by Noah Richler
Point one always gets a good reaction and often a laugh.
“I believe it’s time for change.”
Get the dig in.
“But I believe we also need change locally. You’ve had the same MP for eighteen years and that’s too long. Even the president of the United States—the most important job in the world!—is only able to hold the office for two terms.”
Point two: good—
“And the president of Mexico only gets to do his job once!”
Too much, man! What are you going to do? Explain the revolution that led to the law because you read the history of Mexico last week? Remember the Atwood principle! Get back on topic.
“Change is key, and it’s not the Liberals that are going to provide it. Bennett voted for Bill C-51, and—”
Flip the card to the front side with the picture of Tom—
“Is that you?”
“Yes! That’s me when I had a beard.”
No, jokes don’t work, risky but worth the try.
“I jest, that’s Tom Mulcair, the leader of the NDP.”
Don’t lose momentum.
“You know, I didn’t meet Tom Mulcair until recently and I really like him. I respect him very much. He’s a good, thoughtful man.”
Get to point three, hurry up.
“He’s the only leader speaking for Toronto. Tom’s all about investing in cities, he says that Toronto is the most important city in Canada. And I can tell you that if as a writer I said that I’d be in big trouble and they wouldn’t be talking to me in Vancouver or Sudbury or anywhere other than here. But when Tom says that I know he’s speaking in shorthand.”
Liz is glowering, get a move on.
“He’s saying what’s good for Toronto is good across the country because we’re living in an urban age and we need infrastructure and parks and better schools and to make cities more liveable for everybody.”
All right, motormouth, spit it out.
“But what I really like is that when Tom talks about infrastructure, really he’s talking about people—not just about concrete and transit, but about health care and pharmacare and care for seniors and good jobs and all the things that make lives of the community better.”
You’re drifting. Close.
“Is there anything on your mind I should take back to the team? No? You’re sure? Well, here, you keep this card. There’s my number and do use it. Call and share anything that comes to mind—enjoy the evening!”
“Not bad,” says Liz, “but too long.”
After six hours we have completed the poll.
“Four should have been enough,” says Liz.
—
For all its wealth, and maybe because of it, the riding had few public venues suitable for the all-candidates debates important to any campaign. For Toronto’s problem is that if you have a cottage to go to, and in the winter would rather be in New York or Florida, then you’re not going to be spending a whole lot of time loving the city you don’t have to be in, or finding places to get together with communities you’re de facto not much interested in, and that the lax sprawl of streets does not obligate you to meet. All-candidates debates are shortcuts to being recognized by more people than you would meet at the door—a chance of press coverage, too—and I found myself envying the neighbouring ridings of University—Rosedale and Toronto Centre that, due to their large student populations and pockets of greater community activism, had more. The Holy Blossom Temple, a synagogue with a very powerful congregation, had arranged an all-candidates debate for September 1, the date an exciting one to look forward to because it felt key and the proper moment of our campaign’s debut. But, curiously, the synagogue had initially cast the debate with politicians from outside the riding: Joe Oliver, the sitting Conservative minister of finance, who lived in the riding and was a member of the congregation but represented, just to the north, Eglinton—Lawrence; Marco Mendicino, who had bested Trudeau’s pick, Eve Adams, to contest that same riding for the Liberals; and Olivia Chow, the NDP candidate for Spadina—Fort York, whose team had passed the acting chief rabbi, Michael Satz’s, invitation to participate on to me. There were also several big churches in the riding—notably the First Unitarian Congregation of Toronto, at which an all-candidates panel on the environment was booked to take place, and the St. Michael and All Angels Anglican Church, where nothing was booked at all. Beyond these venues were a good dozen high schools, some of Canada’s most exclusive private ones in their number, interested in acquainting their not yet eligible voters with candidates on the job. The only other forum of note was Wychwood Barns, formerly a streetcar maintenance facility and remodelled to be the site of artists’ studios, a small park and, on Saturdays, a vibrant farmers’ market.
