The Candidate

by Noah Richler

  And then it is the turn of “Tom Mulcair, Canada’s NEXT PRIME MINISTER!” The Montreal musician Sam Roberts’s hit “We’re All in This Together” blares from the speakers and a phalanx of party operatives and security and cameramen enters the quadrant of supporters standing and applauding, me among them. For a moment, only the top of Mulcair’s head is visible, his wife Catherine by his side, until the leader appears out of the throng to smile and turn and shake each of the candidates’ hands, mine included. “Are you having fun?” he says—he is—before he takes the stage and holds the microphone to his chest like it was a birthday gift, absorbing the love before he finally waves at the crowd to sit down. Mulcair addresses the room, but nervously. He has mounted the stage without the tactical interlude of an Anne Fenn to make the transition to his lesser oratory easier, and he’s underperforming for a moment, but we ignore it. He smiles again, the teleprompter is rolling and I learn to clap on command. Learn to clap till my hands are sore. Learn to stand up. Learn to sit down. Learn to stand up and clap again. We’re at a church of the faithful with a rousing minister and a congregation ready for the miracle of an NDP government to bring change to Ottawa! Stand up! Clap again! You think your hands are sore? Clap some more.

  And then my first rally is over. An aide motions me to follow and join the train of candidates heading behind a couple of screens at the foot of the emptying hall to a room where I learn—quickly, good lad—to be a mannequin, arranged in a tight row behind the federal party leader fielding questions from Canada’s francophone and anglophone media. Then, my initiation not yet complete, the aide gestures to me to follow again, this time for a photo of the Toronto—St. Paul’s candidate standing alone with Mulcair, just in case, you never know, I might win, or maybe for the files. I ask for another to be taken of us with Pinhas. I’ve seen what being the artist’s partner is like; know that in the shadows, there is a price to be paid.

  —

  Jonathan Kay has been booked in to accompany me on a canvass of one of the riding’s NDP-friendliest polls.

  “He’s a journalist,” I say. “He’s not stupid. He’ll figure it out. You can’t just send me into areas of support. We need to show him the gamut.”

  —

  The debate at the Holy Blossom Temple is approaching and animating the team because we are still at the stage where ideas—intellect—are primary and have not ceded the ground to the “calculated algebra of poll-by-poll analyses” and the interparty acrimony that will follow. But in truth, I have no experience to alert me to the inevitability of this. There are seventeen-year-olds working on my campaign with a greater understanding than I of the “pugilism” the team will inevitably face. In this blissful, exciting moment—the closest the campaign will come to the panels to which broadcasting and the literary life have made me accustomed—it is entirely possible to believe candidates have their own thoughtful contributions to make, beyond being simple party pushers at the door. There is ferment, there is discussion, and the full import of the thirty-odd “backgrounders” distributed in piles by topic the breadth of my dining room table has not struck home. They are intermingled with academic papers on “Canadian values” and “the common good” and even more dialectic material suggesting a degree of knowledge that will, of course, never be necessary for the parroting the party would prefer. I have not learned this yet, and Janet, the campaign manager charged with preparing me, is so keen and intelligent, so honed by her family’s generations of dedication to fundamentally altering ideas about social democracy at home and abroad, that my cocoon is for the time being a comfortable one. I am in my element.

  With less than a week to go before the debate, Janet has arranged for me to meet with a thought gang of her own making, composed of herself, Doug, Sean, Alberto Quiroz (a Mexican-Canadian member of the congregation and the party) and Josh Scheinert, a young investment and human rights lawyer and foreign policy buff whom Craig Scott had taught at Osgoode Hall and for whom he is trying to find an NDP team. We assemble in the small, windowless backroom, where Josh is seated at the table already. A smart, good-looking Jewish twenty-something, he has an excellent c.v. and Janet’s favour, I can tell. He’s confident, even precocious, though maybe I am feeling my years.

  “I was a lawyer for the Bilcon appeal,” says Josh.

  “And we lost,” I say, thinking back to what Elizabeth May told me. “That’s a drag.”

  “No. I was on the Bilcon team. I wanted to tell you because I know how much the story concerned you.”

