because although he had a staff of about 35 people, there was no one who disliked him, absolutely no one.”

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The job also involved fighting with editors on the Toronto news desk, who might not agree that the Ottawa story of the day was worth leading the national nightly news. Mr. Alboim was fiercely loyal to his team and pushed hard to promote their stories.

Later, some of those reporters fought for him when he was attacked by the Prime Minister’s Office and top managers at the CBC.

In 1987, at the height of the debate on Meech Lake, prime minister Brian Mulroney’s constitutional proposal, Mr. Alboim made comments at an academic panel discussion in Calgary that came back to haunt him. Mr. Alboim described the Meech Lake agenda as “cynical.” He thought it was off the record. It wasn’t.

Mr. Alboim’s anti-Meech Lake remarks were mentioned in a 1991 in a book by John Meisel, a professor at Queen’s University and former chair of the CRTC. Two journalists spotted the obscure reference and soon Mr. Mulroney’s office was calling for Mr. Alboim’s firing.

Reporter David Halton called CBC president Gérard Veilleux, a former deputy minister who believed in bureaucratic structure. “I told him Elly was a valuable asset to the CBC,” Mr. Halton said. “But he told me I had no right to go directly to the president and should bring it up with news managers.”

Mr. Alboim apologized and managed to keep his job, but in 1993 he left the CBC and joined Earnscliffe Strategy Group, which was setting up a communications division.

“When Elly became a consultant, every bureaucrat in Ottawa wanted to hire him. He was quickly busy as hell advising every government department,” said Mr. Herle, who is now with Rubicon Strategy in Toronto. “What he did was sit there while the Department of Finance and the Minister of Finance outlined their plans. And he applied his penetrating mind and told them where all of the vulnerabilities in their plan were, all the places that could go wrong. He was a policy analyst as much as anything.”

For a man so driven by work and politics, he loved sports, watching it and playing hockey and softball; he played in a CBC softball league. He was planning to watch the Super Bowl on Sunday, Feb. 8, but he died the day before the game. He was 78.

Mr. Alboim’s other passion was teaching. He taught at Carleton’s School of Journalism for 46 years. For most of that time he taught as much as any other professor, squeezing in time away from work to hold small classes on political reporting and strategic political communication.

Along with teaching, Mr. Alboim helped the journalism department solve some of its political problems at the university.

“Part of our relationship would be in faculty meetings where we were dealing with demand for budget cuts or changes to curriculum,” said Allan Thompson, head of Carleton’s Journalism program and a former student (1984) of Mr. Alboim’s. “Elly would just sit there quietly, listening to everything. You would think he wasn’t even paying attention because he was on his BlackBerry, double-tasking. Then suddenly he would stop and join the conversation and just cut through everything, get to the point and lay out exactly what we needed to do.”

Mr. Thomson said Mr. Alboim was e-mailing him from the hospital the day before he died. “He was asking about his students and apologizing that he had to cancel a class because he’d had a mild heart attack. But he thought everything was going be fine, and the next day I heard he was gone.”

Mr. Alboim was a devoted family man. He married Kathy Moore in 1971 and they had three children, Jennifer, Jesse and Jaime. The family spent a lot of time at a cottage at Lac St. Germain in Quebec, 40 minutes north of Ottawa. Former CBC host Peter Mansbridge lived nearby, as did Mr. Mulroney’s former press secretary, Bill Fox, a close friend of Mr. Alboim’s.

His family said they always came first. When anyone of them would call, he would always pick up the phone no matter who he was with, at least to say he would call back soon.

Mr. Alboim leaves his wife, three children and seven grandchildren, along with his sister and extended family.

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