by Noah Richler
Quickly I was proved wrong. Among the very first to donate—the draft of my fundraising ask still on my hard drive—were a couple of novelist friends from Newfoundland, a legal thriller writer from Nova Scotia and a radio champion of Canadian writing living on the West Coast. In many of these letters, sentiments were expressed that I would encounter throughout the campaign: “I am so proud of you”; “Kudos for trying what I would like to be able to do, but cannot”; “I believe (really) and hope that the NDP will form the next government.” This was encouraging. Whatever degradation of parliamentary democracy I feared the Conservatives had managed was not deep-rooted; there were still people who believed politics could be redeemed should the right folk find their way in. I wanted to be that person, to live up to that ideal, even if a part of me also knew I would be most free to be the person of integrity—the inspiring and decent politician promising to bring a clean slate to tawdry government—during the period of time in which lack of title meant I was no more than a pretender. Did history not teach that office would, by its very nature, put an end to the sincerity with which most candidates begin?
How much, I wondered, did Mulcair or Trudeau actually believe any new party could bring “change” to Ottawa? “Change,” as a slogan, should have been as tired an idea as decades of television advertisements for better detergents, more lustrous hair or youthful skin. How was it that we were still fooled? A satirical political advertisement on YouTube (“This Is a Generic Presidential Campaign Ad,” created by the stock footage company Dissolve) compiles, quite perfectly, all the tropes that innumerable candidates have depended upon to sell themselves as society’s panacea—farmers’ fields, hard-hatted workers, doctors with stethoscopes about their neck, but also soldiers, brooding skies and hooded evildoers, etc. The messages of Hope and the Change that returns the gift of it to us (Clinton’s, Obama’s, Trudeau’s and Mulcair’s pitch) or, conversely, the stoking of fear that society will not be secure, or the economy not soundly managed (Bush’s, Harper’s, Trump’s), are so inveterate we should be embarrassed that we are not yet inured.
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And maybe you imagine political allegiances are about party platforms, class or the money we think the taxman has snatched? Not so. “Political identities,” says the New Yorker writer George Packer “are shaped mainly by irrational factors that have nothing to do with rational deliberation: family and tribal origins, character traits, historical currents.” Our political affiliations “form in early adulthood and seldom change. Few people can be reasoned into abandoning their politics.”
We have a whole set of reasons for choosing the parties we do: logical ones informed by platforms and the ideologies that, long ago, spawned them, but also resolute, personal ones. People talk of being “lifelong [fill in the blank] voters” because, such loyalty as inviolable as one to a sports team, voting as the family has done is a reflex and makes them part of a tribe. Makes them belong. Or maybe we identify with a party leader because we feel a kinship derived from a sense of being hard done by—but in our personal lives, rather than our political circumstances. Perhaps aspiration is the driver, and so we adhere to an aura of celebrity and success that could almost be ours because we voted for it. There’s always baggage—a piece of carry-on, at least.
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London, England, 1996.
My shrink looks like Medusa. She has long, curly russet locks that, in the hind corner of my vision, could pass for snakes. A classicist, I find this fitting. And so I am lying on the couch, eighty pounds sterling a session. There is a Rorschach print very deliberately positioned on the wall in front of me and, today, it looks like a padlocked rib cage. I am discussing the bad play I have been working on, a rewrite of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, in which I have made the brash Mycenaean leader of the Greek flotilla a foreign correspondent. I have given his long-suffering wife, Clytemnestra, a child that may or not be his. In the scene I am describing to my psychoanalyst, the infant boy runs and embraces Agamemnon, returned home after ten years.
“Agamemnon is your father,” Medusa says.
“Oh no,” I say. “He’s just an absent hero to the boy.”
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In the start-up that was the Toronto—St. Paul’s NDP campaign, my father’s friends constituted another target in the search for early investors, so to speak. Almost all of them were not simply card-carrying Liberals, but full-on Liberal Party pushers. It was a useless pursuit—for money, that is. But it proved to me that I was charting my own course, this nagging of an Oedipal itch.
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“J., how are you? It’s Noah.”
“How come you’re not on the hustings?”
“Well, I walked into a riding that’s absolutely broke and there’s a little prep to do first. As it was put to me by one of the team, ‘my time no longer belongs to me.’ ”
“I wish you luck.”
“Also, I’m phoning because…well, I sent you a letter and didn’t hear from you and I thought I’d better check that—”
“I know you’re running against Carolyn Bennett in a difficult ward.”
“I’m thoroughly fed up with Harper—”
“So are a lot of people. I wish you luck.”
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From: M.
Sent: July-28-15 5:33 PM
To: Noah Richler
Subject: Re: I had to ask…
Dear Noah,
Thank you for a very thoughtful and intelligent letter. I agree with much of what you say.
I actually met Mr. Mulcair at CTV and chatted with him and his executive assistant about cultural issues. I was given his card and actually wrote him. The silence was deafening. I never heard back. Where does the NDP stand on cultural policy?
I am appalled by his stance on the Clarity Act and 50% plus one. I am deeply pro-French and profoundly anti-separatist. How can I interpret his remarks other than pandering to soft nationalists in Quebec?
