The Candidate

by Noah Richler

  A woman in her early thirties with large doe eyes has dark hair pulled back into a thick ponytail. She’s Jewish and her great grandfather, she says, was a Toronto city councillor. She shows me a faded newspaper clipping with his picture. I suggest she might want to volunteer, and she does.

  A woman with thick make-up and a minuscule red and black lace bra and matching panties opens the door a few inches: she’s a working woman, it’s pretty clear.

  “Hi,” I say. “My name’s Noah Richler. I’m your NDP candidate.”

  “Not a good time,” the woman says, gently smiling as she pushes the hair back from her face.

  “Oh, sorry.”

  Before closing the door, she pulls one of the candidate’s cards I’m holding out of my hand.

  “But I’ll take one of those,” she says.

  November 4, Ottawa.

  Cabinet’s been settled for the morning’s Rideau Hall reveal and I’m waiting in the lobby of the CBC on Sparks Street for a quick chat with Rosie when my CTV contact calls.

  “Noah, you know all that stuff that keeps most people from running?”

  “Money?”

  “Don’t kid around. Now it’s your turn.”

  But he was on the company cell, so he wouldn’t say more.

  I look up and Heller is standing outside and gives me a high five and points to his watch and I wonder what misstep has caught up with me. Heller mouths “Rideau Hall!” and looks up to the sky like he can’t believe it. Then he points to his illegally parked car, hazard lights flashing, and motions at me to get a move on. Who’d I insulted? Who’d I slept with who suddenly decided it was news? Quickly I reviewed the shitty things I’d done maybe coming back to haunt me on this, the NDP’s day of victory. I’d come down hard on Jian Ghomeshi, that was true, but I did so early on and I doubted that I’d ever ranked so high on the radar of the rehabilitated sex advice columnist for me to be the one he’d come after. As for Evan Solomon, the ex-CBC host cum art pusher, I’d been careful not to pass judgment—not publicly at any rate—already worrying about bad karma and thinking that if I kept quiet for long enough maybe I’d have access to a discounted catalogue. (Note to self: have Ethan see if he’ll have me on his Sirius show.) And yes, I’d knocked loudly on the door of the only bathroom of the last Porter flight I was on before a young woman several months pregnant stepped out guiding her infant daughter ahead of her and into the aisle. That was a boo-boo, me not looking back because I didn’t need to, I could hear the bros who’d been drinking in the row behind me muttering loudly about what an asshole I was. But I doubted they’d have recognized me now, they didn’t seem the Liberal or even the voting type and my candidacy had not yet been announced. So maybe the cashier at Sobeys in Saint John had come forward, the one I’d been rude to when a power cut meant she couldn’t cash me out and I’d asked if they still teach math in New Brunswick schools or did they do so only in French. Or what about the server at the fancy restaurant to whom I’d sent an anonymous card—just a nice gesture, that was all—maybe she’d figured out the postmark or my handwriting and fed it to His Nastiness at Canadaland: “NDP CANDIDATE TOLD ME I’D HAVE CHANGED HIS LIFE IF HE’D BEEN TWENTY YEARS YOUNGER—MORE LIKE THIRTY, THE PERV.”

  I have no idea what is coming at me, no time to call Kinsella—he’d know—but am at least braced for something when, ushered into the studio of Power & Politics, Rosemary Barton, the dragon slayer, asks about an affair that I’d forgotten even as she assures me they’re not yet taping and we’re off the record—like that’s ever true!

  “Never happened,” I say, as images come to mind of a wimpy Jimmy Carter professing adulterous thoughts and Bill Clinton so easily getting away with more. “But hell, it’s only 2015, there’s still time.”

  No jokes! I can see Sarah telling me now. I look over Barton’s shoulder into the control booth and Levy is covering her face with her hands. Heller is rolling his eyes. Solberg points to the red light overhead and mouths the words, “We’re live.”

  Okay, okay, so that didn’t happen either—but this did:

  “Noah,” said Pratt. “We need you to stay home.”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “You’re not to take calls from anyone.”

  “You know, if I’d offered the Star editors a piece about celebrity culture sucking up attention on the social networks at the expense of people dying in Africa, they’d have sucked it up and been thrilled by the hits.”

