The Candidate

by Noah Richler

  (At my nomination, an Italian-Canadian friend had explained this part of the riding to me. “If someone accuses you of being a champagne socialist,” he said, “tell him, No—Prosecco!”)

  The sun is setting gloriously, slowly—as if the day itself might fall asleep and forget to finish the job. I meet the barista of a downtown coffee shop where I am a regular, who laughs and welcomes me to the riding; at another house, a former work colleague, a kind and affecting woman who tells me she’s working for a Christian NGO distributing aid in Africa, no surprise, says she wept when she learned I was running. Along a short cul-de-sac, two small Filipino children play. One of them has his forearm in a cast and leads me up the drive and around the back of a small bungalow where, under the shade of a vinyl awning, two women are rocking on a swinging bench as one of their husbands grills chicken, pork and small steaks on a charcoal barbecue. They insist that I join them, and the other man fetches a soft drink from a cooler inside the back door. “No election,” the woman says, “not Canadian.” But I accept the invitation to eat anyway. It’s too perfect a close of day and, soliciting as I may be for votes, I’m also doing this to meet Canada, the country I love. These small encounters—these views from the street—leave occasionally joyous imprints of singular experiences. I ask for seconds. Sarah is with me today and she is shaking her head—she knows this is not the job—but I am oblivious and mulling over how many Filipinos engage in “precarious” work and, unrepresented, are the party’s natural franchise. I am eating more because I want them to know I care—and, besides, I’m enjoying the food. I shake the family’s hands, sign the kid’s cast and move on.

  —

  Dale and Laura-Lee, volunteers:

  Canvassing gave us a sense of pride as we walked house to house with a purpose, decked out in NDP memorabilia. One homeowner even offered my partner and me some tea and cupcakes, though I also learned that politics has its own versions of your typical comic book nerds. I learned quite a bit about each party and everything they strived to accomplish in the election before now and the one before that. But there was one moment that I will never forget. We entered an area heavily populated with the Conservatives, blue signs, some lawns even had four signs on each corner of the lawn, so I turned to my partner and said “Bike faster, our orange is starting to stand out and I don’t want to get shot today.” You see, I’m Aboriginal, my partner is Aboriginal-Jamaican. Haha! A couple like us has to think about these things. But our exuberant display of colour was also providing us cover. It was rush hour, and we received a cacophony of honks of approval and a few celebratory thumbs up. It was a ton of fun painting the town orange. I’d do it again.

  —

  Night comes on and I petition a young black woman at her open window and, looking up, feel oddly as if I am serenading her. I like these streets, like the people—have fantasies about attaching speakers to a car or small truck and blasting my politico’s message in Portuguese or Italian, not English, evoking politics as they were done in the Caribbean or the Old Country and winning me votes, surely. But, for the time being, more conventional canvassing will have to do. I knock on the door of one house with baskets of geraniums hanging from the brown-painted metal railings of its verandah, and a woman steps out and calls to her neighbour because I’ll want to talk to Luca. A stocky man in his sixties whom I can only see vaguely in the half-light strides straight at me and, as he stands a step below with one hand on the railing, it occurs to me in the fast seconds that no one has tried to hit me yet. But, instead, Luca launches into a tirade about winter trucks that clear the snow off the streets of rich people’s houses but not his. I commiserate and talk about the NDP’s plans for infrastructure and the state of cities and he tells me that he knows politicians, I’ll only come around once every four years, and I reply in Italian I’ll be back sooner than that for us to drink wine insieme and eat the pomodori I know he is cultivating in his back garden. He laughs heartily and we’re pals. He slaps me on the shoulder and then embarks, in Italian and English, on a screed about new immigrants to Canada freeloading and refusing to do the work his family did to build the country. When he starts to refer more specifically to blacks and Jews I give a discreet nod to my canvassing aide, a bright young LGBTQ student, indicating that, amused and unintimidated as she may be, it is time for us to extricate ourselves. The street slopes southward and, at the corner of the block, a couple of young men are standing inside their small garden’s fence and holding glasses in their hands, one of them leaning at an improbable angle born of several stiff drinks. I introduce myself, and the fella with the beard tells me his name is Yossef and that he will be a citizen four days before the election.

