The calm in the storm

Jonathan Dickie isn’t a battle-hardened national campaigner. And that may be just right for the Greens.

Several things are coming up Green now, but up against the party’s sense of wide-open possibility, there is the spectre of the usual pattern kicking in once again: plenty of voters telling pollsters that they like what they see and buoying up approval numbers but then changing their minds on election day.

The Green Party of Canada’s national campaign manager is also about to helm a 338-riding sea-to-sea-to-sea effort with only a pair of local Vancouver Island campaigns on his CV.

Still, Jonathan Dickie inspires a particular sort of confidence and devotion in people who have worked with him. He speaks slowly and deliberately, palpably weighing each word before it hits the air; in conversation, his speech feels less like a political dodge tactic and more like his default mode. Politics is full of loud voices with big ideas, but those who have worked closely with Dickie say he will o en speak up only once or twice in a meeting and, when he does, he tends to change the conversation.

Party Leader Elizabeth May, for one, thinks the sun rises and sets just over the 40-yearold’s right shoulder. “He’s the most exceptional young man,” she says in mid-July, via a terrible cell signal on the road between events outside Barrie, Ont. “Jonathan is very so - spoken, he’s a man of few words and great depth, really thoughtful and an exceptionally smart and caring person.”

And Dickie will run the campaign of a Green Party that has likely never faced as favourable a landscape as it does now. Last fall, a landmark report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that we have a dozen years to severely curtail global warming before catastrophe is assured. The public’s attention has sharpened, and polls have shown climate change leaping up the personal priority lists of Canadian voters.

Over those same months, a string of electoral victories has put 17 Greens in legislatures at the provincial or federal level—including the Nanaimo-Ladysmith by-election that sent Paul Manly to the House of Commons and

finally gave May, the MP for Saanich-Gulf Islands, a lab partner from her own team.

On top of that, recent poll numbers point to the election in October of a minority government, which is the ideal outcome for an upstart party that could hold a crucial balance of power. While the Liberals have stanched the bleeding from the SNC-Lavalin brouhaha, their tarnished reputation may send a subset of progressive voters to a new home.

“We increasingly have the sense that anything is possible,” May says.

She and Dickie first met in 2007, when he volunteered for her campaign to unseat thenDefence Minister Peter MacKay in Central Nova. Dickie was in his late 20s and restarting his life, or returning to some profoundly altered version of it. When he was 20, his mother died of breast cancer. He had four younger sisters— aged 18, 15, 11 and eight at the time—and his mother’s death contributed to a decline in his father’s mental health, so Dickie became the family caregiver in his hometown of Stellarton, N.S. Five years a er his mother’s death, his father died of a brain tumour.

Dickie relays the barest version of these facts quickly and lightly, by way of explaining why his university studies in physics and engineering were interrupted. “It was a lot in a fairly short period of my life,” he says delicately. “It was a lot at the time, but we all kind of pulled through it.”

Things just needed to be done. “I feel as though my parents were able to provide me with a certain type of upbringing, and it wouldn’t be fair if my younger siblings didn’t have that same right,” he says. “I would have felt bad at this point in life if I looked back and realized that they didn’t have the same opportunities that I had, so I had to try to provide that for them.”

By the time he got involved with May’s campaign, the eldest of Dickie’s sisters had finished school and was able to help care for the others, so he could figure out what was next. “I thought it might be a passing fad that I was going through; just try it out and then do other things.” The concerns of the Greens interested him, but the steep uphill nature of the battle also drew him in. “I like the underdog, and Elizabeth and the Green Party were just such underdogs,” he says. “I like the challenge of trying to help someone succeed against really, really long odds.”

In the 2008 federal election, May finished 14 percentage points behind MacKay with a respectable 32 per cent of the vote. She liked and counted on Dickie so much that she transformed him from a volunteer into an employee. He thought May had a lot to offer, but he knew if she ran in Central Nova again, the result would be the same, so he pushed her to consider somewhere else. He si ed through data from Elections Canada and Statistics Canada for ridings that were a good fit. Vancouver Island looked like Greenfriendly territory, and she wanted to defeat a sitting cabinet minister, so the Saanich-Gulf Islands (SGI) riding held by Gary Lunn, minister of state for sport in Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s cabinet, became their target.

