The Candidate

by Noah Richler

  I did not doubt Harper, but marvelled at his unfortunate capacity to appear dispassionate when a display of feeling was so pressingly called for. The prime minister was unconvincing because the only thing he knew how to state with any urgency was the not unreasonable position that came next: “Refugee policy alone is not remotely a solution to this problem, it is of a scale far, far beyond that,” said Harper.

  “We are also doing what we have to do to try and fight the root cause of this problem. That is the violent campaign being led against millions of people by ISIS. That is why we are part of the international military coalition.” In the “interparty air war” of an election in which images—hands on hearts, tears—would matter more than they ever had, Harper’s words were neither sufficient nor appealing. And this was true despite significant concessions in the prime minister’s rhetoric that went unnoticed: his reference to a “root cause” would have been anathema to the Conservatives during all the years of the conflict in Afghanistan, and his description of Canada “as one of the largest donors of humanitarian aid relative to our size in this part of the world” stood in stark contrast to his chara​cteri​zation of such work, only three weeks before, as “dropping aid on dead people.” These small alterations had no bearing. The steady resolve, the placing of the incident within the greater context of the war with ISIL, did not satisfy the burgeoning need of Canadians to be able to respond as unequivocally and immediately as the country (including the prime minister) had done after the Haitian earthquake five years before.

  In Montreal, Trudeau was repeating his open-ended pledge to bring in twenty-five thousand government-sponsored refugees by the end of the year and saying, of the Conservatives, that “you don’t get to discover compassion in the middle of a campaign, you either have it or you don’t.” And at the Café Diplomatico, a popular College Street spot in Toronto’s Little Italy neighbourhood to which the NDP’s loose-knit coterie of downtown MPs and candidates had been summoned, Mulcair was prefacing the series of platform announcements concerning seniors he was due to make with a necessary acknowledgment of the Kurdi photographs and what they said about the refugee crisis. “As a dad and a grandfather,” said Mulcair, “it’s unbearable that we’re doing nothing.” Mulcair, visibly moved, compared the photograph of the dead Syrian infant to the equally iconic one of “the Girl in the Picture”—the pre-teen, naked Kim Phúc fleeing an American napalm attack during the Vietnam War. Mulcair warned against using the situation for political advantage, though not without a discreet swipe at the minister in the news. “Canada has a responsibility to act,” said Mulcair, “and it would be too easy to start assigning blame. Chris Alexander has a lot to answer for, but that’s not where we are right now.” It was the sort of deftly delivered remark that had contributed to the leader of the Official Opposition’s august reputation in the House, but it did not work so well in the larger public forum in which Canadians were needing to have emotions, not rational arguments, vindicated.

  —

  The early call at the Café Diplomatico had been easy enough: an espresso, a sunny morning and none of us in the Aegean. Count your blessings. What with Hollett reading the teleprompter introduction of the party leader for the cameras, there was a fair sense of where the party figured its meaningful fight was going to be. Toronto—Danforth and Davenport were in the can, University—Rosedale was for the taking; Toronto—St. Paul’s—well, there were NDP candidates in the Don Valley, in Markham and in all the ridings of Scarborough, too. Mulcair announced his plans to roll back the retirement age from sixty-seven to sixty-five, to protect public and private pensions, and to create affordable housing and “a larger federal role in areas like long-term care, palliative care and dementia” in ways that did not saddle future generations with massive social and economic debts. Then, at Bathurst Street, word came from Davenport of a demonstration that Lifeline Syria was planning for outside the Government of Canada Citizenship and Immigration offices on St. Clair Avenue East that afternoon, where Andrew Cash was going to speak.

  “Jesus,” I said to Janet. “What’s with this party? Nobody knows how to play as a team? This is my riding! Tell them I have to speak.”

  Janet decided not to point out that Cash was the party’s critic for immigration.

  “Ethan,” I called out. “Get me the name and the date of that ship of Hindus that Canada turned away. The Moramagatu, I think it was. And the MS St. Louis—was it 1939?”