  “Congratulations, Yusuf,” I say.

  “Yusuf?” he repeats, making a play of stroking his beard with his free hand. “Yusuf? You think I am a terrorist? It’s Yossef.”

  I make a joke of it, he seems game, and ask what has brought him from Israel to Canada. We talk about the impossibility of the situation in the Middle East for a while, and when he asks about the NDP’s position I speak (sadly, again) of the two-state solution we’d encourage and he tells me I should put up a sign. Corner lots are choice in the signs war and this pleases me, but I feel obliged to be candid.

  “A lot of Jews in the riding will be upset with you.”

  Yossef laughs.

  “Why?” he asks. And then, making quotation marks in the air with his fingers, “because Harper’s my ‘best friend’?”

  —

  We feel better off inside, though the trials of community housing are testing. There is wailing in the corridor and suspicion behind doors of apartments we have seen people enter but that are silent when we knock. At one, the door does open and a squat Trinidadian man with a thick neck and stumpy legs is standing in shorts beside his Chinese-Canadian wife who covers her mouth and lets out a muffled laugh as I ask her name because her false teeth are not in. She apologizes and goes off to insert them. We talk at the threshold—he’s a TTC engineer and a sympathetic man—and he invites me in. I was told never to do so, and typically I would not have done, but he is imploring me to see his paraplegic son. The father points to the scuffed walls of the neatly kept but tiny apartment and explains the son has severe muscular dystrophy and uses a wheelchair. The wife comes back with her teeth in and I say yes, I’ll come in, what else was I going to do, and she ushers me in to the bedroom where a small television sits on the dresser and the son’s wheelchair is wedged between the door and the side of the bed—the only place it fits. The father tells me he works nights in order to be with his boy during the day because his wife has shifts cleaning. His son is twenty-two, wasn’t expected to live past fourteen, and for years the family has been on a list for a larger apartment that would allow him to navigate corridors without bumping the walls, but still they are waiting. They’ve been told they might have a bigger apartment in two years if they’re lucky. The wife swivels the chair around and pushes the boy’s head back up each time it falls to the weaker side of his atrophied neck. She is telling him to say hello, and I am struck by how brusque her handling of the son’s head appears, but also that I am in no position to judge and not for a moment do I assume the action is not loving. The man asks me nothing, just tells me his story.

  As we leave, I tell myself it’s not true, John Donne. Some of us are islands. I am sick with pathos but also filled with bafflement and wonder at the love that is possible in such straits.

  —

  Mansions, townhouses, apartments, rooms; SUVs, beaten cars, buses, bicycles, scooters, canes. Beautiful and wealthy people; the lumping lumpe​nprol​etariat. As a writer, I am already aware of the fallacy of representation. All it takes is a flight from Toronto to Halifax to Vancouver to Regina, the plane descending over scattered farms and then sprawling suburbs and dense downtowns, to feel humbled at the best of times but mostly defeated. What makes me think I know anyone? What right do I have to put forward some abstraction, political or literary, on be
half of other people? Whom do I speak for but myself? And now here I was imagining that I might do so as a politician? Let it be a conceptual worry for another day: all we can do is speak what we believe to be right and hope our message rises above the cacophony of the rest at the foot of the Tower of Babel.

  No, like a writer, the candidate does not overestimate whatever influence may be had at the door—though perhaps behaving as if the influence is already yours is what makes the winner. Be bold.

