The Candidate

by Noah Richler

  I’d been keeping the campaign managers in the know all along, and I’d asked Phil to come round to the studio on the following Wednesday, September 23, to view rough cuts. I did so knowing, even at the time, that, had my team been working for another party, we almost certainly would not have had the relative freedom we were enjoying to invent as we saw fit. A more organized electoral machine would surely have been more dictatorial; would probably not have let me use Jonathan’s designs, our slogans—“Spread the Word,” “Your Vote Matters”—or my moniker, “The Candidate.” Even I was aware the label—the brand!—might be thought of as maverick or lacking humility or conflicting with the national one. For the time being, our heads were beneath the parapet, but we needed the office to be on our side of it, with us.

  Phil watched, taciturn—but I knew, by then, this was his happy taciturn face. He liked the Trudeau and Harper videos a lot, but, while not disturbed by the essential action in the latter of kicking the prime minister out of his interviewee’s seat, he did worry that the frame of him lying prostrate on the ground as I took up the conversation with Mansbridge made Harper’s still body look like a corpse. Nick fixed the frame, at least in the interim, by having Harper, lying on the lawn a distance behind Mansbridge and me, nodding his head in approval at what I was saying. Phil also worried that my face looked tired and haggard—as indeed it did, after intense hours of shooting and rewriting. Make-up had achieved little and my eyes were darting about visibly as I read lines off our ersatz teleprompter. But Nick found a software program that was his genius editor’s equivalent of blush and wrote to say he’d applied it to the tired candidate in the videos “with great results, it’ll send you back in time a good decade.” That was enough to allow us to use the short appearances we’d left of me, as we’d decided to use topic-related footage to illustrate the substantive videos, effectively reducing my to-camera contributions to short introductions at the start of each (with a map of the electoral riding behind me) and a reappearance at the end before Jonathan’s “The Candidate” graphics concluded them. The videos for which we had not found images, we kept in reserve.

  —

  Later, I asked Nick if, during our Starbucks encounter, he’d expected to say, “Sure, I can help.”

  “No,” said Nick, “it wasn’t on my mind until you expressed interest.”

  “Do you ever worry about crossing the line?”

  “Well,” he laughed, “I’ve probably crossed the line a few times, but it wasn’t my line. I’ve made a lot of videos that have been shelved by clients out of fear of fucking with reality a bit too much.”

  “But what are your own signals for—umm, maybe not?”

  “I guess my messing with reality always has an obvious comedic fakeness to it,” said Nick. “But I’m not really pulling the wool over most intelligent people’s eyes, so I don’t feel like as much of a trickster as the people who cherry pick sound bites to push whatever is their agenda. My motive is comedy. Ethics would come into it more if deception was my motivation. That said, I’ve been asked to make a video where I replace a politician’s mouth with a puckering asshole, so who am I to talk?”

  —

  We’d decided on Friday, September 25, as the launch date of “The Escalator Works.” In Montreal, the night before, the debate organized by the province’s consortium of French-language broadcasters had taken place, with reports beginning to filter through of the trouble that Mulcair had landed himself in on a couple of counts. He’d sparred with Harper and Gilles Duceppe, the Bloc Québécois leader, over Zunera Ishaq’s right to wear the niqab at her Canadian citizenship ceremony, and with Trudeau over the Sherbrooke Declaration. We were paying attention—I was proud of the stance Mulcair had taken vis-à-vis the niqab—but preoccupied with developing an appropriate strategy for our video launch. We knew that simply dropping a video into the ether and hoping for the best risked oblivion, so we’d compiled a list of about thirty web “gatekeepers.” The list included journalists working in mainstream media; bloggers of digital and literary as well as political events; and habitual tweeters with substantial numbers of followers. Crucially, pundits disinclined towards the NDP’s messaging were in all of these groups. The sequence of the videos’ rollout was also critical, and so we planned to follow the launch of “The Escalator Works” with several of the substantive videos—the Bill C-51 attack (“We cannot afford that #LPC architects and supporters of C-51 and the G-20 fiasco fade from view: @justintrudeau @carolyn_bennett @billblair #cdnpoli #NDP2015”); another supporting the party’s policies towards the environment; and then a cri de coeur on behalf of the freedom of scientists; before pushing out “That’s My Seat!” as a finale. Whatever videos were left we’d use ad hoc or as a coda.

