The Candidate

by Noah Richler

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  Janet, campaign manager:

  I’ve worked in campaigns all of my life. And that’s not hyperbole. Being a Lewis meant that all of the children started working in campaigns when we were old enough to distribute leaflets, print signs, address envelopes. Sounds so old school now! Stephen wrote me about Noah running and told me he was speaking at his nomination. He also said he didn’t know who the campaign manager was. That got me thinking. I didn’t know Noah but I did know I couldn’t run a good campaign by myself—it’s been a while—so I asked a couple of experienced friends and that formed the nucleus of the campaign management team that expanded into an energetic, hard-working and fun group.

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  Phil, campaign manager:

  Why, after decades of refusing to ever organize another campaign, did I agree to co-manage the TSP campaign? Because Janet made me do it. The party had asked me in the spring to manage another campaign, offering “lots of money.” I told them no amount of money would induce me to manage a campaign again. But then, in midsummer, it felt like history was in the making and I mentioned to Janet that I wished I could play a part by helping out with speeches, leaflets or whatever. She said there were a number of priority seats still without campaign managers and I said the only way I’d ever get involved in that again would be co-managing with her. Since she was crazy busy with the Stephen Lewis Foundation, the campaign in Toronto Danforth and the provincial party, I thought that would put an end to that. But then she called and said she’d agreed to take on the Richler campaign in Toronto—St. Paul’s. Brother Stephen had spoken at the TSP nomination and was enthused about the candidate. So there we were. Janet brought in Wendy as well, and we got off to a good start.

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  Wendy, campaign manager:

  And why did I get involved? There is something miraculous about how quickly a group with common cause comes together and gives so much effort. In a short period of time—because of long hours, every single day—you get to know your coworkers as intimately as family members. In a week you know more about their strengths and vulnerabilities than casual or regular workplace friends you might have known for years. I’m sure this is the same intensity war veterans feel about their combat relationships. You quickly figure out whom you can trust and rely on, and there are always those who surprise and delight you with their optimism, dedication, hard work and insights.

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  They say an alcoholic never remembers his first drink, and if the tumult of that road is anything to go by, maybe that’s why I can’t recall the first moment of meeting my campaign management team—all of whom, contrary to their wary pledges, worked full-time from beginning to end. What I do remember is that by the time I was back in Toronto—I’d taken a few days to be with my family in Nova Scotia—the Bathurst Street office was in business, Janet, Phil and Wendy hard at work within it. I’d suggested looking for premises in the Oakwood–Dufferin west end of the riding, an area Debbie Parent had identified as one of NDP strength, or even setting up a mobile office in an Airstream or Winnebago caravan, cheaper to run, and that we could move about the district as an old-fashioned circus troupe as indeed my late friend Terry Wall might have done, but that didn’t wash. We needed facilities for people with disabilities, a bank of telephones and computer stations, and fortunately, a member of the executive had found the perfect site, Penny negotiating the lease for a highly visible former retail space on Bathurst Street just north of St. Clair Avenue West. The junction was almost exactly in the geographical heart of the riding—easy to span out from—and busy with the passing traffic of shoppers, TTC riders and commuters. Our very first sign could not have been more strategically placed. At a first meeting that Laura had called, arriving with two friends and a strategist from her husband Michael’s office who thought they might be interested in working with the campaign, the office had still been empty and without desks or phones or furniture but for a few folding chairs we pulled across the bare, unfinished concrete underfoot into a small circle. One wall of the office was made entirely of mirror, though the front was a floor-to-ceiling window that filled the place with light. The office had air conditioning, and at the back there were a couple of washrooms—one for people with disabilities—and a room that would do nicely for private meetings. A boon for volunteers canvassing and posting signs, or a candidate arriving from Cabbagetown, there was an exit to the lot behind the building, and free parking there as well as underground. Posters of Tom Mulcair were pinned to the window storefront—a banner with my name had been ordered to go above it—and several desks of different sizes, corralled from members and friends and garages, already had people working at them. Phil, who’d insisted on being “backroom,” if he was to work on the campaign at all, had set himself up nicely at one of the larger desks farthest away from the front door. Wendy was seated at one of a few desks with a telephone, and if I have an abiding visual memory of the office it is of this soft-spoken and thoughtful woman with her head down, speaking into the telephone to voters in the riding as she would do from nine in the morning to seven at night and later, virtually every day of the campaign. And, too, of Janet, pacing in the front. On the wall behind Phil were sheets listing the 190 polls (there was also a mobile one) in the adjusted riding, as well as a calendar and list of tasks. A candidate’s office is much like the green room of a stage play, and for the long hour of strutting and fretting that was our election run, I would learn how a campaign is an undertaking of the many and the candidate is certainly not the boss of it. I’d come to appreciate the distinct qualities of my colleagues—all those other pieces of the machine. There was Young Ethan, a political science graduate and, years back, the grade school classmate of one of Sarah’s two girls. He’d anticipated working for the Liberals, but I’d leaned on our family friendship to have him work for me. A wise move it was, Young Ethan being a model of dependability and resolve. So too was Data Ethan, a member of the riding executive who’d moved over to the Bathurst Street office on Day One, busy at the computer dedicated to the entry of polling information and liaising with Populus, the federal party database. And there was Elizabeth Glor-Bell, of course, another member of the Toronto—St. Paul’s executive, who, at that first meeting I’d attended back on July 8, declared she was too busy to work for us but subsequently agreed to come on as the pre-election organizer. The first of the two washrooms at the back had been appropriated for storage and was filled with candidate signs. The second had her bicycle parked in one of its two stalls. Beside it was the backroom, which would be used for telephone canvassing and confidential meetings. For eleven weeks, these premises were ground control and home.

