TORONTO – OPP Sgt. Cam Wooley is the go-to-guy when it comes to traffic and highway safety in Southern Ontario. 
When the cops do their regular blitzes, Wooley (right) is the voice heard on radio and seen on TV describing the trucks held together with hope and duct tape or the guy doing 150 while eating, talking on the phone and using his foot to steer.
So it seemed like a neat idea when Corus Radio’s Toronto cluster (640 Toronto, Q107, The Edge) made him their new traffic reporter in January.
Not so much, though, for the other radio stations in the market.
Wooley lasted barely a month in the thing as his superiors changed their minds on letting the Sgt. take to the airwaves while airborne. The official line is that the job was a major drag on resources since Wooley had to get up at 3 a.m., put in his shift in the chopper over Toronto and then do his full day at the office. It was too much to ask him to do the drive shift, too, so another officer, Dave Woodford, did the afternoons.
When Wooley started, "it was a good idea brought to us by Corus that looked like a win-win," OPP chief superintendent Bill Grodzinski told cartt.ca on Wednesday. Corus would get the province’s foremost expert on traffic and highway safety on the air and the OPP would get their safe driving message out many times a day.
"But it was a lot more work than we thought," added Grodzinski, and after a month Wooley was forced to give up the job.
While Grodzinski conceded there were some complaints about the arrangement, he wouldn’t say if those complaints came from other radio stations.
However, the two other major news stations in the market, Rogers Broadcasting’s 680 News and Standard Radio’s 1010 CFRB, were caught by surprise and none too pleased about the OPP’s main highway spokesman suddenly becoming the voice of a competitor – and they let the OPP hear about it.
"The OPP didn’t think it was a big deal or that we would view him as a competitive property," Standard Toronto’s vice-president and general manager Pat Holiday told cartt.ca. "But I told (Wooley) ‘I can’t use you now,’ and 680 News and another station told him the same thing."
"He took a job that made him somebody else’s (traffic voice) and that’s a big deal to us… basically, we’re paying taxes so that he can be a competitor against us, is what we told them," added Holiday.
And, in the end, without fanfare, the copper was taken out of Corus’ new chopper.