In mid-2009, Dickie made the cross-country move, figuring it would be for a few months. Harper’s government was a teetering minority, but the election-could-happen-at-any-moment speculation stretched all the way through 2010 and into the spring of 2011.

The story of the Green party’s growth—and, at various times, lack of it—has been one of tension between making a broad national effort aimed at increasing the popular vote and legitimizing the party with a candidate on every ballot and making a more strategic effort in a few promising places where Greens might actually win.

Jim Harris, the party’s leader before May, favoured the former approach, Dickie says. But a er the party saw how May landed a solid share of the vote but still came up short in 2008, they figured they should see if they could get a Green into the House of Commons. “We didn’t have this institutional knowledge within our organization of how to run really good campaigns,” he says. “So we really had to learn by watching what other parties were doing.” In The Canadian Federal Election of

2011, journalist Susan Harada describes how “Dickie organized the political equivalent of a pyramid scheme, recruiting supporters to invite over neighbours—particularly those not planning to vote Green—for a coffee and a chance to meet May.” The hope was that even those who weren’t “converted” would be impressed enough to talk up May a erward. The candidate attended every public event she could and stood on street corners waving to passing cars. Volunteers stuffed sunflower seeds into branded packets which, they thought, would hang around people’s homes longer than brochures. May finished with 54 per cent of the vote.

May and Dickie work closely (she conducted the wedding ceremony for him and his wife, Tara Keeping, a WestJet flight attendant), and she paints her campaign manager as her perfect counterbalance: he leans toward pessimism when she’s optimistic; he’s deliberate when she’s impulsive. Midway through an hourlong interview in his office, Dickie answers

his phone and talks casually with May. She goes on for some time about a decision that needs to be made, while he offers reassuring murmurs. “I’m not too worried; we just need to deal with it the best way possible,” he says. Later, before extricating himself from the call, he adds, “I just want to make sure that we’ve laid it out, what all of the pros and cons are, that we’ve got a good conversation.”

Two years a er helping May get into the House of Commons, Dickie took a leave of absence from running her constituency office to manage Adam Olsen’s provincial campaign in Saanich North and the Islands. Olsen recalls Dickie’s arrival as a steadying presence. “He’s very calm, very thoughtful and works his way through issues,” he says.

Olsen tripled the Greens’ previous vote total, but the NDP squeaked out a victory and he finished third in a tight three-way race. In 2017, he ran again and won the riding, becoming one of three Greens in the B.C. legislature, where the party struck a deal to support the NDP in a minority government.

Some version of that outcome on the national level in October is the fantasy. Greens say the campaign could unfold like this: people like the Greens, but when the time comes for voters to pick up their Sharpies, they worry that they’re wasting their votes and default to the established parties. But now, as Green victories accumulate one by one across the country, the Greens no longer look like plucky also-rans, so the gap between what people say in polls and how they vote should narrow.

The party is looking at focusing their efforts in 10 to 20 ridings—places where more people have gone to university and have slightly higher incomes but are not in the top brackets and places that have social features (such as more common-law marriages) that suggest people aren’t strongly tied to traditional values. “They’re more open to trying new things,” says Dickie.

Even while the environment becomes a bigger concern for voters, it’s difficult for people who are financially stretched to think about the state of the country or the environment in 10 years, Dickie says, so the message and platform need to be broad. “If we’re going to be a national party, if we’re saying that we would like to elect a number of MPs, we have to be ready to do more than just talk about climate change,” he says. “It’s a major issue, but there are lots of issues that governments need to deal with.”

Geographically, the party sees promise on Vancouver Island and more broadly in B.C., Atlantic Canada and Quebec. “Quebec is very intriguing for us because voters can suddenly shi there, and they are willing to take risks as a larger bloc of voters,” Dickie says. The goal is winning between four and 10 seats nationally, in addition to May’s and Manly’s.