The Stop Farmers’ Market at Wychwood Barns (its official name) is ridiculously pleasant to canvass, and today I have a mole in my ranks. She’s “American Sarah,” the daughter of friends from Massachusetts, whom I think of as my very own “activist funded by foreign money,” or however Harper described environmentalists some time back. American Sarah, in her twenties, quit her New York job as an executive assistant to a comfortable member of the one percent and did not need the nightmare on the horizon of Donald Trump to look to Canada for redemption. She’s loving the campaign and working outdoors. At the market, I’ve been showing off the cornucopia of August and September, our Canadian calendar’s short paradise months. Even if my entreaties fall on deaf ears, I explain to Sarah, we can shop—berries, corn, peas, greens, peaches, tomatoes—who’d turn this good work down? Despite the friendliness and the banter, coming to us easily, we’re baffled that the market supervisor seems to be doing everything her position allows to impede us—no signs, don’t stand here, don’t stand there, you’re in the way, you’re blocking traffic, etc, etc. So we learn to identify her coming and to move back onto grass officially the park’s and not the market’s and to charm as we are able. And inevitably, since the site is pleasant not just for the NDP, I meet my political rivals there. Kevin Farmer, the spritely, affable candidate for the Green Party of Canada, tells me he is having a hard time acquiring the requisite two hundred signatures for Elections Canada, so I add mine and tell him I’ve been making a point of mentioning at the door that he needs them, which is true. We are collegial from the start, perhaps because we understand our shared outsiders’ position. Marnie MacDougall has a broad, confident smile, but is shorter than I expected and accompanied by a rather intimidating church secretary type. She is dressed in a blue blazer and skirt ensemble that must be hot but, seven years in Panama behind her, she is able to carry it off. We chat briefly, and I tell her that, regardless of how the campaign transpires, whatever comments I end up making should be understood as expressions of party, not personal, differences. And it is at the farmers’ market, too, that I first encounter my Liberal counterpart, Carolyn Bennett, appearing in a blaze of red. (I’d not yet found the orange Italian bomber jacket that became my own NDP suit of armour.) I repeat to Bennett what I had said to MacDougall and then, because I want to be able to debate her and not a Liberal candidate from another riding, at Holy Blossom Temple, I ask why Marco Mendicino is on the slate. She seems surprised, even taken aback—I know my mention will be enough for her party machine to have her replace Mendicino—and, unwisely, she accepts my challenge to a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors. One of my team promptly tweets the video record of the NDP’s shocking win-draw-win upset over the eighteen-year incumbent, the harmless reaction immediate:
@AdamCF: Love the collegiality between @noahrichler and @CarolynBennett on the #StPauls campaign trail #Cdnpoli
Such small pleasures. I knew how unlikely were my chances of victory—the campaign’s early observers probably did too—so figured ambushes like these were permissible. We are still in the early days; no need for the tough to get going. But what I had not counted on was just how quickly I would start to believe that victory actually might be possible. I was learning that the candidate must believe: how else to ask a team
, in good faith, to join the cause? Believing the outrageous makes it all so much easier.
—
It wasn’t only larger community forums that Toronto—St. Paul’s lacked. The smaller, intimate venues practical for the pub nights that we were planning were also few in number and clustered mainly along St. Clair Avenue, west of our office and north towards Eglinton. Catherine had figured out, by now, that we would not have the money to pay her—not for the grand fundraising schemes anyway—but had been keen on the idea of pub nights from the start and, a good sport, was aware that time to plan them was short and running out. She hustled me into her car to look for venues where they might happen: maybe one on LGBTQ issues with the Now magazine writer Susan Cole, an able interlocutor and activist in the riding. Maybe an evening bilingue, or one with “Our Canada” for a theme. We visited a couple of the bars along St. Clair Avenue West, where we thought an evening about immigration or Bill C-51 would work, and then on to the district of high-rises around Yonge Street and Mt. Pleasant Road, where aspiring young professionals and Bay Street workers not yet with families or houses of their own tend to congregate in loud bars with overhead televisions and the notion of a sports-themed evening seemed apt.