  My adjutant was sitting at the front of the room with his laptop perched upon his knees, and I went to the tiny desk by the pillar that I’d appropriated as my own to prepare a pithy address that I’d be delivering, I was sure, to hundreds if not thousands of distressed Canadians gathered at whatever was the park by the citizenship offices.

  Except that when I arrived at the rally, there was no park and the hundreds if not thousands I was imagining had not assembled (I really should have known my riding better). There were perhaps a dozen protestors along the sidewalk, three or four of them holding up a banner. CP24, CBC and Global television crews had SUVs parked on the other side of St. Clair, where one of the teams was filming an intro with St. Clair’s traffic and the small demonstration as a backdrop. I knew the drill—they were biding their time, making the most of their own labour as they waited for a bigger crowd and public figures. Cash had not yet arrived. The two other cameramen-reporter pairs were mulling about, idle.

  “I’m the local NDP candidate,” I said to the CP24 duo. I recognized the cameraman from literary events at which I’d provided pieces to camera on occasion, but this was a new context and his expression was disconcertingly blank.

  “Sorry,” he said, pointing to the reporter beside him. “She makes the call.”

  She looked up at the interloper, then down again.

  I approached the cameraman from the CBC.

  “I’m the local NDP candidate,” I said. “I do a fair amount of work for the CBC.”

  Another deadpan expression. He looked past me to where the CBC reporter with him was gesturing that they should collect some vox pops, the demonstrators’ number having increased to about thirty. The woman holding up a placard that read MY DOOR IS OPEN TO REFUGEES said she recognized me, good news.

  “Are you working for us?” I asked, ready to thank her, learn her name (and not forget it).

  No, she said, she was working in Cash’s Davenport office because she thought the NDP had no chance in Toronto—St. Paul’s. I was figuring out how to take my leave without sounding sour and told her, “You’re volunteering for the NDP in Toronto, that’s what matters”—which, of course, was true, but it hurt. Then Cash arrived with an assistant to manage the media and the cameras turned towards him. This was not the scene I’d been banking on for my Canada-rallying rhetorical turn before an impassioned crowd. The reality was that I was unlikely to manage a word for the cameras, but Cash took my arm and pulled me to his side. He spoke fervently about the necessity for action and introduced me as the local candidate. That was good of him; maybe the GTA NDP was a team after all. I knew I had only a few seconds and that it was likely no one in from the networks would review the footage (digital stuff that didn’t even need to be physically dumped), but spoke anyway. I said Canada had turned away the Komagata Maru back in 1914 and then, in 1939, the MS St. Louis and its boatload of 907 Jews, some of whom would later die in concentration camps. I spoke of Mackenzie King’s declaration that the refugee crisis of the day was “not a Canadian problem” and cited the infamous words of one of the immigration agents of that era, saying of the fear-inducing immigrants of the day, “none is too many,” all in twenty, maybe thirty seconds, before rushing to add the more recent example of the MV Sun Sea. In 2010, the rickety boat had arrived on B.C.’s shores with a cargo of some four hundred Tamils promptly described as “terrorists” and “migrants jumping the queue” by Harper, Vic Toews and Jason Kenney reflexively—no, vindictively—using the moment to increase Canadians’ fears and boost their own anxious cause. N
ow, I said, was the time of the Syrian people’s need and for Canada to behave differently—now was the time to reclaim “Canadian values” and the humanitarian traditions Harper had described as dropping aid on dead people. This, I said, was the moral moment!

  I knew this stuff, I’d written about it, and the crowd of maybe fifty now was not really a crowd, but I was in my element and able to speak, able to do the politician’s thing—the first speech since my nomination—and perorating beautifully as…as the cameraman packed up and joined the reporter who’d put away her microphone and the pair waited for an interval in the traffic to cross the busy street to where their van was parked.