  —

  Things I said at the doors of tonier places:

  “If Harper was my investment manager, I’d sack him. He’s put all our resources in one stock and it’s tanked. Think of the invisible taxes we’re paying! Think of the opportunity costs of Harper’s intransigence! If ten years ago Harper had said, ‘Look, the oil sands are a problematic resource, but they’re also a window of opportunity for us to be able to move towards cleaner, greener technologies and pay for them, so side with us, because we’re going to do our best to exploit them responsibly for the benefit of all Canadians and our children,’ rather than demonizing anybody who was the slightest bit environmentally concerned, then the oil sands wouldn’t be the most reviled energy project in the world—and we’d not be in the trouble with pipelines that we find ourselves in now.”

  Or, “The politics of division are getting us nowhere—Harper not shaking Putin’s hand, or looking menacingly through binoculars on the prow of a ship in the Baltic at Soviet forces he can do nothing about—that’s not a foreign policy. And, again, think about the opportunities such politics have cost us. Canada has been Cuba’s best friend for over fifty years, but it took Obama, of all people, to bully Harper into working with Cuba at the recent Summit of the Americas. The net result of Conservative intransigence is that the economic benefits of our long relationship with Cuba will go to the United States, not us.”

  Or, “Look, here’s the truth about the Iran deal: we’re talking about it as if we have a say, but we don’t. Nothing Israel or Canada says matters anymore. The rest of the world is fed up with no progress and has put us on the sidelines of a game where once we were players. Harper has made ‘soft power’ and ‘honest brokering’ dirty words, but that’s where our strengths lie. We’re not big enough to make a military difference, but we used to be respected for working for peace and can be still. What the NDP knows is we’re here to build bridges, not walls.”

  —

  And, yes, the moral moments:

  “History is a sequence of moral moments. Let me explain—markets may not be ‘moral,’ but the decisions we make in them are. In England in 1847, the Shaftesbury Act was passed, forbidding underage children and pregnant girls and women to be employed in the mines. The owners of capital complained, they always do, that the changes would wreck their businesses, but the law didn’t—and, besides, we knew the law to be right. Then, a hundred and fifty years ago, they went to war in America over the decision that it was wrong not to pay people, let alone own them, because their skin was black, and again the owners of capital—the slaveholding plantation owners—threatened that their businesses would be wrecked. That was a second moral moment! And in Canada, when the NDP’s Tommy Douglas helped introduce free health care, businesses and many doctors complained, but again we did it because we believed it was right. It was a moral moment, and, today, we have another. Tom is asking corporations to pay a bit more tax to bring in more revenue, yes, and to get what Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of Canada, called ‘dead money’—more than six billion dollars of it!—moving again, because the environment and our need for green infrastructure is presenting us with another moral moment. Corporations will tell you they can’t afford it, but they can—and don’t they always tell you that?”

  —

  Things I said at the door that I did not altogether believe:

  That we were in a recession.

  That we should categorically pull out of the fight against ISIL.

  That we needed to fully restore postal service.

  That we did not need to cancel the existing child benefit.

  —

  “Okay, Janet, I have a problem with Mulcair saying we’ll hire 2,500 more RCMP. There are way too many police already. Three on bicycles come down my street together just to hand out parking tickets.”

  “You say that hiring new officers is the quickest way to address the RCMP’s gender and First Nations imbalance.”

  “Okay. That works.”

  “Oh, and say Justin, not Trudeau. When you say ‘Trudeau’ you’re helping the brand.”

  Right. The brand: Justin, young and “not ready”; Mulcair, the statesman. The politician with experience.

  “Who do you want to see standing beside Angela Merkel?” I’d say at the door. “Justin or Tom?”

  —

  Other newspapers have taken the Toronto Star’s cue and are paying Toronto—St. Paul’s a bit of attention: the Jewish Forward, the National Post and the Town Crier. Gary Clement, the brilliant National Post cartoonist, has agreed to join me for a day of canvassing with a view to a full-page op-ed spread and Jonathan Kay, editor-in-chief of The Walrus, is booking time, too. In the Post City chain of Toronto neighbourhood newspapers, the former Liberal spin doctor Warren Kinsella, a perpetual blogger, is having his say:

  POST CITY TORONTO

  Federal Election 2015: A look at five bellwether races that could decide the next prime minister

  Toronto—St. Paul’s

  What does Warren think?

