by Noah Richler
April 8, 2015, 9:56 a.m.
I try the leader of the Official Opposition at his constituency office in Outremont, Quebec.
“Bureau de Thomas Mulcair, hello.”
“Hello, is that Chantale?”
“No. C’est Miriam.”
“Okay. Miriam. Hi. Monsieur Mulcair me connâit. On a parlé, il y’a peut-être six mois, au sujet des elections qui approchent and I wanted to tell him that after a long discussion with my wife, I have the go-ahead. So, umm, he may not want me anymore but perhaps he’d be kind enough to give me a call, or, maybe you can tell me what to do.”
“Okay, so what level was he talking about?”
“He was suggesting that I be prime minister—”
“Ahh-ha!”
“Just kidding. No, my name’s Noah Richler. I live in Nova Scotia and Toronto and we spoke, as I did with Megan Leslie and Craig Scott, about my seeking the NDP nomination in Toronto or West Nova—which would be the riding of preference.”
“Wonderful,” said Miriam. “Someone will get back to you. Mr. Mulcair’s out of the country at the moment, but possibly whoever’s in charge of the campaign will be in touch. They’re going to be the ones on the ground knowing what the state of play is.”
—
That afternoon, James Pratt, the NDP director of organization, called.
“I got a message from the leader indicating that you would like to run for us,” said Pratt. It was the first time I had heard his voice and I could sense the big grin he was putting on. I said yes, and told Pratt Sarah had not been keen but had given me the go-ahead at eight-thirty that morning. But, I added, I was worried that whatever authority I might have as a writer would be affected by being visibly partisan, and that the last thing I wanted to do was get the party into trouble.
“I have dodgy moments in my past,” I said. “I’ve written about these, though I’m sure they could be worked to my advantage. I was very involved with drugs for a while but am also proof of why one should have a lenient policy.”
“It’s great to know the negative stuff,” said Pratt, explaining that the better part of his job was overseeing the vetting of candidates.
“There isn’t a person who doesn’t have something potentially hazardous,” said Pratt. “Offering yourself up for public office isn’t like entering a court of law. It isn’t about what’s right or wrong—it’s not about what’s just. This is politics, and time and again our opponents will throw whatever they can at us, so you just need to be prepared. Potentially they could say some nasty things.”
Pratt told me I needed to join the party—I was not officially a member yet—and that he’d be sending me the candidate’s package that prospective nominees need to complete.
“We can’t do anything till you’re vetted. With authors, these things tend to take a little bit longer.”
“For sure.”
“In rare instances, and I can’t imagine this happening in a million years, the national director, Anne McGrath, says something is just too grave, we can’t let it go. That’s the process.”
“I’m a fairly on-the-record guy,” I said, “and in a way I relish some of this stuff coming up because it could serve us well.”
“I agree with you,” said Pratt. “There’s a good story we can tell—you know, boy done good. I’d be excited about that.”
“And I have two dogs,” I said. “That probably works in my favour.”
“Sure. People love dogs. Dogs and babies.”
I was enjoying the talk. This political life, yet in its infancy, felt like a wide-open avenue.
“So tell me about West Nova,” said Pratt. “How much time do you spend there?”
“Oh, I get out about five times a year,” I said. “I’ve worked on a friend’s lobster boat and that’s something that would give me a bit of cred. I’m from away, but I don’t mind that either. It’s not like I’d be facing a guy who’s really entrenched. The Conservative, Greg Kerr, is no great shakes—and wasn’t it a Liberal riding before Kerr won it?”
“It was.”
“So the riding is shaped like a tuning fork and if I did run there, I’d like to walk, not take a car, from the very southwestern tip of Brier Island to Digby, up a bit into the Annapolis Valley, and then back down the French Shore along the other side of St. Mary’s Bay to Yarmouth. I’d visit every house in the riding along the way.”