  —

  Wendy and her common-law partner, Bob Meddings, ushered me into the backroom. Phil, who had asked me to bring in a variety of suits and ties, stood by the door.

  “Don’t dress for the job you have,” Phil had said. “Dress for the job you want.”

  Bob, whom I’d become accustomed to seeing step out of a beaten-up car with a full load of signs and a mallet in hand, was the campaign’s photographer for the reshoot we’d decided was necessary for less harried material for the election proper. The three urged me to smile, not very successfully, then to come forward like Snoopy wanting to shake a hand, and soon gave up—but they were good, the shots. Dress the candidate for the job you want him to have. He’s all you’ve got.

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  Brochures on the go, the next task was to create a viable organizational structure (and communications to support it) with a view to seamlessly melding the working practices of the experienced NDP members of the team with the ambitions of a mostly younger bunch with new methods and ideas and an aptitude for the social networks. Barnaby Marshall, a social networking specialist, Neil and Carolyn had been with the campaign since before my nomination. The two Ethans; Krista Kais-Prial, a young lawyer whom I’d convinced through Twitter to come see us; and Becky Elming, special assistant to Andrea Horwath and helping to nurture the TSP team
along, were added subsequently. Krista was handling tweets, Barnaby my NDP candidate’s page and the mail that came into it, and Becky and Young Ethan the liaising with my Facebook Events page. The Slack program Carolyn set up had been working well for us, both as a security measure—worried about Conservative or Liberal infiltration, I had acted on Laura’s wariness—and because, free of unsolicited messages, there was no whacking through a bush of emails to find the ones worth reading before they were lost in the undergrowth of a smartphone retaining just the last fifty communications. There were only the messages that mattered, sorted by subject, by person or by group. Slack also provided an easy monitoring of who was dipping in and completing tasks and who was just visiting. I decided that hangers-on—folk I could not rely upon, who’d not been in touch for a while or had decided, for instance, that they were above canvassing—would be dropped from the program, ergo the team, and that was that.

  Our structure, replicated in the channels of the Slack program, looked like this:

  If I bother you with this information, it is for two reasons. First, I was quite surprised, given the number of elections the NDP had contested before this one, that I was not handed a simple handbook and told, “Here’s the template for building a campaign, get to it.” (The “traditional knowledge” of campaign teams is, as with Inuit, oral.) My second reason may be an answer to the first. Every campaign is, as I have already said, a fresh invention, and every election demands new techniques mostly determined by advances in technology. Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them is a useful text by the veteran Ottawa correspondent Susan Delacourt that mines the obvious parallel to be made between the pushing of political candidates and the evolution of marketing techniques. A chapter on the 2015 campaign (the first edition of the book stopped after 2011) could have been written months before the forty-second general election even started, for it was common knowledge across the country that social media—in particular, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube—would provide the means for the next landscape-altering technological advance. Phones were still important, of course (though landlines less); and knocking on doors more so, but the new technology meant cheaper outlays, less costly research, the possibility of significantly greater reach—and a dividend to be reaped on imaginative work. From the beginning, we were aware, hardly an original thought, that the last condition favoured campaigns like ours with next to no resources. A draft social media team and a stream of good audio-visual material to feed our network platforms were of the essence from the very start. To that end, one of my first recruits had been Jonathan Rotsztain, a cartoonist and graphic artist with whom I had collaborated at Luminato, and he agreed to produce cartoons and “The Candidate” graphics—dare I call it “branding”—as required. We also needed a video team. But before meeting that challenge, I had a strategy team to put to work, eager to become a candidate impeccably in command of the facts. In Toronto—St. Paul’s, the fact of Liberals having represented the riding since 1993 meant we were under no illusions about whom to target, and first order of business was to create a SWOT chart listing the assets and liabilities of Carolyn Bennett’s run and my own, a task undertaken by Sean Caragata and Young Ethan. Defeating Harper was of course paramount, but, at the local level, the Conservative candidate Marnie MacDougall (no relation to Barbara MacDougall, the Progressive Conservative who had occupied the seat from 1984 to 1993) did not yet come into it.

