Hitting the road with Jack
In his new memoir, Tom Mulcair looks back on the campaign that saw the Orange Wave sweep Quebec and carry the NDP to official Opposition status.
In his book, Mulcair writes about growing up in a family of 10 children north of Montreal, the beginnings of his political career and how he ended up leading the federal NDP. With some polls indicating he may become Canada’s next prime minister, the memoir also serves to spell out his political beliefs. In this chapter, Mulcair writes about the pivotal campaign of 2011, when he was deputy leader of the New Democrats under Jack Layton. When the new year began we were putting the finishing touches on our plans for our most ambitious campaign in the party’s history. We knew that the election could come as early as the spring, and we needed to be ready. Since becoming leader in 2003, Jack had kept his promise to make Quebec a top priority.
Brad Lavigne, who was national director of the NDP and had been at Jack’s side when he’d made the promise, always made sure that our Quebec team got all the resources we asked for as we built the organization and began recruiting candidates.
Brad’s bestselling book, Building the Or
ange Wave, gives a captivating account of all the hard work that went into implementing Jack’s vision of what the NDP could achieve by bringing everybody together and completing the work of building the national party in every province. A brilliant strategist and tactician, Brad was our national campaign director in 2011 and is the senior campaign adviser for the 2015 election.
In the 2004, 2006 and 2008 federal election campaigns, the NDP had realized steady incremental growth, increasing its support from one million to 2.5 million votes and growing the caucus from 13 to 37 seats. Following the 2008 campaign, it was decided that it was time to cast the net wider than just a handful more seats. It was time to attempt a breakthrough campaign designed to ensure that the NDP was competitive everywhere in Canada, especially in Quebec. To do so we required ground resources, a compelling message to take on the Conservatives, Bloc Québécois and Liberals, and candidates who were worthy of voters’ support. With a lot of hard work, we had all three.
In addition to the unprecedented resources for the Quebec ground game, we spent a good deal of time carefully developing what our offer to Quebec voters would be in the 2011 campaign. We knew from our constant touring of the regions that, overwhelmingly, Quebec voters were looking for change in Ottawa. They wanted their federal government to grow the economy and protect the environment. They wanted Canada to be a voice of peace on the world stage. They wanted jobs and better retirement security. In short, they wanted change from Stephen Harper, and they couldn’t get it from the Bloc or from the Liberals.
Our offer, Travaillons ensemble (Let’s work together), was an invitation for Quebec voters who wanted change and had primarily voted for the Bloc in the past to work with other Canadians in the rest of the country who were also seeking progressive change in Ottawa. By uniting under the NDP banner in Quebec and in the rest of Canada, we were saying, we can defeat Stephen Harper and build the Canada we want together.
In January I went up to Trois-Rivières for the nomination meeting of Robert Aubin, whom I’d recruited to run for the NDP. Robert was a teacher, the head of his union; he was articulate, personable, passionate. I had met him the previous fall at a conference held at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières to mobilize against the refurbishing of the now closed Gentilly-2 nuclear power plant, just across the river from Trois-Rivières. He was going to be an impressive candidate.
That evening he took us to the large bar complex where he regularly played in a band with a bunch of his friends. There I must have met at least 120 people, and every one of them told me they had always voted for the Bloc but now were going to be working for Robert’s campaign as part of the NDP team. That was the first telling sign that our message was resonating. On the way home I called Raymond Guardia, who served as our Quebec campaign director, and boldly predicted we were going to win in Trois-Rivières. Raymond didn’t buy it. “Yeah, yeah,” he said. I repeated the assertion, slowly this time. Raymond laughed. I could picture him rolling his eyes.
Not long before the start of the campaign, I went up to the Saguenay—Lac-Saint-Jean area to meet with our candidates and gauge the mood of the people there. Jack and I had done a swing through the region the previous year, visiting with workers at the aluminum plant run by Rio Tinto Alcan. This time I visited two Tim Hortons in Jonquière with candidate Claude Patry and a huge shopping mall called Place du Royaume in Chicoutimi with Dany Morin, an energetic young chiropractor who was our candidate in Chicoutimi—Le Fjord.