“Okayyy,” said Pratt, like he was talking to a kid in nursery school proclaiming he was going to be an astronaut, and as the teacher his job was to nurture impossible dreams that life would crush soon enough. “While being a little hokey, your dream of walking the riding is the sort of thing that plays and I’m not opposed. Visiting every house is certainly how you win.”
“Nova Scotia is a place where the old ways still matter,” I said.
“I’m assuming you’ve looked at the results?”
“Has the NDP ever won it?”
“No.”
“Well,” I said, “when Craig Scott spoke to me, he was suggesting I should be prepared to run in Toronto ‘to lose.’ I’m very happy to do that as well. I mean the real reason I’d run is to get certain ideas across, if that’s allowed. We’d all love to win, but that may be less important than having someone come out and say, ‘Look, this is the party of principle.’ It’s shocking to me, as it must be to you guys, to pick up a paper in which some mandarin has written a piece in which the Liberals are placed ahead of the NDP in the text as if it’s their choice and not the NDP’s to cooperate. It’s so ingrained, this idea that there are only two options. I’d like to do something about that.”
“It’s frustrating to me on a daily basis,” said Pratt, “and if you were to announce that you were to run for us it would be a sign of momentum and generate some media. As for where you run, what is most important is that you are comfortable—and I hear you, that stuff in West Nova all sounds good.”
“Thank you.”
“But for what Craig mentioned to you, I’d have put it a little differently. Toronto is a battleground—it’s the battleground for us. If you were to run in Toronto, certainly we would have more attention, and if we hold our seats in the GTA and pick up a couple more, then my gut says that something would be happening across the country. If I can’t hold those seats, then that will have ramifications as well.”
“Got it.”
“Now these are tough seats—as tough as West Nova.”
“If I run in Toronto my identity in Nova Scotia is left alone and there’s something to be said for that. But look, I’m offering myself up to you guys. If you want me to run in Calgary, I’ll run in Calgary.”
Pratt laughed.
“I don’t think we have to decide this today, but just to finish my thought, there is a riding that’s not held by us, though it was until very recently, and that’s Olivia Chow’s old riding.”
“Spadina—Fort York?”
“Just wanted to put it in your head.”
“Listen, I have plans to be in Nova Scotia for a bit of August. Is that an issue?”
“No. I don’t believe the campaign will be in full force until September. Great to talk to you, Noah. We’ll be in touch.”
Pratt emailed the link to the candidate’s package. “I’ll work on keeping a couple of seats warm for you,” said the note.
The conversation had been invigorating—who doesn’t want to feel sought out—but the path ahead felt like a one-way street with no possibility of a U-turn, and in truth I was still uncertain about running. But Luminato Festival, where I was literary curator, was in high production mode, and I had plenty of other work to do. I would use the time as a last opportunity to take stock.
—
A month passed before I heard from the party again, enough time to wonder if the vetting was going badly. Then, on May 4, Pratt called with a view to meeting. The next day, Rachel Notley led Alberta’s NDP to a historic win, ending the nearly forty-four-year run of the province’s Progressive Conservative
Party—the longest-serving government in Canadian history.
“We are bouncing off the walls,” emailed Pratt. “This could be a real game changer.”
NDP supporters across the country were giddy with the victory of the “Notley Crew,” though the elated sense that such a triumph might be duplicated nationally left me wary. In Ontario, what with the party’s blemished history at both the federal and provincial tiers of government (though because of former premier Bob Rae’s financial blunders more than Andrea Horwath’s failed 2014 campaign)—not to mention the province’s tendency to want to leave its own mark and cut “tall poppy” pretenders down to size—such misgivings were especially warranted. But Pratt was not so distracted that he did not have the good sense to suggest other parties would be scouring my posts on social media for stuff that could be used against me—“oppo research,” it’s called in the trade. “I’ll follow you on Twitter now,” he wrote. “We will vet you but you should be taking down anything that you think may be a bit controversial.” We arranged to meet in Toronto on the Thursday, outside the Artscape building on Shaw Street, where Luminato Festival of Arts & Creativity has its offices.