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  One of Laura’s friends was Catherine Drillis, a communications and PR professional, and, early on in the campaign, she arrived with a PowerPoint presentation. Catherine talked about fundraising strategies and targets, and it was clear she was thinking big—much bigger than the party was used to. The NDP, version 2015, was sending out multiple e-blasts a day from proxy addresses of top party figures, each asking for five dollars at a time, most duly discarded. President Barack Obama’s grassroots fundraising success was the model, but in truth the emails spoke to a party with an ingrained resistance to exactly the sort of splashy events and bigger asks both Catherine and I were envisioning. As if to illustrate, an email was circulating of a cocktail reception that Barry Sherman, a Liberal in the riding, was hosting for Justin Trudeau at which a donation of $1,500 was necessary just to get across the threshold. I wondered how much the NDP dared ask for the privilege of meeting Mulcair. What was he “worth,” and what did that hypothetical figure say? As for the Conservatives, it was generally believed they were campaigning in the riding more to raise money for the party than to win the seat. But the NDP tradition of events was to hope visitors might leave a little more than the ten dollars it cost to feed them shrimp platters, sandwich quarters or dim sum. This approach was a reflection of the reality of many NDP supporters’ limited means—the very reason the party exists—though also of a certain failure of ambition. So, despite my knowing we had too little time to put into place things we’d like to see happen, we discussed the merely vaguely possible: an arts gala at Casa Loma, perhaps a cocktail party during TIFF, but also schoolyard, park and community events and the series of pub nights Ray and I were keen on.

  Catherine, not one to be cowed, was suggesting an outlay of $20,000 to gain $100,000, while Heller was holding his peace and not telling her—not immediately anyway—that this simply would not happen. But I really wanted her on the team and could see that she was expecting to be paid and that whatever I did agree to pay her, if indeed that authority was mine, would need to be built into the targets. Fundraising had never stopped being key, and her data analyzed the 2011 fundraising of the four parties operating in the riding and the financial resources each was on record as having to draw on. MacDougall had $200,000 in the bank; Bennett, $150,000. Catherine had put together graphs illustrating past campaigns’ successes—the amount of money raised, the number of contributors, the sizes of donations. Whatever funds the NDP had raised in the riding in 2011—less, even, than the Green Party—did not register. More graphs attested to equally dispiriting data. Then Catherine flipped to a pane called “Advantages.” It said:

  NO DONOR FATIGUE

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  Peter, a donor (and to the max):

  Why did I give?

  For the following reasons:

  1. I enjoy supporting insurgents over incumbents—in just about anything.

  2. Especially a disruptor or activist—someone who is also humorous (I love lightness of being, especially where lightness is challenged.)

  3. I believe in karma.

  4. I’m a BIG fan of the spouse.

  5. Alcohol probably had a small role.

  6. And the tax deduction helps.

  —

  Things I was planning from the start:

  Funky town halls

  Fundraisers

  A cartoon crew

  A skateboard gang

  Videos

  Meet and greets

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  I’d been working since before my nomination on the first of the meet and greets with Shannon Litzenberger, a dancer and advocate working with the Canadian Arts Coalition and the annual Canadian Arts Summit organized by Business for the Arts, a fundraising body pairing patrons from the corporate community with cultural causes. Shannon had put me in touch with a number of her contacts, one of them a resident of a small and very wealthy enclave in the Toronto—St. Paul’s riding known as “the Republic of Rathnelly.” (This part of the city was previously known, less glamorously, as South Hill, but playfully declared itself an independent republic during the country’s 1967 centenary celebrations, hence the moniker.) Such is the way of things in Toronto: a part of the city that was once the pied à terre of journalists, professors and writers—it lies just north of the railway tracks of the Canadian Pacific Dupont Line that mark the southern edge of the riding—the Republic of Rathnelly is now home to a more moneyed set. My contact was Nichole Anderson, in her late thirties and CEO of Business for the Arts. In July, she had congratulated me for throwing my hat in the ring. “A disruptive fo
rce…for the good,” she wrote. The pair of us had arranged to meet for coffee before Nichole’s departure to cottage country, with a view to staging a meet and greet in the riding in late August or early September.

  “There are a few NDPers in Rathnelly,” emailed Nichole, “and the standard Liberal voters.”

  I waited on a blisteringly hot Friday afternoon at Seven Grams, a coffee shop at the corner of Avenue Road and MacPherson Avenue to meet Nichole for a chat and a tour of Rathnelly. Much as I would have liked to imagine a future in Fisheries (that portfolio already pledged, apparently), common sense said that were I elected, were I offered a ministry and were any of the NDP MPs who had worked so hard in opposition not ahead of me in the queue, then Heritage was a role to which experience suited me, so that the tenor of our meeting made sense. Besides, it was good practice, a rehearsal on friendly territory. But when Nichole sat down at the small patio table in the shade to which I had staked a claim, it was the NDP in general that we discussed. Nichole was wary. Her husband, Alain Bergeron, a senior vice-president and portfolio manager with Mackenzie Investments, had met Mulcair when the NDP leader was the minister of the environment for the Quebec Liberals and had found him “warm and friendly,” said Nichole, but rude and arrogant when, as NDP leader, he was “attacking his sector in the media.”

  “We need someone at the helm who is going to work with business to improve society rather than attack,” said Nichole. “Most people of our generation—even those working in finance!—care deeply about the social good.”