by Noah Richler
Becky whispers not to forget Tommy Douglas, and from across the room, American Sarah gives you a nod. It’s as good a moment as any to begin.
“Can you speak up?” yells one resident.
“The NDP is the party of Tommy Douglas and—”
“What did he say? I can’t hear.”
The face of a doctor at the Montreal hospital where my father died flashes before me: he and I are sitting at a table, alone in the private room into which he has ushered me to talk about palliative care. Not a term I’ve yet had to use, I am dimly aware that I am oblivious to whatever it is he is saying. Later, I am astonished at how many other people, though not me, understood the significance of the timing of that conversation; how many knew what was bound to happen next. I had no idea.
“Of course you didn’t,” said Sarah. She’d been the first to look at my father and have to turn away and weep. “You were in it. You had to believe he would live.”
Odd that I should be thinking about that scene now.
“THE NDP IS THE PARTY OF TOMMY DOUGLAS…”
October 10, 2015
video team
noahrichler 8.08 a.m.
Hi Video Team
We could put out the innocuous “muzzling of scientists” video today, that needs nothing, Harper on Monday as planned, and then the “Barbaric Practices” and “Strategic Voting” ones later next week; or put out the Harper vid today, on the long weekend, rather than Monday. There is, I believe, a case for this as I think we are about to have a Liberal landslide and the thing that is keeping us going is a modicum of originality and enjoyment that I don’t want Central to kill.
CBC LOGO WASHED OVER WITH RISING ORANGE WAVE.
DISCLAIMER.
BEGIN “THE NATIONAL” PETER MANSBRIDGE/STEPHEN HARPER CLIP
HARPER BEGINS ANSWER.
UNIDENTIFIED FIGURE REMOVES CANADA PIN FROM HARPER’S LAPEL.
UNIDENTIFIED FIGURE BEHIND HARPER’S SEAT GIVES IT A BIG KICK AND SENDS HARPER OUT OF FRAME.
MANSBRIDGE LAUGHING AS THE CANDIDATE TAKES INTERVIEWEE’S SEAT.
THE CANDIDATE ANSWERS QUESTIONS IN PLACE OF HARPER.
HARPER SPEAKS FROM POSITION LYING ON GROUND.
THE CANDIDATE DISMISSES HARPER AND HIS ECONOMICS.
MANSBRIDGE AND THE CANDIDATE CONTINUE.
CANDIDATE ATTACHES HARPER’S CANADA PIN TO HIS LAPEL.
HIDDEN HARPER RISES BEHIND MANSBRIDGE AND THREATENS CANDIDATE, THEN DISAPPEARS AS CANDIDATE CONTINUES TO SPEAK.
“…CAROLYN BENNETT VOTED FOR BILL C-51…AND STRONGLY SUPPORTS IT EVEN NOW. BUT YOU KNOW, SHE’S BEEN THE LIBERAL MP IN MY RIDING FOR 18 YEARS AND HER WEBSITE SAYS ‘VOTE FOR REAL CHANGE.’ I TAKE THAT TO MEAN VOTE FOR THE NDP. VOTE FOR TOM MULCAIR. VOTE FOR ME.”
HARPER NODS HIS AGREEMENT FROM GROUND.
THE CANDIDATE LOOKS AT PROSTRATE HARPER AND THEN AT MANSBRIDGE, BAFFLED.
ALTERED CAPTION BEFORE CREDITS.
CHAPTER SIX
What does mood put into play? What does mood invite? Does mood determine fortune, or does a person’s lot come down to chance?
