Attempting to elevate the argument
Often I am asked if I regret having run for office — as I did last year for the NDP, losing in a Toronto riding that has been Liberal for getting on two decades. Really, what was I expecting, to win? Not at all — not in the moment of signing on, at any rate. I was in the game to elevate the argument, I told myself, and believed it.
What I quickly learned, though, is that as the candidate you lose objective sense out of necessity. Beyond any fantasy of the seemingly impossible — that happened in Québec in 2011, and Alberta in 2015 (and frankly, for the Liberals in Ontario that same year) — as the candidate you simply have to believe you can win. How else are you going to ask prospective donors for money, or reap the extraordinary good will of campaign volunteers?
Heady circumstances overtake: you’re running? Then you need money, you need a team, you need a vision, beyond any laid out for you in simpleton’s terms on sheets that arrive from campaign headquarters with easy turns of phrase for the candidate to parrot.
But I was lucky, and doubly so. I shared the party’s vision, still do, and so was able to argue what I believed. And I was running in a riding where little was expected of me. Even LeadNow, the “Anything But Conservatives” bunch advising Canadians how to vote strategically in order to keep Harper out, wasn’t bothering to poll my riding so much did they figure it a Liberal dead cert.
The good faith of volunteers working not for me or even the party but for their idea of a better Canada carried me through the hurly-burly of the campaign. Still, every campaign is its own invention and mine arose out of a delightful concatenation of a young, bright, social media-savvy bunch and seasoned party veterans versed in practiced, orthodox ways of winning a riding.
This was the second lesson I learned: that a good campaign depends upon a lot of people dependably doing a little. The third was that, as the candidate, I was not “the boss of me.” I was just one piece in a multi-faceted enterprise, a fact of campaigning I tried hard to honour in my book by corralling testimonials from a number of the folk who grease the wheels: my campaign managers, the volunteers, their organizer — and the party leader, Tom Mulcair.
There were the intrigues and challenges and entertainments and good lines — in Forest Hill an unlikely, rich benefactor hosting a fabulous party took me out to admire my large sign staked on his lawn and asked, “Does it come in any other colours?”— and canvassing was an endless revelation, but ultimately it was volunteers’ good will that prompted me, after the election was done, to write a book I did not at first believe I had in me.
I absolutely did not become a political candidate to write about the experience, and I’d have had a hard time writing a book at all were it not for the countrywide phenomenon of volunteers coming out to make hard-fought, seriously entertained elections possible. My amateur math says if we assume 40 or so volunteers came out for each of last year’s 1,792 campaigns, then their total number exceeded 70,000 — and I still find that sum remarkable.
So, do I regret running? Not one bit. I’d even go so far to say the experience was one of the best of my life. What misgivings I have are merely aspirations for the future, for a democracy that works even better. Alongside, for instance, whatever changes we make to the way we count ballots — systems of proportional representation, or first past the post — is a whole other set of vital amendments that need to be made if we are to improve our system and allow not just the privileged to run.
And let’s not fool ourselves, only the privileged generally do. Who but the employed, let alone the wealthy, or (as in my case) those loved and supported by a partner or family is able to responsibly contemplate running? And is it right that the incumbent does so on a salary? We must find ways to allow the poor and marginalized to enter the game, or we’ll concede yet more to a discredited system of so-called “liberal democracy” that is in crisis in Europe, in Britain, in America — and will be soon, if we’re not careful, here.