by Noah Richler
Not a bad idea, I think, but the discussion is with myself.
—
Farnham Avenue, closed door one of five:
The man’s lips are quivering. I notice large paintings hanging on the walls of the living room behind him as he vents at the prospect of an NDP government and this presence of the party’s candidate on his street. “Do you know what would happen if taxes were raised on corporations? My pension would disappear! I’m from Alberta! I know the meaning of hard work! My grandfather fought on Corvettes in the Atlantic. He put his life on the line for this country!”
“Then he understood the meaning of community,” I say, and carelessly, “The election’s not all about you.”
“What did you say?”
“The NDP understands the first job of government is to extend a hand to those in need of support. You’d understand that. You’re from Alberta and we have so much to thank you for: R.B. Bennett. Unemployment insurance. Old age pensions. The CCF.”
Slam!
—
Arlington Avenue, closed door two of five:
“Oh, you’re the NDP candidate?” An attractive woman, modern house, newly appointed. A child playing on the floor. Lots of toys. Tables with sharp corners, too. The trouble with architects.
“Wait there,” the woman says. “My husband would like to speak to you.”
The husband, perhaps thirty-five, comes to door. He’s a doctor and there it is again, the quivering top lip. He grills me about cuts to health care and is citing figures at a level of detail I cannot hope to match. I try to get a word in but he won’t stop speaking—about balancing the budget, about the NDP’s misplaced priorities, their lies about numbers.
“All politics begins from principle,” I start, but he raises his voice to the point that it is shrill and I can’t find a way in.
“I’ll be voting Liberal!” he says.
Slam!
—
Arlington Avenue redux, closed door three of five:
The Toronto Blue Jays are losing to the Baltimore Orioles, but it doesn’t matter because they’ve already clinched the American League East. Still it feels like not a good time to be making friends with a cheery door knock.
The man is a pensioner and a Canadian Armed Forces vet.
“I’ve been an NDP voter all my life,” he says, “and you’re pulling our fighters out?”
I’m all set to go with my potted speech about the futility of the war over Iraq—how we’re supporting the venal dictator Bashar al-Assad; how we’re de facto allies of Iran and Russia; how the Iraq borders the British drew up never made sense anyway; and how the NDP is the only party objecting to the unconscionable arms deal with Saudi Arabia, suspected by the British media of purchasing weapons ending up in the hands of ISIL, but I’ve barely time to draw an intake of breath.
“You should be ashamed,” he says.
Slam!
—
Melita Court, closed door four of five:
“Oh, so you’re the NDP candidate!”
A young black woman, maybe twenty-five, community housing, prints from the Caribbean, a crucifix—but by now the exclamation feels like a setup.
“Wait a moment,” the woman says. “My father would like to speak to you.”
That’s the clincher: the first member of the household is used to the other’s kitchen table rants and wants to see how the candidate copes. It takes a couple of minutes for the bed-ridden father, in his late sixties or seventies, maybe older, to shuffle to the door. His feet never quite leave the floor and the thick rubber-soled shoes squeak on the linoleum. The man is wearing a dressing gown—and there they are, the quivering lips.
I give him my moral moments spiel, talk about Tommy Douglas and pharmacare and the plight of seniors and throw in infrastructure, how hard it is to get around.
“Tom’s not just talking about concrete but what is human,” I say. “He’s investing in people, in social programs. He knows that we’re only as well off as—”
The man frowns.
“Ahbinheresinsiktyfreeanwokinsohahdhahderdanyouhahdderdendemrefugeedeygedindabenefitnodmeahnovodinuvodinlibraluhear no u novodin u sonocomherelookadmewokinsohahdahdonlikeuheerahsaygo!”
Slam!
—
Merton Street, closed door five of five:
More community housing and the familiar smell of cabbage on the top floors, bleach in the basement. Is bleach a heavier odour, I wonder? Surely there is a scientific explanation, or maybe it’s sociological—janitors eating just as much cabbage but using more of the chemicals that come to them free with the job. You hold your nose, you knock. The door opens five inches. A tuft of long, uncombed white hair hangs to one side of the man’s head.