  “Noah,” said Pratt, “you don’t get it. You’re on the wrong side of revenge porn.”

  THE CANDIDATE IS IMPOSED IN LIBERAL PARTY AD WITH TRUDEAU GETTING NOWHERE ON ESCALATOR.

  THE CANDIDATE PASSES TRUDEAU AND LOOKS BACK OVER HIS SHOULDER, PUZZLED THAT JT IS STATIONARY.

  THE CANDIDATE TURNS TO WATCH JT BEHIND HIM AND REACHES FOR THE EMERGENCY BUTTON.

  THE CANDIDATE HITS BUTTON, ESCALATOR STOPS.

  THE CANDIDATE SPEAKS TO THE CAMERA.

  HOLDING LIBERAL PAMPHLETS.

  THROWS PAMPHLETS OVER SHOULDER.

  AS LIBERAL PAMPHLETS LAND ON TRUDEAU’S FACE.

  THE CANDIDATE DELIVERS POLITICAL MESSAGE AND CONCLUDES,

  “I’M NOAH RICHLER, THE NDP’S CANDIDATE IN TORONTO-ST.PAUL’S. THERE’S ONLY ONE PARTY TO GET THE COUNTRY MOVING AGAIN, AND THAT’S OURS.”

  THE CANDIDATE LOOKS OVER SHOULDER AT TRUDEAU.

  THE CANDIDATE AGAIN HITS BUTTON, TRUDEAU SENT BACK DOWN STAIRS, SPEAKING ACCELERATED REVERSE JIBBERISH.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  You won’t believe what happened next.

  In my thirties, not a bad-looking fella and living in England at the time, I bought a motorcycle—an exquisite, canary yellow 1973 Norton 750cc Commando Combat. I’d wanted to ride a bike for years, imagining that, on days when maybe I felt a little blue, I’d put on my leathers and helmet and take to the country, leaning into the curves of the road: just me and the elements, fields and hedgerows passing at the level of my eyes as I leaned forward, left and right, alert and looking for the conditions that might undo me. I liked that sometimes the journey took longer than planned because I was not travelling in the shell of a car where you don’t even see the sky, or that I’d have to pull in at a roadside pub for a pint and a bed for the night because the weather had turned. I liked that the route of a journey, not the time it would take, was all I could reliably calculate. I liked that I was in the world—and lesser.

  And the thing I liked most of all was that when I did buy the bike, everything—but everything—was as I’d imagined it: on days when maybe I felt a little blue, I’d put on my leathers and helmet and take to the country, leaning into the curves of the road: just me and the elements, fields and hedgerows passing at the level of my eyes as I leaned forward, left and right, alert and looking for the conditions that might undo me. Sometimes the journey took longer than planned because I was not travelling in the shell of a car where you don’t even see the sky, and I’d have to pull in at a roadside pub for a pint and a bed for the night because the weather had turned. The route of a journey, not the time it would take, was all I could calculate. I was in the world—and lesser.

  And I liked cleaning my bike. I liked that the engine of my kick-started Norton, all pretty chrome, was a mechanical sequence easy to follow, and to pinpoint the dysfunction of, when something was not quite right.

  Politics—politics was not like that.

  —

  Through July and most of August, Trudeau was saying his party could make no budget predictions until it was clear just what “mess” the next government would inherit from the Conservatives. Then, on August 25, Mulcair told media that, were it elected, the NDP’s “first budget will be a balanced budget.”

  “Maybe we’re not completely fucked,” said Phil.

  Deficits were a sore point for Phil but he was feeling optimistic. He’d been a speechwriter for Ed Broadbent in 1983, when as leader he was arguing it was time for the Liberals—Pierre Elliott Trudeau, at the time, ready to campaign for
a fifth term—to reduce the deficit, and that an NDP government would do so. The economy was in recession and, advising Broadbent, Phil had argued (as the Nobel Prize–winning MIT professor of economics Paul A. Samuelson was also doing) that what the economy actually needed was stimulus, not restraint. The austerity program had been an about-turn not cleared by the party’s federal council, nor with the major union bodies. Phil had said the reduce-the-deficit stance was “bad policy and worse politics” without effect and had given his notice.