  In any other instance, this would be a major case of Josh and me getting off on the wrong foot, but we have no time to deal with anything but the matter at hand. I’m nervous about the Holy Blossom event, remembering the sorts of responses I’d occasionally get from Canadian Jews to mistakes I might have made in columns written for the National Post on subjects close to the Diaspora’s heart—like, say, when I misdated Jerusalem’s Second Temple:

  YOU ARE NOT YOUR FATHER. SHUT UP AND WRITE SOMETHING ELSE.

  Such charm—and what I thought we might encounter at the synagogue. We discuss ISIL and, of course, Palestine. Alberto talks of the synagogue’s Tikkun Olam (“repair the world”) program and the other community work it does that speaks to the congregation’s actually quite progressive nature. He cites Deuteronomy, “Justice, justice shall you pursue,” and I feel marvellously affected by the simple fact of Jewish scholarship. We rehearse the party’s two-state solution line, and Sean reminds me of the fact of Mulcair’s wife, Catherine, being the daughter of Holocaust survivors. We talk about the temple’s educational programs for the community, and then the Gaza conflict. I say that I cannot brook conversation about Israel and Palestine that does not acknowledge that Gaza is, at times, a concentration camp. Josh refers to a past teacher of his who argued that the positive side to the fact of a wall dividing the West Bank from Israelis is that defining a limit in this way at least implicitly acknowledges that the territory on the other side does not belong to them.

  “Give or take a few hundred yards.”

  “But it’s a start.”

  Josh is anticipating that talk of the “Iran Deal”—the agreement for containment of the United States’s and Israel’s historic adversary’s nuclear program—will come up and urges that I “reinforce Obama’s point that Iran is currently a nuclear threshold state and let that fact set the frame for the necessity of pushing forward with a plan that aims to walk that ability backwards.” The audience, he stresses, will want to hear first and foremost about Israel, more than “walls.” He points out that the deal is supported by “many past heads of Israeli security services, including the former Israel Defense Forces Military Intelligence Director Amos Yadlin, former Mossad directors Meir Dagan and Efraim Halevy, and former Shin Bet director Ami Ayalon.”

  The meeting ends, and Josh tells me the NDP’s green policies are what drew him to the party. My sense is that not much I’ve said has impressed him. It’s interesting to be on the other side of this generational wall, and it occurs to me that, more than my discomfort with his work for Bilcon, I may be envious of someone on my team and the admiration Janet seems to hold the fella in. I make small talk, do my best to be nice and confide my insecurities to Doug.

  “He’s a Liberal looking for a job,” says Doug dismissively.

  —

  It is September 1, still the summer side of Labour Day, and half a dozen members of my team, my mother too, are hanging with me in the empty parking lot of the Holy Blossom Temple. Kevin Farmer and his campaign manager, Adam Deutsch, arrive; then the Conservatives, looking wary even though this is (I assume) their natural camp; afterwards, a couple of young Liberals in red shirts. I recognize Bennett’s husband Peter O’Brian, the producer of the classic Canadian film The Grey Fox. Bennett arrives in a loose red coat, the lapels of which are decorated in a black First Nations motif.

  “It’s so much easier for women to dress the part,” says Sarah.

  Bennett’s juniors lead the Liberal MP and h
er husband in and I am left standing with a late-middle-aged man from her coterie. He is holding a copy of my father Mordecai’s “requiem for a divided country,” Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!

  “I’m interested in what your father would have thought about the Sherbrooke Declaration,” he says with an obnoxious, self-satisfied smile, the suggestion being that I am a traitor not just to Canada but to my family.

  “It’s a debate, not a séance,” I say. “We’d have had it out.”

  Inside, only a modest crowd is gathered, these still the holidays and interest in the election still only lukewarm. A bald, surly thirty-something man in a double-breasted suit is sitting on the centre aisle, a PMO operative surely, or at least looking the part. He is emanating an unpleasantness effectively prohibiting any but the brave from sitting near him. My bunch is mostly at the back, waiting for the first question to come to me—about the economy, as arranged—and I handle it nervously, cramming too much in. Then Bennett, two seats to my right, starts. She leans forward and with a chortle says, “I love that every four years I have to reapply for my job!” I cannot believe what I am hearing—your job?—but am too slow to act, no one has interrupted anyone yet, and listen dumbfounded.