“Save me!” he says.
Slam!
—
Long conversations, diminishing returns.
An elderly white Conservative voter sits on the railing of his deck, his wife in attendance. He is speaking thoughtfully, considering his sentences, reflecting on his points. He listens as if your answers matter and so you like him. He is struggling with the idea of whom to vote for but confides it won’t be Harper. “A lot of us never liked Harper even when we were voting for him,” he says. He keeps you for ten, fifteen minutes. Peter Tabuns, the NDP Toronto MPP and canvassing guru, would throw his hands up in despair, leave you here and move on. But you are appreciating the substance of what he is saying. It’s why you signed up. You feel, in your reluctance to leave, nostalgia for the sort of banter that campaigning has left by the wayside, even as you know nothing you say will sway him—not this time around, anyway. Maybe some part of you is already campaigning for the next time and wanting the man to have a good memory of the pleasant, seemingly intelligent fella who came to the door and made a case for a party and a vision he’d not, until now, entertained. Perhaps he will tell his wife, in the years to come, “That NDP candidate, he’d be a good MP. Isn’t it time someone replaced Bennett?
“Love, remind me, why are we so afraid of the NDP?”
—
Some days, the last thing you will want to do is canvass, and then you’ll go out and canvass because that’s what will make you feel better.
It is the beginning of October and I hear Phil say, “All our undecideds are Liberals,” which is another way of saying there may be no “undecided” votes left. Maybe that’s why the meet and greet events are thinning—more like greet and be done withs, despite my stellar company. The jacket is off and the sleeves are rolled up, this not yet the trademark of a far more successful candidate, and I’m practiced in the balletic work of making everyone else feel they are not wasting their time. Enjoy the canapés. Be winning. Be the candidate.
Candidate, ’kandi, dāt, ’kandidāt, noun: “one aspiring to office” (early 17th century: from Latin candidatus “white-robed,” also denoting a candidate for office who traditionally wore a white toga). Subsequent early senses were “pure, innocent,” “unbiased,” and “free from malice,” hence “frank” (late 17th cent) and “candour”: the quality of being open and honest in expression; frankness.
So let me be open, honest in expression and frank. It’s been a long time since Rathnelly and the meet and greets have become events of endurance. Earlier in the week was the last of my September meet and greets, and at the penultimate one, in Forest Hill, the lox and bagels, not the NDP, were the attraction for the brunch crowd of predominantly young investors. At Marchmount Road, there were just four people in the kitchen. I have already cancelled the meet and greet slated for Cabbagetown, at which I’d hoped to raise some money because I’d lived in the district for seventeen years (“Neighbours for Noah”)—that was a drag—and elected not to follow up on invitations for a couple more. Today’s meet and greet, on the first night of October, was fixed some time ago. It is in an NDP-inimical part of the riding—among the enormous mansions of Wells Hill Avenue—and
being hosted by a couple of generous and committed Jewish NDP activists honourably doing what they can in a part of the riding where their politics can hardly be mainstream. One has already taken me for a canvass along streets adjoining the road where she lives, knocking on doors and introducing me very personably. By the end of the block, she is like an old friend and I want to take her home with me and for us to watch movies and eat popcorn. It occurs to me, as I talk a calculated mile a minute, that I am becoming teary in moments of fatigue that are more frequent now. I tweet photographs of Toronto’s gorgeous canopy of turning autumn leaves. I want to talk to people I haven’t spoken to in ages. I am thinking of dead people. I want my father to have seen me doing this.
You will move through a carousel of moods.