  “Ironically, on the day I left the Hill, Ed was forced to reverse himself—nothing to do with me and everything to do with the party and labour movement going ballistic,” said Phil. “But at least Ed didn’t have his deficit brain cramp in the middle of the highest-stakes election campaign the federal party ever had.”

  But Phil was giving Mulcair a pass because the numbers were holding. In fact, the numbers were very good.

  Then, two days later, Trudeau declared his party’s intentions to run deficits to the tune of $10 billion per annum for three years as part of a $125 billion spend on infrastructure, vaguely defined. The announcement was made in front of the requisite assembly of workers in hard hats, though the party’s broad definition of infrastructure included green energy, clean tech and social services.

  “Our economy needs investment in order to create growth,” said Trudeau. “Our plan features three years of historic investment in the Canadian economy. That growth will eliminate the Harper deficit and we will balance the budget in 2019.”

  Phil was at his desk. Behind him, the accumulating strokes and numbers and colours of the grids showed our canvassing progress, though also the vast number of polls we had yet to visit. The numbers were starting to slide and he had the Liberal news up on his screen.

  “Ah,” said Phil. “We’re fucked.”

  Later, Trudeau would describe going home after the announcement and saying to his wife, Sophie Grégoire-Trudeau, “I’m pretty sure we just won the election.” But we define all our adventures in retrospect, it’s too easy for the loosely remembered story to ascend to the mythic, and the truth is that about the issue of deficits there was only moderate fanfare at first. At the all-candidates debate at Holy Blossom Temple, no one had addressed the subject of deficits much. The opening statement about the economy had been mine, and I’d talked about the difference between a resource economy and a resource mentality and not treating the land as a bank vault to be pillaged without making any effort towards the creative industries.

  “Look,” I said, resorting to what I figured was one of my catchier lines, “if Stephen Harper and Joe Oliver were my stockbrokers, I’d sack them. They’ve put all our money in one stock and it’s tanked. High-risk portfolios are for cowboys; what a steadily growing economy needs is variety in its portfolio—diversity, proven resources in manufacturing, and the small and medium-sized businesses that provide eighty percent of the jobs in this country, with openings to future earners in the form of tax breaks for innovation. Harper can blame the global economy as much as he wishes, but to do so is missing the point. We’d endure the lows and ride the highs infinitely better if we’d laid the way for a diverse economy rather than relying dispr​oport​ionat​ely on resources.”

  MacDougall had threatened, as was her party’s habit, dire consequences were the economy in anything but Conservative hands, and Bennett had praised Trudeau for being a leader, not a boss, and surrounding himself with good people, an attitude that I wished had been the NDP’s. I was ready to say, “There is no need to resort to accumulating deficits because the cash exists already—Canadians have already handed over some $600 billion of ‘dead money’ to corporations hoarding it, so it would be criminal to exhort them to have to pay to kick-start the economy a second time,” but the Greens’ Kevin Farmer beat me to it, good man. Hundreds of billions in non-working capital is a “disease of hyper-right-wing thinking,” said the notes Michael Tamblyn and my team had prepared for me. “There’s no need to resort to accumulating deficits because the cash exists already. We’ll not be having government do what the private sector can but nudging the corporate sector into doing its bit and spending. That’s how you get an economy going—through the velocity of money that’s stagnant right now. Trudeau was a champion of balanced budgets until July, and now he’s telling you he’ll run deficits and that’s dandy because it relieves him of the need to tell you whether or not his plans are affordable, even as he plans to lump great big debts on our children—as if they don’t have enough they’ll be paying for. Trudeau can promise you the moon, anything, but you’d be daft to believe it’ll come without a crippling cost.

  “We’re confident we can institute our plans and balance the budget,” was the party message.

  That worked for a while, encounters at the door not yet shining a light on the altering political landscape. Deficit spending was not yet Trudeau’s winning card, and balancing the books not yet the NDP’s Battle of the Somme. During the better part of the month of August, the predominant question had been “How will the NDP do in a coalition?”