We went in there at11in the morning, on a weekday, and spent two hours going store to store, stopping at every table in every coffee shop. Then people started pouring into the food court to have lunch and we went around, meeting and greeting everyone. Pretty soon a TV camera showed up from the private network TVA, and that created a buzz. I must have shaken several hundred hands that day. I remember on the way home phoning Raymond again and saying simply, “Forty per cent.” “What are you talking about?” he said. “We’re going to get 40 per cent in Jonquière-Alma,” I declared. In the end, we won there with 43.44 per cent and in Chicoutimi—Le Fjord with 38 per cent of the vote.
Just a few weeks later, in mid-February, Jack met with Stephen Harper and proposed a series of progressive measures that we wanted to see in the upcoming federal budget.
We wanted action to lift every senior out of poverty and proposed an increase to the guaranteed income supplement; we wanted Canadians to save on their energy bills, so we proposed the removal of the GST from home heating; we wanted increased retirement security, so we proposed changes to the Canada and Quebec pension plans; and we wanted to ensure relief for the millions of Canadians who don’t have adequate access to health care, so we proposed investing in more family doctors. These plans were affordable and doable, and were part of Jack’s offer to Canadians that the NDP was going to be about “proposition as well as opposition.”
Two weeks after that meeting with Stephen Harper, Jack underwent hip surgery without complications. He needed crutches, though, to get around Parliament Hill. Although he was in pain much of the time, he didn’t let his hip slow him down. Nor did the prospect of campaigning on crutches affect his view that if our proposals were not in the budget, the NDP caucus would be voting against the government and triggering the next election.
On March 21, the day before the tabling of the budget, the standing committee on procedure and House affairs, having repeatedly tried to get the government to release the estimated costs of its law-andorder agenda, tax cuts to corporations and planned purchase of stealth fighter jets, produced a majority report recommending the government be found in contempt of Parliament. It was the committee’s job to request the information, and the government’s refusal was brazen, outrageous and unprecedented.
The next day, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty presented his budget. After reading the highlights and conferring with me as finance critic and with NDP deputy finance critic Chris Charlton, Jack announced to the throngs of media in the foyer of the House of Commons that Stephen Harper had chosen to ignore our proposals and, as a result, the NDP would not be supporting the budget. Within days the Conservative government would fall on a motion of nonconfidence and the election campaign would be underway.
We all took a deep breath. I went back to Quebec where our NDP team had been busy for months, recruiting candidates, among them a group of really bright McGill students, several of whom I can remember driving home after NDP meetings. Whenever Jack came to Quebec he campaigned flat out. He was spectacularly brave, radiating energy and optimism, and the sight of him campaigning, now with a cane instead of crutches, less than a month after his operation, drew people in and fired everybody up to work twice as hard.
I’ll never forget a huge rally in Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe’s own riding of Laurier—Sainte-Marie with 1,200 people. Jack’s daughter Sarah, son-in-law Hugh Campbell, and granddaughter Beatrice had flown in with him on the campaign plane. Catherine and I met them in the green room of the Olympia Theatre as Jack was preparing to deliver his speech. But Jack was a lot less concerned with rehearsing than he was about fawning over his little granddaughter. Catherine and I have often reminisced about how Jack, despite his cane, despite the pain, kneeled down beside her, took her little hands, looked her in the eye, and said, “I’m doing this for you.”
Jack would constantly remind us that what motivated him, particularly after the birth of Beatrice, was the responsibility he felt toward future generations. He summed up brilliantly his dogged determination to never let up: “Don’t let them tell you it can’t be done!” More than a slogan, it became our inspiration.
Prior to the campaign I had travelled to Sept-Îles in the riding of Manicouagan where Jonathan Genest-Jourdain, a young Innu lawyer from the Uashat reserve that is now part of Sept-Îles, was running for us. I met him in his community, at the Shaputuan museum, where his dad was one of the artists, and we went canvassing door to door. We worked the shopping mall, visited the offices of the band council and held a press conference at which the chief spoke: “We don’t endorse people in these campaigns,” he said. Then he flashed a huge grin and bellowed, “But we couldn’t be prouder that Jonathan is running!”