  —

  Monday, September 7, the holiday morning of the Labour Day weekend, was gorgeous and sunny and blue. This was, in Alistair MacLeod’s marvellous phrase (that was the Cape Breton writer’s title for perhaps the best Canadian story ever to be written about work), “The Closing Down of Summer.” I cycled down University Avenue to join the Labour Day parade, where, in bright orange T-shirts, an NDP cohort of volunteers from across the GTA was gathering at the head of an assembling crowd (and this time, it was actually a crowd). There were placards for Andrew Cash, Laura Casselman, Olivia Chow, Jennifer Hollett, Peggy Nash, Rathika Sitsabaiesan—and even a few for me. The cameras would be at the front, the candidates and NDP incumbents leading the phalanx. Liz tapped me on the shoulder—she had been dispatched by Sarah, aware I was unsure of what to do—and took me up to the top of the line, where I joined candidates holding the NDP banner the breadth of Queen Street like a skirt to their waists. Hollett was my neighbour as we moved forward and we talked for a while about the campaign and our prospects, and after several blocks Mulcair appeared out of the crowd taking hold of the banner and marching next to me. Click-click. Click-click. Click-click. I’d barely said hello before a check from behind shoved me to the left and Peggy Nash appeared between us. Mulcair fell out like a paratrooper to a waiting black SUV.

  “Don’t worry,” said Sarah, who had been walking backwards in front of me. “I got the shot.”

  —

  I’d taken advantage of the moment to talk to Nash about the urgency, in Toronto, of a position vis-à-vis the arts, and the former NDP president told me that she and Cash were concerned the party had no credible position on Toronto beyond the promises about infrastructure being made. A few hours of walking later, I found myself standing next to several NDP candidates on risers arranged along the west side of Dufferin Street, there for us to wave our solidarity to the mile-long parade of workers and floats filing into Centennial Park. The district associations of assorted unions strode by and a CUPE bigwig I’d seen making nice to Bennett at Wychwood Barns shook the candidates’ hands and was introduced to me as “someone important to know.” It was around about the time when the IAMAW Local 2323—or was it Local 128 of the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, or maybe the United Steelworkers, or was it the Workers United of Brockville or Belleville or Oshawa or Orangeville?—marched past in duck-hunting camouflage shirts, that some part of me wondered what was the 1950s drama of which the NDP imagined it was the star. What bygone world was the NDP living in, that it thought people voted in blocs and organized labour was its bedrock? Why was it assuming the allegiance of groups of highly paid carpenters, nurses and teachers, et cetera, who, their revenue guaranteed, were surely as likely as anyone to choose the party that taxed them the least (their union management among the provincial Liberal Party’s biggest donors); or of workers from small towns as wary as Westerners of the party’s please-all-comers vacillations on gun control, and fine with all that environment stuff as long as it did not lead to carbon taxes and hikes on the price of gasoline? Disorganized labour—part-time and “precarious” workers—I could see. But this long line of workers in closed shops with eighty-inch TVs and home cinemas and gas-guzzling trucks, these teachers with pensions—would they be voting our way?

  —

  The NDP’s five core franchises were, I figured: labour; so-called soft Québécois nationalists wanting a better deal within Confederation than the moribund Bloc Québécois could offer; First Nations; new Canadians; and youth. The last three groups, maybe I could reach. I’d had some fairly detailed ideas about video advertisements of a satirical nature that I’d wanted to be a part of our campaign from the start, but had only a layman’s idea of cheap ways to produce them. My plans of last and maybe even first resort were to shoot a series of videos with handheld iPhones, but I knew that even the appearance of amateur must be designed and planned. To that end I’d been communicating for a while with a documentary filmmaker I knew—someone on the fringes of the Toronto arts circuit to which I was privy. His posts on social media were often as virulent about the Conservatives as mine, but he’d messaged to say that “even though my political leanings are pretty evident I think it will threaten my own livelihood to actually do work for a campaign,” which was a drag. In lieu, he’d put me in touch with a couple of other directors, and it was clear from initial communications that started,

  Hi Noah

  We have some ideas. But before we develop anything further, we need an idea of what the budget is. What are you thinking?