  “Tom’s a collaborator by nature,” I’d say. “He’s always said he’s prepared to work with the Liberals—but Trudeau! Trudeau has said that he won’t! Of course, he has to say that, doesn’t he? Don’t worry [deliver, sotto voce, a knowing chuckle], he’ll change his mind closer to the day.”

  But faces at the door were evolving away from August’s happy-go-lucky to something more…well, concerned. Voters were listening more intently to the case being made, it was September and the contest was now serious. There was less time to waste and “E-Day”—October 19—was no longer a date in dreamtime. Auguring as much, on Wednesday, September 2, the day after the Holy Blossom debate, the Syrian infant Alan Kurdi was washed up on the Turkish beach of Bodrum, dead. The image that was the encapsulation of the dreadful news quickly undermined whatever may have been the political advantage enjoyed by the Conservative Chris Alexander, the MP for Ajax—Pickering and minister of immigration, refugees and citizenship. His hostile performance on CBC News Network’s flagship political program Power & Politics was the norm for him but, on this day, it was another Conservative tactic suddenly inadequate to the task. Alexander’s shaky demonstration—his talking about refugees from Iraq, not Syria, and the complete implosion of his numbers—was deftly handled by Rosemary Barton, the program’s host, and seized upon by his opponents as obfuscating and inhumane. Quickly, the Ajax—Pickering MP was dispatched to Ottawa, ostensibly to deal with the Kurdi family case but surely to be put through a direly needed crash course in voter-sensitivity training. It was a watershed moment. Alexander, previously a UN diplomat, had become one of the CPC’s nastiest spokespeople, unpleasant, short-tempered and accusing—and, pretty well for these reasons, was acclaimed by party loyalists and a lazy press as one of its rising stars. But the Power & Politics undoing was one of a series of events showing just how deeply the rot of insensitivity had infiltrated the Conservatives and was a symptom of the party’s peculiar malaise. Even Harper, a man increasingly perceived as a leader without friends, was beginning to seem curiously un-anchored and adrift of the task. Out of reach, no lifebuoy thrown to him, the minister of immigration, refugees and citizenship was floundering in the water.

  Alexander was on air at 5 p.m. I’d not seen the Bodrum photograph yet, but was following the fracas, as I was able to, on Twitter. An hour later, I was welcomed at a private home in Rathnelly for the meet and greet that Nichole Anderson had put into play, the first of my campaign. The Rathnelly guests, well-to-do and eager, numbered about twenty-five. My hosts—one a celebrated painter whose work I’d bought long before we’d met, and the other a former colleague from the writing world—were welcoming and convivial and had laid on a good spread; I could not have made my debut in more optimal surroundings, but botched it. The point of a meet and greet is for a candidate to engage constituents and to deliver a message, but also to raise money. It doesn’t have to be much, but not to do so is an op
portunity missed. I’d arrived without pledge forms, though, and without an assistant able to work the room. But these turned out to be just a couple of the ways in which I discovered myself—pace the PMO—“not ready.” I’d come prepared to address residents’ worries about volatile bitumen being transported along the Dupont Line and spoke well, but failed to fathom the full significance of one woman’s question about refugees. I was distracted. The stage manager in me was worrying about keeping the campaign’s photographer busy and getting him shots that might be useful to the campaign, more for his satisfaction than mine, and I suggested, fairly disastrously, a group picture on the back garden steps. Immediately, I realized how untoward had been my assumption that the group, many of them strangers to each other, would be cajoled into de facto support of a candidate they’d come simply to hear out.

  Within hours, photographs of the drowned three-year-old Syrian went authentically viral, the BBC and other media reporting that the Conservative government had stalled the Kurdi family’s application to immigrate, news that Harper and the PMO vehemently denied. The drowned boy’s aunt lived in Vancouver. The Kurdi story had a tragic, domestic face.

  The next day, the prime minister held a press conference and said he and his wife, Laureen, had seen the picture of Alan Kurdi on the Internet. “The first thing that crossed our minds was remembering our own son Ben at that age,” said Harper. “That brings tears to your eye. That is the reaction of every parent, anyone who’s ever had a two-year-old, or been near a two-year-old, been a parent in Canada or anywhere around the world.”