I liked that Catherine’s solution was to step up and make shit happen, and now here she was driving me up around the northwest end of the riding in which the party traditionally fared better: lower income, immigrants, working class. This was the part of the district that I knew the least but that interested me the most. There were manifold bars, church halls, restaurants and family-owned businesses—germane, as we had a small business policy in the platform and many were struggling to get by. Behind the busier thoroughfares of Dufferin, Eglinton, Oakwood and Vaughan were residential streets where houses had beguiling displays of ceramic statuary in their front yards—of the Virgin, of course, but also animals, buildings, ships and a soccer-playing boy in an Argentine uniform. At Five Points, a street junction with—well, the name makes it clear—was a tavern with its front windows open to the sidewalk. It had the air of a “local” in which a pub night with a “Black Lives Matter” or police injustice theme seemed appropriate, and among the contacts Raymond was pushing was a local reggae band—Mike Garrick and the Posse—that I thought might go down well. The place was empty but for a few regulars at the long bar and, I’d noticed too late, a makeshift altar on a table by the opposite wall. On it were cards and vases of flowers set beneath the photograph of a woman I recognized from a story that had run in the Toronto Star the week before. She’d been killed in a drive-by shooting near the grounds of the Canadian National Exhibition, the fair on Lakeshore Boulevard, after a taxi had refused to pick her up. The young African-Canadian woman, it was clear, had been a server here.
“Talk to the owner,” said Catherine, motioning me with a nod of her head towards the woman behind the bar. “Tell her who you are. She’ll want to know.”
I did so, but awkwardly, my politician’s instincts not yet honed. I introduced myself, expressed commiserations, settled the bill and left. I’d been a lousy journalist on many occasions—unable to ask the big question or prompt the tears, not wanting to be a nuisance. Leaving a person to grieve privately seemed the better, more proper way to behave. But then I learned that a lot of the time people want to speak, want to be asked, want to share their grief; I’d make a better candidate in time.
—
Creedance, volunteer:
My first time canvassing for Noah was my first time canvassing for anything. I was nervous, as I wasn’t sure what to expect. I walked up and down seventeen floors of an apartment building on Vaughan Road with my mom. I’d start at one end of the hall and my mom Janet at the other end and by around the tenth floor we had a rhythm going. Even the barking dogs and screaming kids didn’t break our focus and it seemed like we’d get out of the building in another thirty minutes unscathed—until, that is, around the thirteenth floor. I heard a half laugh or half scream, I wasn’t sure, from mom’s end of the hall and walked over to see what startled her. I was greeted by a man standing in his doorway with no teeth and stark-naked except for the pool shoes. I can’t say we were excited to see a toothless man’s scrotum before dinner, but he was more than ecstatic to see us holding our clipboard and pamphlets at the door. He was a huge Richler fan, he said.
—
Outing number two: Poll 214.
The smells, I’ll not forget: the stuffiness of flights of stairs in three-storey apartment buildings that, with their windows facing up to the sun but apartment doors locked, act like greenhouses, the fecund heat cooking overly worn shoes and the assorted detritus of family living left on mats. The thick air of corridors in the taller apartment blocks carries the odours of musty cabbage on the top floors, bleach in the basements. Occasionally, stairwells, unheated, offer the respite of cleaner, circulating breezes.
And when the door opens, for a caregiver usually, a wall of dead, used air comes at you in all its fetid, de-oxygenated saturation, telling you that the door is hardly ever opened at all—that the windows are locked shut, and that the air conditioning, if it ever existed, stopped working long ago or isn’t turned on because it costs too much. You can tell by the hoarding that’s going on the degree to which tenants have given up on the world outside—and the better part of the world on them. Oh, the odd havens apartments become.
The Persian man with the walker and a mattress stripped bare—no need for sheets in the overheated studio—but cages for twenty birds, the room cacophonous with chirping and smelling of their excrement.
The Portuguese grandfather with the white hair of his chest sprouting over the top of his black apron, it’ll do for a shirt, and who, with thick Coke-bottle glasses on, appears oddly like a welder taking a break from the job. Really, he’s making lunch and complaining vociferously about the rent.
The Caribbean-Canadian woman in a wheelchair, she’s in her seventies and ailing, and she’s a data miner’s algorithmic dead end because, in all probability, there will be no one to tell I came by.
These apartments’ smells are of loneliness, but their residents open their front doors and treat us with grace.