In my late teens, unsure about university or the proper life course to follow, I’d made a chunk of money working a seismic job in Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Alberta. I decided to travel the world for a while, a less automatic decision then. In hostels and cheap hotels, there was the usual assortment of peculiar strangers: the Vietnam vet that leapt up from the bunk below mine and almost threw me to the floor because the clicking of my ballpoint pen (I was writing a letter) reminded him of grenades and triggers and brought on his PTSD; or the Canadian with the cinnamon-coloured pock-marked skin who was a disciple of Jim Jones and heading to Guyana, where, somebody told me, he really did “drink the Kool-Aid.” On the road, I was learning the first lesson of travel, which is that you make your own chances as you go along. It is up to oneself to be sufficiently open to the world to let it in, or sufficiently guarded to keep it at bay. In the hostel in Rangoon, among the tattered paperbacks that travellers exchanged, was a copy of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, a novel that enthralled me. In its concluding chapter, the airman Yossarian takes a surrealistic walk through a grim, Dante-esque Rome, all the horrors that the war has put him through finding body in the shadows. It was an unforgettable literary experience and instructive to the eager young traveller, me. I realized that on days when I was in a bad mood, bad things were likely to happen; when I was in a good mood, good things did. “Cheap Charlie,” the Vietnam vet, shrugged when the kid on the top bunk, wanting to calm him down, told him this. “Maybe, maybe not,” said Charlie. “Everything happens all the time, it’s just up to you to notice.”
Be the butterfly. Take a chance.
—
It is the Thanksgiving weekend and the interval before the third period, the Liberals coming on strong and the NDP playing stoically but making the classic mistake of defending an early lead; scared of losing, forgetting how to win. Such was the cocoon my campaign lived inside that now, writing only months later, I do not remember having written we were about to lose, and badly. But this does not surprise me, because I know—any candidate knows—that it’s not at all contradictory for me to have told my team a crushing Liberal victory was imminent while not heeding these words myself. How was I going to lead if I did not believe we could win? And it was also my duty to let the team understand how extraordinary their work was—how original, how much fun.
We hadn’t been the only ones using videos to spread our message (and a little enjoyment). Scott Wyatt, an independent candidate for the B.C. riding of Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon, had been first out the gates with a superbly entertaining video, “I’m Running for Parliament,” in which the fella rides in on the back of a goose—a good Canadian—before slaying dinosaurs and aliens in the defence of his pro-Indigenous and socially progressive program. (The video was reported on internationally, all credit to him.) Other NDP candidates I did not meet were buoying their colleagues across the country with equally imaginative efforts. Matt Masters Burgener, running against the prime minister in the riding of Calgary Heritage, produced an artful video using a series of placards, revealed in order and then the reverse, to transform a dire political message into a hopeful one, a sweet turn that, like our Trudeau video, went viral. Jagmeet Singh, the provincial NDP MPP for the Ontario riding of Bramalea—Gore—Malton and provincial deputy leader, had also been an inspiration. The video of the handsome bearded Sikh cycling though his riding in shorts with a bright NDP orange turban and leading a posse of volunteers on bicycles during the 2011 campaign was a moving tribute to the late Jack Layton (an avid cyclist) that makes me happy when I think of it even now. The marvellous youth pack from Harbaljit Singh Kahlon’s riding of Brampton East, wearing campaign T-shirts with a sweet caricature of the candidate, could only make onlookers smile. Their appearance together at an early NDP event is one of the best memories I have of any of the contrived meetings that are “rallies” and “town halls.”
I do not doubt that other campaigns, across the barricades, found equivalent ways to motivate their own and perhaps to convert others, though in truth I have my doubts that any of the videos changed anyone’s mind. Cognitive consonance and dissonance are not solely qualities of the Internet; they are merely amplified there. But I have a suspicion that in the NDP’s grassroots derivation—for all its occasional failings (the parsimony, the aversion to the flashy, the inclusion of narrowly held views)—there is a freedom of expression that more than compensates for the ad agencies and focus groups and technologies barebones campaigns cannot afford. I loved my team: its efficiencies, its failings, its idiosyncracies, its appetites. The Bathurst Street office was not just a green room, it was the set of our very own made-in-Canada hit show, and I am sure the feeling was the same in the other 1,791 shows running concurrently across the land. Not just the NDP but all of us were “in this together”—and what was “this” but a dedication to the practice of the bigger idea?
Democracy: my bu
nch; the kids across St. Clair in their red T-shirts—they, we, were doing it. “Democracy” is a big word, lofty and sonorous, travestied and maligned a lot of the time too, but that’s what this was, in all the inveterate practices—the knocking on doors, the “postal walks”—and in the new customs, too. Of 1,792 candidates, 1,454 of us were bound to be “losers,” but who had time to think about that? There was work to do.