But even in what looks like a moment of unprecedented opportunity, the possibility of history repeating exists. “I o en talk about the long walk between the car and the voting booth,” Olsen says. “A lot of Canadians, especially in the first-past-the-post system that we have, end up voting against what they don’t want and settle for ‘good enough,’” he says. “The Greens are emerging as a legitimate option for people to not have to settle for good enough.”

The Greens now hover reliably in the double digits in the polls. The larger target on the Greens’ backs—specifically on May’s— explains the party’s decision to bring in Warren Kinsella, former Liberal strategist and dedicated Twitter provocateur. Dickie says Kinsella’s role is to conduct “defensive” research to learn how their opponents could go a er May and to help the Greens parry. “We’re in new territory as we start to poll above 10 to 15 per cent,” he says. “In the past, it’s not really been worth it for parties to focus much on us, not worth it to spend their staff’s time and their money attacking our leader or our party.” The controversial relationship was short-lived, though: just a few weeks a er it was announced, the Toronto Star quoted May saying of Kinsella, “He’s finished whatever work he was doing with us.”

Asked why he thinks the Greens picked him to be the campaign manager, Dickie acknowledges that May has a lot of confidence in him and that being the first Green campaign manager to help a candidate win conveys some sense that he must know what he’s doing. “I’m sure I’ll do an adequate job,” he says with a smirk. This remark does not come across as self-deprecating as it probably looks on paper. It sounds like the carefully weighed opinion of a man who is not about to promise too much, which of course does not discount the possibility of overachieving.

‘Quebec is intriguing for us because voters can suddenly shift there, and they are willing to take risks’

‘We’ve had some advances, some setbacks. But the general direction is good.’

it’s “safe to think of him as a very senior adviser.” He had in fact already been meeting with Broadhurst, in public places, since immediately a er Trudeau put Broadhurst in charge of the campaign organization. And now he’s back.

In the meantime, the reporter wrote, retreating as quickly as possible to the world of relative certainty, Jeremy Broadhurst is the Liberals’ 2019 campaign director. Here he was now, in that Parliament Hill coffee shop, having tossed a cigarette away as he arrived. (“He’s a smoker, which isn’t that common any more,” Peter Donolo, the former Jean Chrétien spokesman who promoted Broadhurst when Donolo became Michael Ignatieff’s chief of staff in 2009, told me. “The best time to catch him is outside an event.”)

Broadhurst has been in Ottawa for 20 years. This was our first conversation of any length. A Torontonian by birth, son of an accountant and a piano teacher, the youngest of eight children, he was “a good member of the chorus” at St. Michael’s Choir School who “just always had the bug” when it came to politics.

He was nine during the 1984 election. Brian Mulroney fascinated him. So what made him a Liberal? Well, his father was one. As for ideas, “What got me there was the social-policy stuff. And particularly the Party of the Charter.” His hands carved out an area in space the size of a rugby ball, as though “Party of the Charter” were a brick or another massive object. “At its core it was always that sense of justice and fairness and equality.”

He went to work for Bill Graham, a family acquaintance, taking over the Ontario desk— responsible for files that might affect Ontario, which was a lot of them—when Graham became foreign minister in 2004.

Suddenly Liberal leaders started falling in waves. First Paul Martin quit a er losing the 2006 election, and Graham became the interim leader. He kept Broadhurst and a few other staffers on in the suddenly empty leader’s office. “You guys are great,” he told them. “You’re my dollar-a-year men.” They held out for higher pay.

At the end of 2006, Stéphane Dion became the first new Liberal leader who hadn’t been front-runner throughout the leadership campaign. Not having particularly planned to be leader, he had no staff. Broadhurst stayed on, temporarily, and found himself still there when Ignatieff became leader at the end of 2008. By the time Donolo took over to run Ignatieff’s office at the end of 2009, Broadhurst was starting to stand out simply for his ability to survive staff purges.