—
The afternoon of May 7 was sunny and hot and I was thrilled with the news of Khadr’s bail when I stepped out to meet Pratt, who was waiting in front of the Penny Café across the street and so obviously a political operative. There was something theatrical but also marvellously incongruous about the man pacing in front of the corner store’s street-side trays of farm-fresh asparagus and strawberries. The pallid skin, white beard and head of thick hair pushed back (white, though he was certainly younger than me), the dark suit ill-chosen for the temperature, the collar of his white shirt unbuttoned and the frown of consternation as he spoke into his BlackBerry: here was a man who’d traded in salubrious sunlight for the sake of his political ambitions.
We bought coffees and sat by the window as well-to-do children and their young moms with state-of-the-art strollers and the latest running gear came into the store to buy sweets and kale salads. When did walking kids become a competitive sport, I wondered.
Again I pushed the possibility of running in West Nova. “I think I could get Antonine Maillet to support me,” I said. In the tight-knit Acadian community along Nova Scotia’s French Shore—united by a lively oral tradition, summer festivals and the interrelationships of perhaps sixty founding families—it was not a stretch to imagine that the endorsement of the great writer, whose leonine character I greatly admired, would make a difference.
Pratt shrugged. I’m not sure he knew who Maillet was, but it wasn’t important.
“We want you to run in Spadina—Fort York, where Adam Vaughan is. We need an attack dog like you in there. He’s got money and resources and we need the Liberals to have to spend those resources in the riding.”
“I don’t know if that’s me.”
“West Nova has nothing. But if you run in Spadina—Fort York, we’ve a significant amount of money and a crew of good volunteers ready to go. It’s not even about winning. If we lift just a few points, it could mean thirty seats. Get the forms in. That’s the most important thing.”
—
Still I was slow to commit, and Sarah aghast that I might have to run against Vaughan, who was regarded as having run a particularly nasty campaign against the NDP candidate Joe Cressy in the 2014 by-election following Olivia Chow’s resignation (so that she could run for the Toronto mayoralty). Sarah and I absconded to Nova Scotia for a week, and on May 23, the Saturday of our return, I’d arranged for us to meet Megan Leslie at Il Mercato, an Italian restaurant at the Sunnyside Mall in Bedford, en route to Halifax Stanfield International Airport. I’d first met the NDP’s charismatic member for Halifax at the Writers’ Trust Politics and the Pen dinner in Ottawa in March 2013, when Mulcair had been the politician assigned to my table at the gala at which I was a nominee. The NDP leader had not lingered—the House was in session at the time and MPs typically arrive late or leave early during the evening—and it ended up being Leslie with whom I’d chatted afterwards at Zoe’s, the bar of the Château Laurier raucous with heavily drinking journalists and politicians by night’s end. Leslie, liked across the spectrum of political parties and media (in a fashion I figured I’d never be), struck me as smart, vivacious and savvy. After that first encounter, she wrote:
Don’t worry about disappointing anyone. This is a personal decision, it takes a lot of thought, and the decision is ultimately yours, either way. I’ve listened to people going through this process that have ended up with such a range of final outcomes! But in the ruminating, it can be helpful to bounce ideas off of someone.
We’d talked again at the same gala the following year—Leslie’s turn, this time, to host the evening, with the Conservative minister of transport, Lisa Raitt. But it wasn’t until our meeting at Il Mercato that we managed to speak at all substantially, Leslie interrupting a day of events in the riding to do so. Busy days and the compulsory attendance at umpteen local functions were other factors I would need to consider—I, who had always enjoyed working at home and alone—but I spoke to her instead of my more general anxiety. She told me I was right to be nervous and, performing in the House, she was still; I told her how compelling I had found the experience of listening to the party’s 2012 leadership contest that, in the wake of the former leader Jack Layton’s death from cancer, Mulcair eventually won. That campaign had been criticized for being protracted, but I’d found it fascinating and impressive, replete with the voices of contenders from B.C., Ontario, Quebec and the Atlantic provinces. The NDP, I said, possessed a pan-Canadian pedigree none of the other parties could match. I told her just how capable she seemed as the NDP’s deputy leader, said I’d admired her work as the NDP’s environment critic and suggested she might try for the top job one day—it was certainly time for a woman to have it.