—
Doug and Nick had found good footage for the substantive videos, transforming them into short, neat sermons for a better Canada that please me still. I have more than twenty-five years’ studio experience and this crew was top-notch: capable of swift and last-minute changes, no problem with instruction, inventive with our limited means. Our net outlay for “The Escalator Works,” “That’s My Seat!” and seven of the substantive videos had been in the region of $115 ($100 for software and $15 for a red Staples button). Nick’s editing wizardry had been the glue.
The substantive videos had Bill C-51, the environment, the muzzling of scientists, the integrity of Parliament, “barbaric cultural practices,” the new Conservative (and much ridiculed) category of “Old Stock” Canadians, strategic voting and the demonization of immigrants for subjects. We were sticking to our plan to release the majority of these videos at regular intervals between the launches of “The Escalator Works,” on September 24, the revised version of “That’s My Seat!” in the penultimate week and the remaining others in the election’s waning days. None of the substantive videos had garnered more than several thousand views, though none were expected to have performed better than that. Each video ended with my asking the viewer to “vote for Tom Mulcair’s NDP and, in Toronto—St. Paul’s for me, Noah Richler,” with the “Candidate” logo and then the message “Spread the Word” following, but the slogan was replaced with “Your Vote Matters” once the spectre of strategic voting was clouding the horizon irrefutably.
The further purpose of the videos with less viral potential was to keep the campaign feed live and varied and provide the Toronto—St. Paul’s team a boost of morale despite their lesser traction. The video addressing the environment was pleasing for the quality of its images, even after the demand that we remove an offending frame of an oil sands project seen from the air was satisfied. The video attacking Bill C-51 containing the charge that Bennett “not only supported Bill C-51, she’s still a strong and vocal supporter of the law even now” did so over images of police confronting a First Nations demonstration—this synchronicity a discreet, even underhanded jab at the contradiction of my Liberal rival’s support of Aboriginal causes and the excessive security bill. The video condemning the xenophobic intent of the “barbaric cultural practices” snitch line referred to “Stephen Harper, Chris Alexander and their hired hand, the Australian merchant of hatred and division, Lynton Crosby,” but edits dictated from the street as I was canvassing led to a second “Barbaric Cultural Practices” video (that we’d improvised from existing tape) landing us in a spot of trouble. The latter version denounced Conservative MP Joyce Bateman’s reading out a list of supposedly anti-Israel Liberal MPs to a Winnipeg South Centre audience “as if we were living in East Germany under Stasi operators,” an image of Erich Honecker preceding one of Harper under my voiceover saying, “Harper joins a rich tradition of shameful politicians using the cloak of prejudice as they pretend to look out for our safety.” The photograph of the prime minister showed him frowning unpleasantly, as damaging to the idea of a sympathetic prime minister as the stock photograph of a bearded Mulcair angrily remonstrating in the House had been to the idea of a warm and cuddly NDP leader. Any choice of images can be so fantastically prejudicial as to constitute a cartoon, and our team indulged in a bit of this—the message was stronger for it—though the juxtaposition of Honecker’s image with Harper’s pushed the video beyond the bounds of acceptable taste (even during an election) and my campaign management team disabled it until the photograph of the East German leader was removed.
noahrichler
7.53 a.m.
Hi Janet. I am upset that you would go behind my back to Ethan to make an important decision without informing me, but I shall get over that. The important thing is that it was a good decision.
janetsolberg48
9.07 a.m.
Noah, I wanted to take it down quickly so that we could think about it some more. I did it in a mood of caution. The last thing you need or Tom needs is more media distractions.