  D_____

  to which I’d replied,

  Hi D.,

  Well, let’s see. I’m the guy that walked into a riding with $350 in the bank for a $97,000, now $200,000 campaign. But I also have quite specific ideas about the two sets of vids, each taking half a day I’d say. So I figure if you’re open, then a talk about what items we’re costing and how to cost them is in order before we put a price on things, no? Because right now it’s not even fair to ask what your own minimum would be.

  Best, and hoping to chat,

  Noah

  that no charitable or even discounted work would be forthcoming and our conversation quickly petered out. Without scripts, props, cameras, crew or money, even iPhone plans seemed unrealizable.

  Then, on September 8, the day after the Labour Day parade, chance came into play.

  —

  I was taking a break for tea at one of the streetside tables in front of the Starbucks outlet at the corner of Bathurst and St. Clair, drafting an email to Pratt and Levy about lessons I was learning from down below. Not my place, I knew, but, what the hell, I hit “Send”:

  From: Noah Richler

  Date: Tuesday, September 8, 2015 at 9:32 AM

  Subject: A note from the floor

  Hi Greta, James

  I know we are holding well in the polls, but I would like to bring to your attention the feeling that we are being outpaced by Trudeau’s rabbit-out-of-a-hat PR strategies that appear to be working for him. As people are repulsed with Harper and Alexander et al., folk are forgetting about C-51 and looking to his boyishness and feeling relief. Even intelligent folk I know are game for his deficit talk. And he is getting out ahead on humanitarian issues too, and even on stuff where Tom has come out first—like the Syrian question being non-partisan and not about apportioning blame, or restoring funding to the CBC. So now we see Monday’s Star with not one, but two huge adoring pics of Trudeau, and none of anybody else, and (I defer to you if it is your strategy), the leader of the opposition coming third in the sequence of Mansbridge debates.

  Should we not be giving the newspapers a bit of hell? The sum of it is that we appear to be the trailers in arguments that we have initiated, and it would be nice if we could get out ahead of other issues too.

  I have sent, through my campaign management team, a team-oriented suggestion for getting ahead at least about arts talk. In this realm (and sports) we are perceived at the moment as having no position. The word I had recently, from a prominent member of the Arts Coalition, was that Trudeau was going to make his arts announcement on the Monday but then the Syrian photos hit.

  I’m reattaching it.

  Of course it pales in importance next to the refugee plight but at the appropriate point (and TIFF is happening now) we need to come out ahead. I have offe
red plans for your excellent Toronto cohort, and these arts ones would naturally be an announcement for my riding, what with its bevy of filmmakers, etc. It would be nice to see a little explicit attention from the centre.

  Liz, I knew, would be waiting for me at the office with a clipboard in hand and I was procrastinating, reasoning that it was important to take what chances I had for a little air and composure. St. Clair and Bathurst is an ugly junction, busy with traffic in all directions and the proto–Blade Runner growth of high condominium towers sprouting without sense erratically in the landscape. The far towers east along St. Clair Avenue were daunting—gleaming white and new and, from this distance, utterly without charm. Their apartments with selling views would soon be blocked by other high-rises, and they were home to thousands upon thousands of residents who’d vote for a party leader and not a local candidate because their residence in the riding was fleeting and they weren’t going to live here long enough to care about railway tracks or better local home care delivery. Don’t bother canvassing the condos, I’d been told; their residents have conversations with televisions and not their neighbours. Their allegiances would be in the abstract. They’d vote for a colour or a leader, having been here for just a fraction of the eighteen years that Bennett had been incumbent. They were a precursor, really, of the dysfunction in which the parliamentary system already found itself. Canada, a country overwhelmed by the influences of its neighbour to the south, was voting and behaving presidentially—but without any of that system’s institutions or controls. The towers spoke to the riding’s anomie and the pit stops these apartments were to professionals briefly halting on the way from starter homes to more permanent digs; to pensioners in the last comfortable shelters they would own before moving on to assisted living, slow oblivion and death. There’s a fifty percent turnover in the riding between elections, said Bennett to me in one of our Christmas Truce moments, and it’s largely because of the condos. We didn’t have plans to breach the lobbies of half of them—better the community housing and co-ops and seniors’ residences.