When I returned to Manicouagan during the campaign, a friend of Jonathan’s told me a funny story. He’d volunteered to help Jonathan distribute the NDP signs for his campaign, but the signs had all been sent to Baie-Comeau, more than 230 kilometres south of Sept-Îles in the riding. This friend of Jonathan’s was a plumber, and they set off in his truck to pick up the signs.
On the way back they stopped to get gas in one of the first Innu villages along the coast. Some young guys approached the truck and, seeing the signs in the back with Jona- than’s face on them, asked what they were. “I’m running,” Jonathan answered. “You’re running? One of ours? What do you mean?” Jonathan explained that he was a candidate in the upcoming election. They were gobsmacked and insisted he put up some signs on the spot.
Young people are so connected, via Facebook and Twitter and all the other social media, that as Jonathan and his friend got to the second village a bunch of kids were waiting by the roadside to stop the truck because they also wanted signs in their community. By the time Jonathan and his friend had made their way back to SeptÎles, a Facebook page had been created for him that already had hundreds of followers. When I came up the NDP signs up and dow that said to me was th had rarely ever voted the First Nations c icouagan, a vast ridin the St. Lawrence fro Blanc-Sablon and the dor and includes the was mobilizing to vot date. Up and down the worked hard. Party sta respected notary who de la Gaspésie et des longtime volunteer fo ning in the riding of Madeleine. Guy Caro
e next day there were wn the roadside. What hat a community that d in federal elections, community in Manng that extends along om Baie-Comeau to e border with Labrae island of Anticosti, te for our NDP candi- province our people alwart Philip Toone, a o taught at the CÉGEP s Îles and had been a or the party, was run-Gaspésie—Îles-de-laon, an economist with the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada and a former journalist who was the author of a report for the Council of Canadians titled “Crossing the Line: A Citizens’ Inquiry on Canada-U.S. Relations,” was running for us again in his riding of Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques.
Christine Moore, a francophone nurse from Abitibi who’d served with the Canadian Forces for three years and was a member of Nurses Without Borders, had run for us before and was now our candidate in Abitibi-Témiscamingue. Romeo Saganash, a former deputy grand chief of the Grand Council of the Crees of James Bay and the first Cree to receive a law degree in the province of Quebec, was the NDP candidate in the vast riding of Abitibi—BaieJames—Nunavik—Eeyou.
Françoise Boivin, the lawyer and former Liberal MP who’d run for us in 2008, was running again. Françoise was extremely well liked in her riding of Gatineau, which had been a Liberal fortress since its creation except in the two previous elections, when the Bloc candidate had won. Nycole Turmel, a former president of the Public Service Alliance of Canada, was running for us in Hull-Aylmer, a Liberal stronghold in every election since 1917. In Montreal, Alexandre Boulerice, a prominent labour activist who’d run for us the last time, in 2008, was our candidate in Rosemont—La PetitePatrie. Hélène Laverdière, a former Canadian diplomat who’d served in Washington, Senegal, and Chile, was running in Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe’s fiefdom of Laurier—Sainte-Marie.
We knew something was really starting to happen. For the first time in our party’s history we had a real Quebec-wide campaign. As the Quebec team of candidates were not big on meetings, we had only one weekly conference call to check in with all the candidates. I’ll never forget the question put to us at the end of one call by Francine Raynault, who was running in the Bloc stronghold of Joliette held by Bloc House leader Pierre Paquette: “Why do you think the Bloc supporters are tearing down my signs?”
To anyone who has ever organized or been involved in an election campaign, having signs pulled down, though annoying and, indeed, illegal, is not unusual. What was big news here — and we all understood it immediately — was the fact that the Bloc would even bother to tear down our signs in a riding where, traditionally, the NDP didn’t have much success.
Despite the unprecedented investments in the NDP campaign, the Bloc still had much deeper pockets to invest in their ground game as well as voter identification and polling. They had begun to notice what we were picking up on the doorsteps, and they were lashing out. After the call, Raymond Guardia and I spoke privately. “Wow,” he said, “they must really be seeing something that’s making them nervous!” The stridency of Bloc attacks on Jack, me and the NDP increased in the final weeks of the campaign. We were going to pull off something big, and they knew it.
