The Candidate

by Noah Richler

  I’d been starting to enumerate the pros and cons of this strategy when a young, lanky, but solid-looking fella sat down at my table.

  “Are you Noah Richler?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I’m glad you’re running,” he said, introducing himself only as Nick. He was blond, slouched in the other chair and likely in his mid- to late twenties. He had the naturally fit build of a guy who played pickup hockey effortlessly. He wore glasses and a plaid shirt, his arms crossed and legs stretched out before him like he was waiting for nothing in particular.

  “What do you do?” I asked.

  “I’m a film editor,” he said.

  “Oh?” I answered. And then, without a great deal of conviction, “Maybe you could help us out. I’m looking to make a few videos and could use someone who knows the software.”

  Which was all I was expecting: another piece of the puzzle on the cheap. But he was affable and a constituent, and I was relaxed, and so I explained the ideas we had for a spoof remake of the Conservatives’ attack ad “The Interview,” in which a boardroom table of dour accountant types is considering the Liberal Party leader’s job application and decides “Justin’s not ready” but he has “nice hair, though.” We’d imagined a rewrite using much of the same script and a lot of the footage but, rather than Trudeau’s, having Harper’s application repeatedly come up for a variety of positions—as CFO (cueing “Are you nuts? He ordered a thirteen-week election for one that should have taken six. All he does is waste money”), as VP of human resources (“Are you crazy? All he does is make enemies. He’ll treat every Muslim in the building like a threat”). With each, the prime minister’s headshot thrown down and added to the pile of discarded Trudeau applications already on the table in each version. We’d thought of adding celebrities to the table and having the original video’s agitated South Asian, instead of complimenting Justin Trudeau’s hair, ask a question about legalized marijuana. And, I said, we’d been contemplating a second set of “substantive” Charlie Rose–style interview segments in which I’d pronounce on platform issues against a black background as if edited from a conversation with the PBS broadcaster, the point of these to act in counterpoint to the satirical ad and to show that our campaign had substance.

  “Sure, I could do that,” said Nick. He said he did a little animation and had his own studio. “If we need somewhere bigger,” he said, “I have a friend’s we can use.”

  Nick was as appealing as he was understated, though I did not yet know just how much this was the case. We exchanged numbers and he scrawled down his full name—Nick DenBoer—and, hard to forget, the URL of his website: www.​smearballs.​com.

  —

  Back at the office I checked my envelope of telephone calls to return, and on my desk was Sean and Young Ethan’s SWOT analysis that I’d commissioned more than a month before but none of us had followed up on. It had been an exercise in delegation as much as anything and the single page of hyperlinks to which finally I was casting an eye did not appear to amount to much. Their research confirmed that Bennett had voted against Bill C-51, and contained other rudimentary information about my Liberal and Conservative opponents that was also common knowledge. At the foot of it, Ethan and Ethan had cut-and-pasted a few of my Facebook posts:

  February 27, 2015

  So Chelsea football fans have natural partners, n’est-ce pas? May they meet in the Paris Metro and push each other onto the tracks. (What is it about blue and white livery that gets racists going?)

  February 6, 2015

  [a video of Montreal snowplows efficiently at work]

  How I miss this. In Toronto the overpaid incompetents just push the stuff around.

  January 27, 2015

  I blame Stephen Harper PERSONALLY for this. He is a pathological psychopath who I believe wants an attack on Canadian soil to vindicate his paranoiac view of the world and his idiotic policies. We as Canadians are to blame. He brings out the worst in us, has made a travesty of our reputation abroad, but we swallow his bullshit rhetoric and his reward is that we are about to re-elect him. No language is too strong. If this man was leading South Africa during apartheid he would have been unrestrained and history would have vilified his hateful policies and their result. But he leads Canada, we have certain vague traditions he has not yet undone and there he is, still. A vile miscreant who announces foreign policy at high schools rather than Parliament and who pretends to be a champion of free speech even as he ruins it and uses all the thuggish means of government to shut people up. When a bomb blows up here, I put the blame squarely on his shoulders. I have been a champion of Canada all my life. But I wonder if that Canada even exists. Please, please, show me it does.