  “It’s what I call the ‘St. Paul’s model,’ ” says Bennett, going on about meeting constituents between elections and a proper democracy as if she—not Westminster—invented it.

  I regret that I let the moment pass, though from then on, the debate goes swimmingly. Ed Greenspon, formerly editor-in-chief of The Globe and Mail, is the moderator. Bennett seems startled there is much of a debate on at all, and periodically throws harassed glances across the front of the stage. In between Bennett and me is Farmer, the loquacious Green Party candidate and, to my left, MacDougall.

  Child care comes up and I compare Bennett’s Liberal pamphlet to that of a mortgage broker selling bucket rates—this much of a rebate from the Conservatives, this much from the Liberals. Has politics been reduced to no more than such banal comparison shopping? I ask. The NDP’s child care policy, I say, is not about stuffing money through the door for parents to use as they see fit, as the Liberals and Conservatives are doing, but about the children—about ensuring places as a right, and saying the just society should expect no less. The NDP will fight for children’s rights in the same way that—with a higher percentile of women candidates than any other party—it is doing for women, continuing to lead the fight for gender parity and equal rights.

  “What?” says Bennett, glaring this time in shock. She has pushed for more Liberal women candidates in her role on the party’s Election Readiness Committee, famously fought for Toronto’s Women’s College Hospital to stay open, and I’d been bluffing somewhat. It wasn’t territory I knew rigorously, and I’d made the argument to please my campaign management team, as much as anything else, and to steamroller on. It is a political technique that I’m not altogether comfortable having mastered—the lesson that the appearance of rectitude is often a substitute for the real thing. This I regret a little, though not at all my highlighting of the Liberal sense of entitlement that, I argue, is not a trivial matter of social comportment but a phenomenon with serious political and legislative consequences. To illustrate, I talk about the arrogance of Trudeau trying to impose Eve Adams on the Eglinton—Lawrence riding, close to where we are; of the cynicism of the appointment of the former Toronto police chief Bill Blair as a Scarborough candidate; and then of Bill C-51:

  “It’s not enough to say, ‘Not to worry, we voted for Bill C-51 so that Harper was unable to make hay of it, we’ll fix it in office.’ What if you don’t win office? What happens then?”

  Bennett looks sideways with another frown, invoking the October attack on Parliament and arguing the bill’s importance, alleging the police had evidence leading them to believe an incident was imminent but were unable to act. The Liberal MP Wayne Easter, formerly solicitor general, says Bennett, assured the Liberal caucus that many of the elements of the bill were necessary. I am astonished Bennett has argued outright for the bill and make a note of her having done so for later parries: the laws of an ousted government, no matter the rhetoric, can be awfully convenient to the next.

  Greenspon asks about the Middle East and MacDougall opens her binder to a page that says IF ISRAEL COMES UP, then starts to read from the statements prescribed beneath it. I think of asking, out loud, if she needs help reading her instructions but, because she is a woman, I am worried I’ll come off as patronizing rather than funny, so I don’t. It has been an aim for the evening for me to be the gentleman and stay true to the pledge I made to MacDougall, in particular, at the Wychwood market. But when the subject of missing and murdered Aboriginal women arises and MacDougall starts to read from her binder again with no acknowledgment of the shame of the tragedy and the Conservatives’ willed indifference towards it, instead embarking on the barely tenable sequitur of a security presence in small communities, I decide it is appropriate to intervene and do. I tell her that the Conservatives relinquished the moral right to speak of the horror of the missing and murdered when they refused to hold an inquiry and Harper described the phenomenon as not “a sociological problem.” MacDougall reacts badly, says she is being interrupted and, though I have no regrets about having been rude for a moment, I feel discomfort in the congregation. There is a yearning, not just in the room, for politicians to be civil and, come the end of the evening, a young rabbi speaks for the congregation insisting on the same. But it feels like a victory.