“I can’t,” said Leslie.
“Why not?”
“Because there are better and worse places in Canada and I think New Brunswick’s a useless province.”
I could see from the Trickster smile that Leslie was having a tease and we talked more specifically about my running in West Nova.
“Don’t,” said Leslie. “I’d be thrilled to have you for a colleague here, but the NDP here killed the Yarmouth Ferry and the situation is such a mess that I don’t think you’d win in West Nova.”
We discussed the “McGill Four”—the students Charmaine Borg, Matthew Dubé, Mylène Freeman and Laurin Liu, all in their early twenties when they’d been elected—and I said how much I’d been impressed by Ruth Ellen Brosseau, nicknamed the “Phantom Politician” and, more cruelly, “Vegas Girl” by national media because the hard-working single mom travelled to the Nevada city to celebrate her birthday during the 2011 campaign she’d never expected to win. When I’d met Brosseau for my New Statesman piece about the 2011 election and the NDP’s astonishing rise, I told Leslie, she’d seemed shy but extraordinarily resolute.
“She’s a great MP,” said Leslie. “If the tsunami comes and we’re wiped out, Ruth Ellen will be the one left standing.”
—
The next day I sent the completed Prospective Candidate Information Package to Pratt with a cornucopia of my published material I figured needed to be scrutinized. Among the many inclusions was “How Stephen Harper is using paranoia to win in 2015,” an article for the New Statesman that had been printed only the week before. In it, I’d suggested that should sufficient Conservatives and Québécois souveraintistes behave as an unlikely alliance of Christian, Jewish and Muslim religious leaders had done in Jerusalem a decade before—homophobes united across the usually antipathetic triad of faiths in their fulmination against the prospect of a Gay Pride parade planned for the city—then the 2015 election would likely go Harper’s way. I’d also included “Canada and its Peacekeepers,” a piece of satirical fiction I’d contributed to Canada in 2020, an anthology of speculative political essays edited by Rudyard
Griffiths, co-founder of the Dominion Institute (the Canadian think tank that would later merge with the Historica Foundation to become Historica Canada) and afterwards the mastermind of the Munk Debates and Chair of the Aurea Foundation backing it. In the piece, a Métis MP rises to become prime minister after recordings of a party thrown by an Albertan petroleum company reveal the scandal of a Conservative minister of defence delighted at the occurrence of a terrorist attack on Canadian soil because of the political advantage he imagines his party will accrue as a result. A real-life reiteration of this dark assessment would—mea culpa—get me in trouble soon enough, as would a couple of tweets espousing positions concerning Quebec nationalism in the New Statesman article I’d submitted. However, at the time I was not so much oblivious to the political toxicity of these ideas as I was overestimating the rigour of NDP scrutineers and the time they had on their hands to vet yet another prospective candidate. I actually felt a little guilty about all the stuff they’d have to pore through and didn’t want to pile it on.
“I have not deleted my Facebook or Twitter accounts,” I wrote, saying that I would do so “either partially or completely after you and your team have perused my occasional moments of pissed-offedness.”
A week later I emailed to ask just how much longer the vetting process was going to take—if I was going to run there was a lot of work to be done in a very short time—and asked what I should be doing in the meantime. But when Pratt returned the call, it was to tell me that there was a “possible complication”: Olivia Chow was contemplating another go at the Spadina—Fort York seat previously hers. Chow’s candidacy appeared to me to be of dubious benefit, but I was not yet a player and it was not my place to pass judgment. Clearly the party thought her return to the fold a coup.
“Is there another Toronto riding that’s open?” I asked.
Pratt was silent for a moment.
“Well,” he said, “there’s Toronto—St. Paul’s.”
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll run there.”