  Sarah, I recalled, had complained about a couple of these as I was writing them—this the usual scene:

  INT. KITCHEN—MORNING

  The WRITER is in his pyjamas, chuckling to himself and ignoring his wife as he types on his iPhone. SARAH, who has a steady and important job, is smartly dressed.

  SARAH: What are you doing?

  NOAH: Nothing.

  SARAH: What are you doing?

  NOAH: Nothing.

  SARAH: You’re lying. I can tell.

  NOAH: It’s going to be sunny in Nova Scotia.

  SARAH: You’re posting. Don’t.

  SARAH gets up from the table, clearly exasperated.

  SARAH: I’m going to take that machine away from you. The social networks are no place to be funny. Nobody thinks it’s funny except you. How many times do I have to tell you to stay away off the networks? Facebook is for family, Twitter is for cats. Delete what you’re writing, now.

  NOAH: Sure. Okay.

  SARAH leaves. NOAH keeps tapping.

  But I’d altered the settings of my Facebook page from “Public” to “Friends” in early summer and presumably “Fred Checkers” had vetted the posts before I’d been cleared. Not an issue, surely my “Friends” were my friends—and, besides, taking posts down implied a cover-up, the sort of action that had always struck me as more censurable than whatever may have been the original offence.

  I tossed the paper in the bin and checked my email.

  —

  On September 8, 2015, at 5.36 p.m., Nick DenBoer wrote:

  Hi Noah,

  If you want to shoot some interview style Charlie Rose stuff it’s totally doable here. I also have the compositing and animation skills to augment Harper’s attack ads where we could alter or replace the actors to present a new narrative and maybe even sprinkle in some comedy for viral effect.

  A proper skewering of the cringe-worthy messaging the CPC has been putting out this election is sure to resonate with any Canadian with half a brain in their skull.

  Let me know if you want to come by.

  Cheers

  Nick

  —

  Nick showed Doug and me the coach house in a back alley that he’d converted into a modest shooting studio for “green screen” work—in which, as happens with weather broadcasts, an actor is filmed against a green backdrop that, using techniques of “Chroma keying,” allows one background to be substituted for another. Downstairs, where the Corvette parked outside would ordinarily have been stored, was a small studio space with lighting rigs, a couple of single lens reflex cameras on stands, microphones at the ready and green and black backdrops. Upstairs were Nick’s editing suites and a music and audio production setup. Beyond this were his kitchen and living quarters and a pile of laundry he explained a local Portuguese woman came by regularly to pick up, launder and press for a bargain price, “so I don’t need to put in a washing machine or a dryer. Cool, eh?”

  Doug and I were hard put to contain our excitement. We figured out a schedule and left.

  —

  At the Rally for Change that evening, it was the usual jockeying for seats behind the stage and in the cameras’ view, this time at the Harbourfront Westin, and the turn of Quebec MP Ruth Ellen Brosseau and B.C.’s Mira Oreck, the
candidate for Vancouver—Granville, to rouse the faithful and welcome “Canada’s next prime minister!!”

  Murray Brewster, a Canadian Press correspondent who’d been good to me when Afghanistan was his beat, was on the platform of reporters and cameramen. So was the CBC’s James Cudmore—a friend and, years before, the intern I’d hired at the National Post and nicknamed “Sergeant” because the former cadet’s voice boomed so. I’d always liked James a lot, enough so that I’d given him the BBC Radio travelling box that had been with me in Haiti, Rwanda and who knows how many troubled places, as if it were a talisman. Now here he was in the zone and it was my turn to be the intern.

  “What’s going on here?” I asked. “It looks to me to be the same folk every time.”

  “It’s a big game,” said James. “It’s a show organized for the television networks. It’s not made for voters. It’s not even made for newspapers, because the parties have learned that the days when newspapers could afford to cover the rallies are done. Only the networks can. The buildup, the music—the signs people carry—it’s all for television and the hope that the big guy will make the news.”

  “Does the conversation change?”