As to tomorrow night, I would be there to support you personally but am off at the crack of dawn for lunch with Mayor Nenshi in Calgary and simply do not land until 1 am Thursday. I like Stephen Lewis very much. His dad was a great friend of my late father.
Sadly, I cannot support you financially because I committed my full legal allowance weeks before you entered the campaign to two other friends—Seamus O’Regan and Chrystia Freeland.
I am sorry not to be more helpful on the short-term practical front.
Best regards,
M.
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Wednesday, July 29, came and Laura arrived early for the nomination meeting at one of the Tarragon Theatre’s rehearsal halls with bus trays of soft drinks, a couple of fold-up tables and, just in case, a laptop computer and printer—all of this without planning on my part. Kari Marshall, a friend who worked at the House on Parliament, my Cabbagetown local, had set up outside with a cart of the eclectic Pop Stand popsicles she crafts and was handing out orange ones to welcome folk in. Inside, volunteers from the riding were taking down names, the first of many times I’d shake the hand of men and women coming out to work for the campaign whom I’d meet no more than once. In the upstairs rehearsal room that we’d been provided, the kernel of what would become my team had set up a small stage and lights and a PA and had blown up orange balloons. The room of sixty was filled to capacity, the overflow watching through the open doors at the back, when Stephen Lewis rose to speak.
“Let me suggest to you that the moment the election is called, we unleash the potential of Toronto—St. Paul’s and you don’t wait,” said Lewis. “Come to the committee room in advance, choose a poll and go out that night and start knocking on doors—the later the better, because it attracts voter attention. It’s a simple proposition: my suggestion is you go out any time between eleven and midnight, you knock on the door and, as generously and in as dignified a manner as you can convey—because people will be staggering down the hall to greet you—you say, ‘Good evening sir, I represent Carolyn Bennett.’ And you will find by the morn
ing, the campaign is over!”
Lewis was in fine form. He complimented the NDP’s “formidable array of talent” across the GTA—Craig Scott and Linda McQuaig in the room, and Andrew Cash, Olivia Chow, Jennifer Hollett, Peggy Nash, Mike Sullivan and Rathika Sitsabaiesan among those outside of it. “My father David Lewis [one of the founders of the NDP, David had been leader of the federal party during the first four years of his son’s time as Ontario NDP leader] always said to me, ‘Son, not in my time, but perhaps in yours.’ And I’ve always said to our own three kids, ‘Not in my time, but perhaps in yours.’ Well I’ll be damned! It looks as if it could be in my time after all!”
Some elections, said Lewis, were vastly more auspicious than others, this one particularly so. Harper’s government was the “most ignoble that Canada had ever experienced, lacking sincerity and honesty and run with reprehensible cunning.” Canada was “being shredded before our eyes.”
Lewis’s attack was as unrelenting as it was enthralling. And it was being viewed by more than those in the room. I had assembled the beginnings of a social network team for the campaign: Carolyn McNeillie, who’d helped build my author’s website, and Neil Wadhwa, another employee at the House of Anansi. In our moment of start-up, Carolyn was the invaluable lynchpin, the overseer pushing essential things forward discreetly and purposefully. It was Carolyn who, at Sarah’s suggestion, had set up Slack, the campaign’s intramural communications program on which I would come to depend, and now here she was attending my nomination with Neil and broadcasting the event on Periscope, a Twitter-powered live video-streaming app not yet in widespread use. Thanks to the set-up, ten times the number in the room were able to hear Lewis speak and then the Sudanese-Canadian musician Waleed Abdulhamid play, at a cost to the riding association of exactly nothing. The first congratulatory comment to come in was a tweet from Milan, irrelevant in terms of votes or donations but auguring well for the campaign’s reach. I had elected not to speak immediately after Lewis (why ambush myself?) and, instead, the television writer and comic Anne Fenn stepped up to make the money ask. Craig Scott had come out and my mother, sitting next to Linda McQuaig, the NDP’s Toronto Centre candidate, raised her hand pledging the maximum $1,500 to get the fundraising going—and it worked. Doug followed and then more friends gave, a number of them from outside the riding, and then constituents of all ages did. Within fifteen minutes we had raised over $16,000—already exceeding the $10,000 we’d set as a target and a good portion of the money we required for the skeleton budget that Marno had drawn up during the July 23 meeting of the EPC. We had more than enough money to order lawn and window signs and a first pamphlet.
We had a campaign.
From the wings, I stepped up to the microphone to deliver the first speech of my campaign. Looking back, I see how easy a target the Conservatives had become—and how the language of a Canada to be restored was sufficiently in the air that it spanned the parties.
The Canada I know, the Canada you and I love—the Canada in which those who can take care of themselves take care of the people who cannot; that seeks through such long overdue measures as affordable child care, not to maintain but improve the lives of working people; that treats the environment sensibly and engages with and seeks to learn from the gift of our First Nations; that sees racism and does not turn away from it; that should never have to be told “Black Lives Matter”—this Canada, the country for so long held in high esteem all over the world, the Canada that stands as an example to other countries and to ourselves—the Canada of encouragement, of peace, prosperity, good government and goodwill—this country, I tell you now, is coming back.