We had many young high-quality candidates. Many of them, like 19-year-old Pierre-Luc Dusseault in Sherbrooke and the “McGill Four” — Charmaine Borg in Terrebonne-Blainville, Laurin Liu in Rivière-des-Mille-Îles, Mylène Freeman in Argenteuil-Papineau-Mirabel, and Matthew Dubé in Chambly-Borduas — were very young, energetic and fluently bilingual. Others were accomplished professionals already making their mark on society.
Pierre Nantel, a former musical artistic director with the Cirque du Soleil, and TVA and Radio-Canada columnist, was running in Longueuil—Pierre-Boucher; Hoang Mai, a young notary with a graduate degree in international law, who was the son of Vietnamese parents, was our candidate in Brossard—La Prairie; Anne Minh-Thu Quach, also with Vietnamese parents, a teacher and union activist, was running for the party in Beauharnois- Salaberry; Djaouida Sellah, who had been a volunteer doctor for the Red Crescent before immigrating to Canada from Algeria and was president of the Association québécoise des médecins diplômés hors Canada et États-Unis, supporting the recognition of qualifications of foreign-trained doctors, was running in Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert.
On May 2, election night, the scene at the Théâtre Rialto on Park Ave. in my riding of Outremont was complete pandemonium. Back in 2007 and 2008, my team and I had celebrated winning in Outremont at a bar called Les Bobards that we’d taken to calling our “bar-fétiche,” on Saint-Laurent Blvd., a stone’s throw from where Rebecca Blaikie and her “colocs” cohorts toiled in the tiny apartment that served as NDP headquarters. So I’d just presumed we would be going there again. But Raymond, who kept his eyes on the ground game on a daily basis, knew it would never hold the crowd he was expecting to turn out on election night.
When Catherine and I arrived at the Rialto with Greg, Matt, (Matt’s wife) Jasmyne and Juliette, our 21⁄ 2- year-old granddaughter, we couldn’t believe our eyes. A huge crowd, probably more than a thousand ecstatic, wildly cheering people, was pressed up between the stage and the exits in the lovely, ornate former movie theatre. But the massive presence of camera crews, reporters, and photographers from dozens of local, regional and national media outlets in both official languages showed that this was real.
It was all a bit intimidating for our little Juliette, so we made our way to the green room backstage, along with Mylène Freeman, who’d just been elected in the riding of Argenteuil-Papineau-Mirabel, and her mom, who’d driven in from her home in Ontario for the occasion. As the results rolled in from riding after riding, the crowd roared again and again.
We were in constant touch with Jack and Olivia in Toronto. The results in Quebec were far from the whole story that night. As the ballots were counted across the country, there were NDP breakthroughs in ridings across Canada that either hadn’t elected the NDP in a generation or — in many cases — ever. In the end, 4.6 million Canadians elected 103 NDP members of Parliament to form the largest official Opposition since 1980. Even if you took away all of the seats gained in Quebec that night, it was the best showing for the NDP in its 50-year history.
The Orange Wave was the realization of much of the plan that Jack had laid out at dinner that November 2006 night in Hudson, when he’d turned to me and said, “That’s where you come in,” and had given me the chance to build that future with him. I could remember walking out of (then Quebec premier) Jean Charest’s office and packing boxes with Graham Carpenter at the riding office, not knowing if I’d ever run again, and I realized what a turning point in my life meeting Jack had been. Now it had all come down to this night, when Quebecers in huge numbers had decided to place their trust in us. When the media announced that the NDP would be forming the official Opposition in Parliament, Jack and I spoke again, and the quiet joy in his voice brought tears to my eyes. A huge part of his vision was now realized. The chance to form a truly progressive government that reflected the values of all Canadians was finally within reach.
“The stridency of Bloc attacks on Jack, me and the NDP increased in the final weeks of the campaign. We were going to pull off something big, and they knew it.” MULCAIR IN ‘STRENGTH OF CONVICTION’