  “Not really,” said James. “It’s the same conversation, the same people, the same potted protest. Sometimes what we write, maybe what we say to a leader or his aides privately, might change what a party does, but not often.”

  —

  The next day, Anthony Green and Emma Knight came out to canvass Vaughan Road, where large signs for the campaign were multiplying at pleasingly short intervals. Anthony and Emma, now adults, were children of friends and had become friends in their own right. Handily, both were very interested in film and for a while they’d been working on a screenplay together. Anthony had directed several short films and documentaries, including one about the Rolling Stones’ “Bigger Bang” world tour (Salt of the Earth, with Jacob Cohl), and Emma had worked at the International New York Times in Paris for a time. Together, they were co-founders of a cold-pressed juice retail startup and were still finding time to volunteer. They were young and industrious and had organized minds, so I’d asked them if they’d help me out on the video team.

  Emma said, “You know I was delivered by—”

  “—Carolyn Bennett. Yes, yes, of course you were. Who wasn’t?”

  “Do you think that’s an issue?” she said teasingly.

  Anthony asked if I had checked out Nick’s show reel yet. He said, “It’s amazing, what he does. We’re in a whole other stratosphere with this guy.”

  It was true. Nick’s show reel was out of this world and the stuff of a very plastic one—a hilarious and bizarre collection of comic sketches. Footage from late-night interviews and the like was manipulated by savagely distorting the features of celebrities (Hillary Clinton’s eyes, Miley Cyrus’s tongue) or by inserting loosely similar lips of an actor to deliver whatever lines Nick had scripted so that his subjects—Bill Cosby, Brad Pitt, Alex Trebek, Donald Trump—would speak the ridiculous and absurd.

  —

  Nick said his short film The Chickening, already booked in several other festivals, was opening the wildly popular Midnight Madness series of the Toronto International Film Festival, and it was probably not a good idea for him to schedule anything for the weekend. No scripts had been written, so there was no time to do anything on the video front but move forward as if the team had been up and running for weeks. I told Nick we’d be ready to shoot five videos on the Wednesday—three days before his premiere and less than a week off. Now we had an editor and a studio, and the boon we did possess was production experience. Anthony and Emma were keen and on board, Doug had worked on The Newsroom with Ken Finkleman and co-written (with Patrick Graham) Afghan Luke, an underrated dark comedy about a maverick Canadian reporter in Afghanistan, and I’d produced and written radio features and documentaries for years.

  And we had a plan. We’d already settled on Bill C-51, the environment, the plight of seniors, the muzzling of scientists and the general degradation of Canadian parliamentary democracy as subjects for the substantive videos, but we’d taken too long to spoof “The Interview,” the Conservatives’ attack ad, and the parodying of it was already hackneyed. The Liberals themselves had turned the slogan “Justin’s not ready” to their advantage in the first advertisement of their campaign (“I’m not ready to stand by as our economy slides into recession; not ready to watch hard-working Canadians lose jobs….I am ready to do what my opponents won’t”) and, in the week preceding our planned shoot, NDP headquarters had put out its own limp spoof of the CPC video, neither effective nor amusing, but convincing us to look elsewhere for material. So, instead, we decided to use the interview Peter Mansbridge conducted with Stephen Harper for the CBC’s The National, that had been broadcast two weeks before as the basis of something. But if the central NDP apparatchiks were convinced the Conservatives were the target, a conviction that would eventually undermine the NDP campaign, in Toronto—St. Paul’s there was no question the Liberals were. Thus, we studied the various videos Bennett’s and Trudeau’s teams had produced, Nick uploading ones for us to select, transcribe and revise. We’d found, on YouTube, a badly shot video of Carolyn Bennett inviting the residents of Toronto—St. Paul’s to the Liberal Party Canada Day celebration a few years before, which suited our purposes because she was facing the camera from a fixed position and the movement of her mouth would be relatively easy to rework. We knew Anne Fenn, the comedy writer who’d done the fundraising ask at my nomination, to be a terrific performer, and she had a mouth that could substitute for Bennett’s. Quickly I rescripted Bennett’s lines for us to have the eighteen-year incumbent say change was necessary and urge her supporters to vote for the only candidate that offered it—i.e., me. Then we looked for a suitable video with Trudeau in our sights, deciding on the Liberal “Escalator” advertisement that was by far the most successful of the election so far, the Liberal Party leader using his stationary position walking up the down escalator as the metaphor of a stalled economy and a country in crisis.