Wells Hill Avenue faces the Loblaw’s on St. Clair. Separated from the busy central thoroughfare by a small English green, it is, for all intents and purposes, a gated community. In perfect view of all the cars passing and entering the supermarket parking lot, and the steady stream of pedestrians using the TTC entrance right by it, is a great big red Liberal Carolyn Bennett sign mounted at the foot of a house that might as well be a castle. For the duration of the campaign, I have wanted to match it. On my way to the meet and greet I think “What the hell?” and try the house next door. The young father who answers is holding a small child and speaks, with an English accent, words I know to be an indication of what’s to come: “NDP? Yeah, I was hoping you’d come round.” Then he lets loose with a diatribe about Gaza and the NDP’s censoring of Morgan Wheeldon, the Nova Scotia candidate who’d accused Israel of a little ethnic cleansing. I’m tempted to say, “Well, a Nova Scotian would understand. Did you know England’s expulsion of the Acadians, back in 1755, is generally regarded as the first example of ethnic cleansing?” But I think better of it; some voters simply need to be let be. I knock one door further up and find myself having a much easier time, the fantasy of a NOAH RICHLER NDP sign next to Bennett’s still alive. My dance partner is a dandyish retiree of the financial world with wire frame spectacles and brightly coloured striped socks. He is amused—his son comes home and is not—and I make a mental note to return with a copy of my first book because he’s from out west and a reader. Maybe that will sway him. Yet, like so many things, I’ll not get around to it and now it’s time to move on to the appointed meet and greet. It is the weekend of Sukkot, the Hebrew harvest festival, and inside the house is a nicely laid out table of wine and Jewish foodstuffs. I am prepared for bad attendance, but this time some fifteen people arrive. After half an hour of niceties, I am shepherded from the hall into the living room to deliver my case for the NDP, everyone seated but me. Immediately, Mulcair’s plans for a balanced budget arise and I talk about spending corporate taxes, not my children’s money, and, contrary to popular mythology, the party’s generally exemplary fiscal record. I talk about having visited Bay Street and my executive contact, “whose annual remuneration is likely that of a small Latin American country” (no laughs) and how he’d endorsed the NDP plan to cut stock option tax credits—which is when an elderly man with an Eastern European accent starts haranguing me.
“Nonsense! How am I going to keep my employees interested in startups if I can’t give them stock options?”
I put up a fight but he doesn’t stop, and finally it’s the circle that tells him that’s enough, and when, later, I make my exit, they are apologizing for him. “That’s his nature,” my hosts say, which I know to mean that he had the better of me and I’ve not won votes here. I cycle by the Carolyn Bennett sign, wonder in passing where she lives and worry I’m being shut out. It’s depressing, and once back in my neighbourhood I make a pit stop to have a drink, wishing my local was in Toronto—St. Paul’s and people were seeing me doing it. I have become my own toughest critic when it comes to the question of where a candidate lives, not due to issues of representation but because when you’re campaigning at home, then the drink at the pub and the coffee in the morning or the walk of the dogs—it’s all related and the job is easier.
The Mihevc fundraiser seems so long ago.
—
It can jaundice you, too much canvassing—are you seeing that? When, looking up a street interrupted here and there by cubic houses made of metal and glass or mock Tudor “dream homes” that look as if they were won in a lottery—houses indifferent to the architectural and the social rest—and I started to conclude, “no Dippers here,” then I knew my game was up. Evidence? There was plenty. It had only been the rich, leaning out of oversized custom front doors held just slightly ajar, who would berate me about government handouts or say, “The system is broken.”
“People vote according to their pockets,” I told Young Ethan as we worked some well-to-do part of the neighbourhood.
And why should that have been a surprise? Of course people do. The disenfranchised, the old and the marginalized depending on benefits were likely to vote our way, but weren’t they voting with their hands in their pockets, too? I’d tried my arguments about the “ ‘invisible’ taxes” of Conservative intransigence and the benefits that would accrue to all in a more secure, just society—S.’s good roads, schools and hospitals—but the “middle class,” that great big privileged tranche in which half of Canadians imagine they sit, and in which even more believe that they belong, appeared, in the conversations I was having, only progressive to the point ambitious social plans did not cost them. Then they were Liberal.
