'People take shots': The leak the Speaker resented the most in Ottawa

In 1985, the Speaker of the House of Commons was dealing with a leak at Kingsmere that couldn't be fixed by a traditional plumber.

Back then, a story was leaked to a newspaper that Kingsmere — the Speaker's official residence in Gatineau Park — was going to have more than $400,000 worth of renovations and repairs undertaken. 

And Speaker John Bosley was blamed as being the person pushing for that work.

However, as the CBC's Jason Moscovitz recapped for viewers of The National on July 23, 1985, it was not the case that the Speaker had requested those renovations. 

"The story was attributed to government sources, widely believed to be right in the prime minister's office," Moscovitz reported, 10 days after the story was published.

"Bosley was portrayed to be an extraordinarily extravagant man with rich tastes in renovation."

But the decisions on the pending renovations were actually made by an independent committee and not the Speaker, who Moscovitz said "resented" the leak that painted him in an unflattering light.

'That just comes with the turf'

The Speaker was adamant that he never asked for any specific work to take place at Kingsmere.

"I said all along, if the decision was to do nothing to Kingsmere, or whatever, that I would be perfectly happy to live with that. At no time, have I asked for any specific figure or any set of things to be done," said Bosley.

Moscovitz asked the Speaker for his thoughts on why someone would want to target him in a parliamentary intrigue like this.

"In this business, people take shots," Bosley said. "That just comes with the turf."

A flawed theory

There was another twist to the story.

"The Prime Minister's Office knew before the story was leaked that Bosley wasn't the extravagant villain he was made out to be," Moscovitz reported.

The National showed viewers images of a letter showing that a senior advisor to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney had been formally told that the Official Residences Council "unanimously approved" the spending for the proposed renovations to Kingsmere.

Moscovitz said the council had been set up to depoliticize the business of looking after official residences.

"With independent people in place to make decisions, politicians, the theory went, would no longer be blamed or embarrassed by what was spent," he said. 

"The theory was good, but it hasn't worked."