—
Mulcair has said he won’t participate in a debate on women’s issues without his target, Stephen Harper, there. The Up for Debate women’s group spokesperson, Jackie Hansen, is disappointed, but Mulcair has proposed a “Plan B” series of one-on-one conversations instead. It’s uncomfortable, the news. At the office, I pull out the “Issues” memoranda Wendy and the crew have left in the envelope pinned to the wall with my name affixed—comments and queries from voters I am to phone back and address.
Joyce is “VERY CONCERNED ABOUT INCREASED POWER AND CONTROL IN THE PRIME MINISTER’S OFFICE, THE REDUCED ROLE OF THE CABINET AND THE ELECTED MEMBERS OF PARLIAMENT, TOO MUCH SECRECY, OMNIBUS BILLS I WOULD VERY MUCH LIKE TO KNOW THE POSITION OF THE NDP ON THIS MATTER AS IT WILL CERTAINLY INFLUENCE MY VOTE.”
Hayley says, “What a mess this election is! Having considered the options carefully, I am voting NDP—Noah Richler, you have my vote!”
Erin writes, “I’m disappointed and upset to hear that Tom Mulcair declined to participate in an extremely important public debate on women’s issues. Although I understand he doesn’t want to attend debates Harper won’t be at, a national conversation about women’s issues is sorely needed and Mulcair’s silence at this time is seriously concerning. Please, the NDP should reconsider.”
Subir is “worried about Mulcair’s position on Israel,” but Wendy already told him that the leader’s position is balanced and “he took a large sign.”
Edouardos is “concerned about politicians who forget working people between elections and wants to talk to Noah to help him decide.”
Wilhelm writes, “WE THE AVERAGE WORKING-CLASS PEOPLE HAVE TO WAKE UP AND RECOGNIZE THE ONLY TRUE ALTERNATIVE FOR A BETTER TRUE DEMOCRATIC AND PEOPLE-FRIENDLY ADMINISTRATION. REPLACING TWEEDLE-DUM WITH TWEEDLE-DEE WILL NOT IMPROVE THE ECONOMIC AND S
OCIAL CONDITIONS FOR SOCIETY.
“TWEEDLE-DUM OR TWEEDLE-DEE?
“OUR CHOICE MUST BE THE NDP!”
Anna writes, “We represent a wide range of voters who are interested in detailed coverage of parties and their candidates. Our communities include Russians, Ukrainians, Jewish [sic], Belorussians, Moldavians, Azerbaijans, Georgians, Armenians, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Tajiks, Kirghiz, Turkmens, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, and also Abkhaz, Adyghes, Bashkirs, Bulgarians, Buryats, Chechens, Chinese, Chuvash, Cossacks, Evenks, Kalmyks, Lezgins, Ossetians, Roma, Tatars, Udmurts and Yakuts. Please let us know when you are available for the meeting, we look forward to hearing from you soon.”
—
Outing number three: Poll 078.
The streets of Toronto have about them the dreamy pace of late summer relaxing into fall. There is the sense of an impending transition, a blooming of the light that cannot keep, but the election is still far away and the canvassing still has the air of a rehearsal rather than discussions seriously considered. A couple in a souped-up Toyota pulls into the driveway of the house where I am knocking, and the pair proceeds to neck within it. Hanging about for them to finish, to linger and see who’s who—if they’re on the list and which way they intend to vote—feels, well, inappropriate. A few houses down and a couple of income strata up, there’s a party going on. Three gay couples are drinking away the afternoon and seriously pissed. A stack of plasterboard sheets for their Designer Guys refit occupies the front room and the door is wide open to the summer air and to me. They invite me to choose from the array of bottles of wine and beer sitting on the kitchen island counter, and one fella makes a half-hearted attempt to debate doctor-assisted dying but it’s too much of an effort and I leave the waning day to the partying bunch.
A senior Italian couple is sunning on their concrete front porch. They have kind faces and are wearing matching scarlet pullovers. “Siamo canadesi,” the husband says. “Siamo arrivati cinquantasette anni fa. Essendo canadesi possiamo votare—e lo facciamo. In quanto cittadini canadesi è nostra responsabilità.” I congratulate them, ask after their children and the part of Italy they left behind. The woman goes into the house and returns with a letter from Toronto Hydro advising her she is eligible for a rebate and how to collect it, but the letter is in English and she doesn’t understand it. I call the number and mediate and it feels like one of the better things I have done all day.