But a campaign is, to a very significant degree, cocooned. The focus is intensely local, and what messages do seep in from elsewhere have been pushed through the party filter. That process had already started. First order of business: knock the competition.
It is the NDP that is going to help you retrieve it—not a Liberal Party still hopelessly entitled—a Liberal Party that, in its cynical and self-serving support of the odious Bill C-51, has shown yet again that, as shamefully as the Conservatives, it regards power as its just desserts; a party that has willingly sacrificed the interests of Canadians on the altar of its slavish pursuit of power, as if we hadn’t noticed their true character already. As if we hadn’t watched the ridiculous imposition upon a riding that wished otherwise of the hapless Eve Adams as candidate—or, worse, of Toronto’s former police chief Bill Blair, champion of carding and the man who, during the G20 Summit five years ago, turned this city into a security forces’ training ground stripped of dignity and civil rights by overzealous officers. No, no, neither is this country for me.
Then sing the party’s praises.
No, instead I choose you, I choose the New Democratic Party, I choose its leader, Tom Mulcair, and its plethora of bright, exciting, dedicated MPs who do not take their position for granted—assume anything is rightfully theirs—but instead work each day to convince you, to learn from you, to serve you. I choose Canada, and I choose the NDP because the NDP is Canada, the NDP is you.
And put the platform in.
I want a party that will heal, not divide—that will provide transport for cities and affordable child care for working families, that will hold in respect all constituencies, even ones that may not, this coming October, immediately see the light. I choose the party that knows its job is to make Canada the best place, the fair country, the caring country. This is my pledge.
Whatever the necessary intrusions, the voice was mine, no question about that, and the points I was making were ones I wished for the party at large. I had not yet learned these were sentences, not sound bites, nor that it was not my place to make speeches of this kind—to behave, I suppose, as a party leader would. Lewis was wonderful but ultimately misleading. I was speaking above my station, and at fault was my own romantic imagination.
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But I did not know that then. The evening ended, spirits good, and an email from Pratt appeared on my iPhone.
16 grand!?!? That’s amazing. Well done.
Also, Penny shook me down last night and we’re gonna float you money for the deposit for the office.
Josh Moraes, the regional organizer responsible for several of the GTA ridings, had coached me through the early stages of the nomination process and took me into a backroom to sign a couple of mandatory forms.
“When this whole thing is over,” said Moraes, “people will ask you if you’re going to run again. But you don’t ask yourself that. Not for at least a month.”
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Larry, my bank manager, has left a message: now that I’m a candidate, I’ll need an account. Sarah’s driving when I return the call and am put through to his voicemail.
“Hey, Larry, Noah here. Hope all’s well. Listen, I’ve just been through Mount Pleasant Cemetery—it’s in my riding—and I’ve sent you the names of five dead people not on the rolls. So we’re good for five twenty-grand deposits, okay? Bye!”
“YOU CAN’T DO THAT!” Sarah screams.
“Sorry, love.”
“You’re a candidate! You have people out to get you now. You don’t know what happens to that tape or who is listening. No jokes. Stop yourself!”
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Three days later, on August 2—and some five weeks ahead of the September day that was expected to be the start of the 2015 campaign—Harper announced the issuing of writs for Canada’s forty-second general election. The early start put an end to expenditures that did not count towards parties’, party leaders’ and candidates’ election limits, as it did the quasi-campaigning that had been in effect for several months. The contest, culminating on October 19, was to be 78 days long, the longest in 143 years—and, certainly within the NDP, the suspicion was that Harper’s early instruction for the 338 writs to be issued was intended to put the more resourced Conservative Party of Canada at an advantage. The longer campaign meant, for instance, that the $96,756 each riding would have been allowe
d under Elections Canada rules to spend on a 37-day contest was increased to $203,972. This was money the Conservatives and Liberals, but not the NDP, had. And it was hoped that not just the NDP’s coffers, but its human energies, would be exhausted. Within the NDP, the instruction was not to fall prey to the manoeuvre—for teams to pace themselves and not panic.
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A few days later, Marno called to say that I had two excellent campaign manager options to choose from. I knew I needed someone with experience, but also wanted a person who would be open to new tactics and strategies. Marno had already informed me she would not be managing campaigns this time around, and Deb Parent had said the same. Marno, my good fortune, was offering one of the few proven campaign managers still not booked—somebody boasting a terrific track record but who was asking to be paid—or, in his place, a triumvirate of three respected party veterans: Phil Carter, whom she described as an excellent speechwriter; Wendy Hughes, a former principal of Clinton Street Junior Public School, in Toronto; and Janet Solberg, a former vice-president of the Ontario NDP, daughter of David Lewis, and sister to Michael and Stephen. (Wendy Hughes had been married to Michael for a time and all were close.) All had agreed to come out of retirement, and to work for free. Carter, said Marno, would likely only be on for a short time, and Hughes and Solberg would alternate from August on. I felt Stephen’s hand at work, and said right away that the triumvirate was what I wanted. And it’s what I got.