Or so I felt in the waning weeks of the campaign as a new spiel developed: “The Liberals are the Conservatives without Harper. We are the only party prepared to tax corporations more, and that’s the difference,” I’d say. “Trudeau says he’ll tax the one percent but—you know the rich—they’ll find a way around it.”
Out went the early argument that the NDP was the only choice to defeat Harper, first in 103 ridings and second in 200 more, and in came—thank you, Wilhelm—an altered other:
“For the whole century and a half of Canada’s existence, the country has been run by Conservative and Liberal governments. Replacing Tweedledum with Tweedledee is no solution!”
How else to fight Trudeau’s announcement, crushing us now, that a Liberal government would deficit spend? I didn’t have to agree with the Liberal plan—didn’t then, don’t now (“The problem with Canada is that politicians are part-time Keynesians: they like the borrowing, they don’t like the paying back part,” said Andrew Thomson to the Financial Times)—but indisputably it had been a brilliant move, rendered more so by Mulcair and the NDP’s failure to react to its overwhelming traction with voters. In Ontario, where former NDP premier Bob Rae’s deficit spending constituted one of Canada’s two traumatic political memories (the other, obsessing the West, was the 1980 National Energy Program of Pierre Trudeau’s Liberal Party), there was never going to be any option but for Mulcair to emphasize the party’s fiscal credentials—or, at least, initially that was true. But on the ground (I was hearing the same from Davenport and Eglinton—Lawrence), we were like paratroopers stranded inside enemy territory and deserted by indifferent generals. There was a yearning for Mulcair to show some sort of spontaneity—to say, for instance, “It’s incumbent upon a government to be responsible with other people’s money, but I am relieved and interested that Canadians are prepared to take on debts to alleviate and perhaps even to solve our economic woes. I’ve listened, and take note.”
At the door, I’d defend as much as I was able against the Liberals’ deft play:
“Balancing the books is not a partisan issue,” I’d say. “It’s about not taking the income of government—the taxes you pay—for granted. I’m uncomfortable spending money we don’t have, our kids’ money [the dig] not ours—and especially when there is no need. Did you know just last week StatsCan—I mean what’s left of it [deliver a collegiate chortle, intone the ‘muzzling of scientists’]—issued a report showing that of all the parties the NDP has balanced budgets the most over the last thirty years of provincial and fede
ral governments? [Phew, seem to have dodged bullet of NDP never having formed a federal government.] And that we did so without cutting social programs [so you say], and furthermore when we did run deficits we did so as a lower portion of GDP than either the Liberals or Conservatives? [Seem to have the momentum here.] The Liberals, of course, have always been great cutters of social programs. People talk about Paul Martin having balanced the books, but we’re still reeling from the cuts he made. We don’t need to deficit spend because we’ll be taxing corporations 2 percent more [party talking point] and shutting down stock option tax credit loopholes—and we’re the only party doing this. Our job is to get the hundreds of billions of ‘dead money’ the corporations are hoarding, moving. And that’s far more than a government can ever spend. And by the way [deliver as another friendly confidence], the NDP doesn’t need lessons in deficit spending—we’re the ones [see how smart and capable we are] who pushed Harper to do it in the last recession [look for acknowledgment of reports that we are in another]. We just don’t think it’s necessary right now.
“Perhaps there’s something on your mind? Ideas, or worries, that I can take back with me?”
But the arguments were not working. The Liberal plan waved the carrot of work to Canadians who did not have it and told the vast numbers who did not need a break, “You’re off the hook. Someone else will pay.”
—
It’s tough now. Like I’m out in the boonies and I’ve been sent up the wrong street; like I’m the DH in a ball game and my timing is off. No one is handing me anything back.
A couple of volunteers tell me they were barred from a condo tower.
“That’s against the law,” I say. (All canvassers have the right to enter apartment buildings and carry Elections Canada permissions to that end.) “Didn’t you tell the super?”