  “So,” I asked Nick, Doug and I paying a second visit, “if, say, we took a part of Peter Mansbridge’s interview with Harper for CBC’s The National, could you put me in that?”

  “Sure,” said Nick.

  “And could you have me pass Trudeau on the escalator?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Doug went off to produce a first draft, deadline yesterday.

  “I can also animate Trudeau falling down the escalator by using the first wide shot of him from afar,” wrote Nick after we’d left. “It could be a funny kicker at the end. Looking forward to it!”

  —

  Nick said he’d put a shot list together once we had finished scripts. Doug and I had a first go at them, and then we met with Anthony and Emma for a couple of hours over two afternoons to compress the back-and-forth of drafts within the minuscule time frame the campaign was allowing us. “The Escalator Works” would show me passing the Liberal Party leader treading on the spot, throwing a puzzled look back at him, before arriving at the top of the escalator, halting it and launching into a tirade about the danger of the Liberal Party plans for deficit spending. Then I’d toss some of Carolyn Bennett’s campaign flyers over my shoulder, these landing on Trudeau, and start the escalator up again with Trudeau tumbling to the bottom of it. In the Harper spoof, “That’s My Seat!,” a figure not immediately identifiable as me would approach Harper and Mansbridge in unctuous conversation, remove the Canadian flag pin from the prime minister’s lapel and give the prime minister’s chair an almighty kick to send him flying up and out of the picture and onto the ground. Then the figure, revealed to be me, would take the prime minister’s seat and explain to Mansbridge why the Conservatives’ and Liberals’ talk of change, Bennett’s too, was meaningless and the NDP the only genuine opportunity for the same, the prostrate Harper concurring from his position on the ground. Jonathan Rotsztain’s “The Candidate” livery—the same we w
ere employing for all the cartoons, graphics and photographs we’d been posting on Facebook and Twitter—would conclude the video and an orange wave (a visual reference to the 2011 Quebec phenomenon) would wash over the CBC logo at the top of the video so there was no confusing our product with a genuine broadcast. That was the plan. We knew it would evolve—we were doing everything in a considered way but on the fly—and to that end it was crucial to have Laura Watts and others in the room to offer instantaneous views—and censorship. What was important to me, above all, was that all players felt they had a stake, for we needed everyone to come through with their contributions, no matter how small. No PR or advertising agencies were being employed (though plenty would call to ask who made the videos afterwards), nor focus groups, and neither was there money to draw on: a campaign depends upon a lot of people doing a little for nothing and reliably so. You only get to make a first movie once.

  —

  September in Toronto is a heady time: the light gentle, the days hot but not sweaty, the leaves turning and the city’s canopy of trees at its most beautiful—and the social season picking up. The ten-day Toronto International Film Festival had started and the Blue Jays were playing so well that they would win the American League East division and go on to their first League Championship Series in twenty-two years. The city was in an excited frenzy, Sarah was looking for her 1993 vintage Jack Morris pitcher’s jersey, and I was wondering just how much interest there would be in the federal election—“getting out the vote” always any party’s abiding concern. Baseball was an opportunity not for riff-raff like me but for party leaders, though the Blue Jays were losing games that leaders were attending, so the politicians made an informal pact and stopped showboating at the Rogers Centre. But TIFF meant parties and the chance to mingle and show an interested NDP presence. At one such party in the riding a very successful retail fashion mogul was hosting, Gerald Schwartz, the usually reserved CEO of the private equity firm ONEX Corp., was surprisingly effusive about Mulcair. He said he’d met Tom and been very impressed, and encouraged Heather Reisman, the CEO of the Indigo bookstore chain and his wife, to do an interview. “I think Tom’s very sensible,” said Schwartz.