  Writers seldom make a happy transition to political life (e.g., Messrs. Dion, Ignatieff), but Richler carries a famous surname. Carolyn Bennett may not be well-loved, but she has name recognition to spare. That, plus a lot of on-the-ground experience, will make this a big challenge for Richler. My prediction: He’ll say something controversial. Controversy is great for writers but not so much for aspiring politicians.

  Eric Emin Wood, the reporter from the Town Crier, also calls, as arranged, saying he has just a few lines so to keep it short. But I still haven’t learned how to and, besides, I am speaking as much for Phil, the seasoned speechwriter in our campaign management trio, politely doing his best to appear not to be listening. I want Phil to know that someone capable is in the candidate’s seat—the one with the tiniest desk in the office, the size of a bedside table, wedged in between a pillar and the wall—and that I know how to talk to media. I am running, I tell Wood, because the Canada I have grown up in is seriously under threat. I explain that politics are derived from principles, etc., etc.

  “What do you think of Justin Trudeau?” Wood asks. Well, he’s no Boris Johnson, I want to say, but that reference, well out of the riding, would likely be held against me. Imagine the story you’d like to see.

  So, instead:

  “Canadian democracy is in a sorry state if, in a country of thirty-five million, we turn for a leader to the same family twice. And saying they did so in the States with the Bush family doesn’t excuse it.”

  We talk for a good half hour and then finally the reporter cuts off my verbal diarrhea, saying he already has more than enough.

  “Keep your answers short,” says Phil in a low voice, listening after all.

  “And be careful about what you’re saying,” says Janet. “What about Michael Layton, who succeeded his father, Jack, on the Toronto City Council?” She is too modest, or perhaps tactical, to say, “So what about me, my father David, my brothers Michael and Stephen, my nephew Avi?”

  —

  “Ready for Change,” the first of the Toronto rallies, takes place at the 99 Gallery on Sudbury Street in Parkdale, where longtime NDP fixture Peggy Nash is the incumbent serving the second of two terms interrupted by her electoral loss in 2008 and a stint, until 2011, as president of the party. Mulcair’s campaign bus is parked outside, Andrew Cash arrives on his bicycle and Charlie Angus, a musician, author and MP for Timmins—James Bay since 2004, scrutinizes me in not altogether welcoming fashion at the door. Inside, the atmos
phere is excited and busy and Angus’s well-received book of Aboriginal residential school experience, Children of the Broken Treaty, is arranged on a bookseller’s table in the entryway beside piles of Mulcair’s Strength of Conviction.

  All is new to me: the chairs on risers on four sides of the small stage where Mulcair will speak; the wall of photographers; the supporters in NDP-orange T-shirts with signs and placards with the name of the candidate and riding each is there to represent. I find a place in the couple of rows by the stage reserved for candidates, and then Cash and Nash stride up to the stage to excite the crowd. The teleprompter begins to roll and cues them to ask, “Are you ready, Toronto?” Tonight Mulcair is preceded by Stephen Lewis, they cottoned on, and he delivers a barnburner of a speech—“the best of the election so far,” TVO’s Steve Paikin will write.

  “There surely has never been a time in Canadian political history when a prime minister has brought his office into such disrepute,” bellows Lewis. “Stephen Harper has played the hand of fear. It isn’t that it’s just unworthy of a prime minister—it’s actually, when you think of it, shocking, mortifying, that a prime minister of Canada would descend to such political depths in the lust to retain power.” Harper, says Lewis, has left “a divided and intolerant inheritance for our country.” He has “trained his political guns on his own citizens.” But now, Lewis repeats his mantra, he who had thought “not in my lifetime!”—who’d told his children “not in theirs”—was suddenly hopeful.