He became the new new new leader’s director of parliamentary affairs. Stephen Harper was still the prime minister, still with a minority of the seats in the Commons. “One of my tasks was to figure out how to bring down the government.” That turned out to be easier than beating the Conservatives in an election. Broadhurst ran the campaign communications “war room,” to mixed effect at best: Harper handed the Liberals their worst drubbing since Confederation. Bob Rae became the party’s interim leader and Broadhurst, at last, was a chief of staff.

Rae’s comments about Broadhurst are typical of just about any Liberal’s comments about Broadhurst: rave reviews, a bit generic, like bookjacket blurbs. “Jeremy is a terrific guy, calm under pressure, a good sense of humour, and a deep knowledge of the party and its history,” Rae wrote in an email. “He is widely and deeply trusted in the party, and has served ably under many different leaders. I was lucky to have him with me.”

There remained one more leadership change. Justin Trudeau brought a lot of people with him when he swept to the party leadership without effective opposition in 2013, but he actually hadn’t given much thought to who should be the Liberal party’s national director. Broadhurst quickly won the trust of Katie Telford, who would eventually become Trudeau’s chief of staff, so he le life as a political staffer on the Hill and took over the party’s operations.

Like much else in Liberal Ottawa, the party had suffered from a decade with a revolving door. “I’ve o en said a party should do two things: win elections, and raise money to win elections,” Broadhurst said. Easier said than done. “If there ever had been a Big Red Machine, it had really died. If we weren’t doing paid phoning, it wasn’t getting done.”

Broadhurst set about integrating data operations and volunteer mobilization: candidates were urged to recruit volunteer armies, which were in turn armed with detailed and up-todate data about loyal and persuadable voters.

Having played key roles in the 2011 drubbing and the 2015 triumph, Broadhurst is quick to admit that a campaign’s organization can have only so much effect on outcome. Usually it comes down to much more basic considerations: whom do voters trust? But, at the margin, good voter ID can’t hurt. In 2015 it told them Mike Bossio, a telecommunications consultant who was running against a popular Conservative incumbent in Prince Edward County, was drawing surprising levels of support. It helped that radio stations in the two nearest cities, Belleville and Kingston, were both carrying Liberal ads. Trudeau added Bossio’s riding to his campaign itinerary. Of the 40 ridings Trudeau visited in the campaign’s home stretch, Broadhurst says, the Liberals won 39 (including Bossio’s).

But so much has changed since then. Trudeau ran on change in 2015; now he’s trying to fend it off. He has a record, which means he’s disappointed some of his erstwhile supporters. His brand has been eroded by the SNC mess, by his baffling family trip to India, by his vacation with the Aga Khan, by all the rest.

The general outline of the Liberal pitch is no secret: whereas you get to power by offering hope, you keep it by underlining a contrast, in policy and values, with your main challenger. That makes a re-election campaign a darker, less optimistic thing. Broadhurst summed up the pitch this way: “OK, the train’s le the station, we’ve had some advances, we’ve had some setbacks. But the general direction is good.” The Conservatives, in this frame, want to bring the train back to the station and set it out on some other path. “It’s hard to see that as anything other than a return to Harper-era policies. Which will be very attractive to some people, but we think, to most people, won’t.”

As he did in 2015, campaigning alongside Stephen Harper, Doug Ford will play a prominent campaign role, serving as Justin Trudeau’s favourite object lesson in what happens if you elect Conservatives. The Ontario legislature won’t be sitting during the campaign, but a lot of Ford’s cuts to education and social services will be taking effect, Broadhurst expects. “It’s going to be playing out in real time.”

Broadhurst is the sort of Liberal who used to be common in Ottawa, when leaders’ tenures seemed as long-lasting as geological epochs: a lifer who’s made his career in the capital. The worst decade in the party’s history made Liberal lifers rarer than ever. Whether the species stages a comeback will depend, to a great extent, on whether the campaign works as Broadhurst hopes. Broadhurst and Butts. Butts and Broadhurst. Whatever.