—
Nerves were frayed ahead of the launch of the Harper video—the one that excited us most. We’d been cautious and tactical in our negotiations with the central office, conceding some ground to help ensure the release of “That’s My Seat!” Twice, we’d amended the images. We removed the prostrate Harper from the background of my conversation with Peter Mansbridge and diminished the force of my kick sending the prime minister flying out of his seat—instead having Harper appear behind Mansbridge with the threatening words “I’m on to you, Richler,” a clear reference to Bill C-51. But we’d needed no coaching when it came to ensuring that the video did not breach clause 29 of Canada’s Copyright Act and constituted “fair dealing for the purpose of…parody or satire.” Lest anyone confuse our satirical piece with a genuine news broadcast, we’d altered the CBC logo at the beginning of the video just as the CBC’s own long-running prime-time comedy show This Hour Has 22 Minutes does when it lampoons real products and institutions. (The Mercer Report would do its own spoof of the Trudeau advertisement later on.) I’d worked for the BBC, the CBC and newspapers and magazines in which the prospect of legal proceedings such as copyright or defamation suits needed to be taken very seriously and we were never about to proceed without a bona fide legal case and the NDP’s clear and unambiguous go-ahead to run the video. This we acquired from the NDP’s director of media, George Soule, on October 12. “That’s My Seat!” was to be the apogee of the innovative side of our campaign and the last original push that we would realistically be able to make. We launched it on the thirteenth, the same day as the Arts Forum we’d hastily arranged at the Tarragon Theatre—six days before E-Day.
By this point in the campaign our primary objective had been reduced to showing a dignified face—that, whatever the electoral outcome, ours remained, as it always had been, a thoughtful, plausible alternative to the status quo. The Arts Forum, with the slogan “Send a Writer to Parliament,” was a part of this last push. We’d learned from Mulcair’s failed arts announcement that few even in the media attached much importance to a sector in which the party had shown next to no interest historically. But there would always be a next time, for someone else if not me, and the Arts Forum rounded out the set of conversations we’d treated in the videos and entertained at the door.
We were gathered in the same upstairs rehearsal room where my nomination as candidate had been approved, the panel for the evening preceded by the Métis opera singer Joanna Burt, who’d appeared at the Wychwood Pub evening the week before. Sandra Cunningham, the film producer on my team and erstwhile chair of the Canadian Media Production Association; Denise Donlon, formerly the president of Sony Music Canada and executive director of CBC Radio’s English Language Services; Richard Rose, the artistic director of the Tarragon Theatre; and Matt Williams, the vice-president of the House of Anansi Press and president of the Canadian Publishing Association, discussed challenges to Canadian arts producers and my suggestion that allotments of money did not in themselves constitute arts “policy.” Denise Donlon argued that when it comes to culture, “we punch above our weight,” pointing out that most Canadians celebrated internationally are artists. It was time, she said, for the government to take steps for Canada to be thought of as an “arts nation,” rather than simply for its resources or military and sports successes. Richard Rose wished for a prime minister able to talk about culture in a manner connecting Canadians across a plethora of issues. Sound points of view also emanated from the audience. Shannon Litzenberger said that a new federal government n
eeded to understand—as Quebec’s already did—that any decision it makes has a cultural aspect; to elevate the status of “culture” in government, cultural principles needed to be embedded in all departments. Jack Blum, the executive director of Reel Canada, an educational program touring Canadian films to schools, spoke of the importance of a cultural component in the syllabus of a film legacy of which students would otherwise be unaware. “We’re desperate,” he said, “for ways to celebrate our Canadian-ness.” If a single concern dominated, it was that supporting artistic activity, whatever its nature, was not simply a matter of grants towards production, but of distribution and awareness across platforms and sectors of society.
And if there was hesitation in my presentation—I chaired the panel—it was an indication of how it was becoming that much harder to be blithe about the swelling Liberal tide. The rewards, now, were moral, these including a considered mention of the evening by Simon Houpt, senior media writer at The Globe and Mail. The notion that money was not in itself a policy, wrote Houpt, “could only seem radical within the narrow confines of an election campaign,” but he was saying so in a respectful light: we had been taken seriously and an evening that was mostly symbolic in nature had not been wasted.
—
At the office, Doug was monitoring figures for the release of the Harper video on Facebook and YouTube and was ecstatic: its rate of viral spread was already exceeding that of “The Escalator Works,” with more than sixty thousand views in less than twelve hours.