  “The best thing MacDougall can do for you is to canvass,” says Doug.

  We have done well—we’ve won, is the consensus, our triumph made all the more evident by the Conservatives’ hasty exit, though Bennett and O’Brian are polite and chat a bit. Josh has attended to provide a post-mortem, and does so rigorously. “Bennett gave the impression that law enforcement is helpless in the face of terrorism,” he writes. “But that’s bullshit and needs to be called out as such. The Criminal Code provides law enforcement with wide powers to arrest, including preventative arrests, and Bennett should know that—many of the changes were written in by Liberals post-9/11. So is Bennett saying the Liberals did a bad job writing laws to keep us safe? The evidence suggests otherwise. Just look at the Toronto Eighteen, a plot broken up in advance by the police and resulting in charges, convictions and long prison sentences.”

  My own immediate reward is that the battery in our car has died. Like a scene out of Armando Iannucci’s The Thick of It, the BBC’s satirical television series on the tawdriness of political life (and a candidate’s handy primer), Sarah and I spend till well past midnight in the parking lot, having sent everyone else home before we’d realized we were stuck. We contemplate ordering a pizza. We are in good spirits.

  —

  Polls, Various.

  A young woman answers the door. She has a bright, happy smile and eyes that are filled with excitement, but also trust. From Nova Scotia, she is a pianist studying at the University of Toronto. The piano occupies most of the small apartment’s living room. She’s so excited about the election, she says, but not sure in which riding she votes.

  A forty-something man tells me of the sexual abuse he suffered as a child. We discuss his subsequent addiction and rehab, and the difficulty of his finding work. He asks me, of all things, about Harper’s “muzzling of scientists”—an issue that, to my surprise, is repeatedly raised in the initial weeks of the campaign. The catchy phrase, I am learning, has become the accommodating vessel of a plethora of people’s discontents.

  A Quebecker, a photographer, insists I step in. He lectures me about the NDP failing its radical roots—specifically vis-à-vis the environment, the biggest challenge facing the world. No pipelines. Vote Green, I say, I’m fine with that, but make sure you vote. And, by the way, there’s a panel about environmental issues scheduled for late September. Do come.

  A woman is watching the baseball game from her three-wheel scooter parked in front of a wide-screen television. The apa
rtment is well appointed, if a bit pleathery. “Fuck the NDP,” she says. “Fuck politicians. I’m from Thunder Bay and I watched that asshole I went to school with get into council and give millions to the fucking Natives. What about me?”

  A former lawyer, seething, presents me with hundreds of sheets of his one-sided correspondence with the city, Queen’s Park and Ottawa. He’s been unjustly disbarred by the criminal Michael Bryant, he says, that murderer who got off scot-free. Here, take these and if Mulcair answers me, I’ll vote for him.

  On the lawn of a well-to-do home in the affluent northeast part of the riding, the southern end of Leaside, a man with Down syndrome insists we “put a big sign right here,” pointing to the spot where he wants it. We talk for a while and I learn his parents live a couple of streets north, get the address and make a note to call before doing anything about the sign. But I wonder about the ethics of this. Am I being patronizing? Is it not his choice? If it makes him happy, why should I not?

  A Russian-Canadian immigrant who has taught herself English and also Portuguese, the language of commerce and the tavern she owns on Dufferin Street, implores me to come by with someone who speaks the language. You must, she says. But I am in luck. I have Daniyal Ulysses Amed with me. The henna-haired Daniyal is ruminative, exceedingly bright and a tad peculiar. He was born in Lahore, Pakistan, raised there and in Italy, now Canada, and bullied in a few countries, he tells me. Daniyal speaks English, Italian, French, Spanish, Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi, some German—and Portuguese. She is practically weeping when they speak.

  A beautiful young Ethiopian mother is making coffee as she used to in Addis Ababa: beans, home-roasted, the tool to crush them and a brass pot and cups laid out on a mat in her tiny apartment. Her aged mother smiles but is too shy to come out from the kitchen. The children, perhaps seven and eight, aren’t shy at all—precocious, even. One wants to be a doctor, the other a politician. The happiness is infectious.