  Wendy—by nature the most reserved of the campaign management team and, what with her hours’ work every day on the telephones, the campaign manager on the front lines—was ambivalent about the Harper kick. But the consensus had been to move forward, and Doug and Ethan and I were deciding which to prioritize when Janet asked to speak to me in the backroom. She and the NDP’s director of media, George Soule, had been discussing the videos we’d sent along.

  “The good news is they loved the Trudeau one,” said Janet. “They won’t give us official permission one way or the other, but they said do it. They had a little discussion about the pamphlets landing on Trudeau’s head, but George and I agreed it’s not funny otherwise, or funny in a different way, so that one you can use as is. As for the environment video, he’d prefer you to take the photo of the tar sands out of it and put something else in there. He said it evokes too much controversy at the moment.”

  “They’re nixing the Harper vid?”

  “Right, they’re nixing the Harper for a whole bunch of reasons,” said Janet.

  Soule, said Janet, was afraid the Harper video would become a news story and that Mulcair would be asked about it.

  “So they should tell Tom to say, ‘It’s funny, go ask the candidate.’ ”

  Janet appeared sombre. At this point, she was only reporting.

  “George says, the questions won’t be ‘What do you think about this obviously funny and yet very insightful video?’ but ‘What do you think about your candidate kicking the prime minister?’ or ‘Did it go too far?’ The networks won’t show you creatively discussing our positions, they’ll clip the kick and show the PM on the ground.”

  “I want to speak to Soule.”

  “Okay,” said Janet.

  —

  What are we worried about here, I wondered—being nice to one of the most punishing politicians in Canadian memory?

  —

  “George Soule here.”

  “Hi George, it’s Janet—with Noah. Do you have time—well, no, let’s just make time for this conversation, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “So you don’t want to run the Harper video,” I said. “Can you tell me why?”

  “It’s not something that we can put out there. I think it crosses too many lines.”

  “I just want to understand what the lines are. Seventy-five percent of the country wants to boot him out of office anyway—”

  (Well, 68 percent actually, if truth be told—but, along with the maybe 7 percent siding with the ridiculous Globe and Mail endorsement of the “Conservatives without Harper,” that would be 75.)

  “I’m sorry,” said Soule, “but it’s unanimous here.”

  “I need to understand why—”

  “We’ll be sued. It will derail the campaign for days.”

  —

  “So what did you say?” asked Doug.

  “Nothing. I didn’t want to be told not to bother adjusting it. But we’re putting out Trudeau—and we’re doing it today, before anyone changes their mind.”

  —

  At four o’clock on the Friday, Doug and Ethan started the launch of “The Escalator Works.” Using my Facebook page as well as YouTube to embed the videos, and my NDP Twitter address as the i
nitial source, we tweeted,

  Couldn’t resist: had to take on @justintrudeau and his budget fantasies http://​bit.​ly/​1OXfVJA Elections are no excuse for fictions.#TM4PM

  And then we waited.

  We’d had a notional sense of what it meant for a video to “go viral.” Ten-thousand views was a target that can only be described as notional. And then our smartphones started pinging. Lots.

  David Akin @davidakin

  Gotta watch NDP candidate Noah Richler spoof justinpjtrudeau escalator ad

  Paul Wells @InklessPW

  Why, Noah. You scamp.

  Andrew Coyne @acoyne

  Heh

  The video garnered 1,000 Facebook views within an hour, 50,000 in eight and 100,000 in twenty-four before its rate of acceleration diminished and, after thirty-six days, it settled at 117,000 Facebook views and another 15,000 on YouTube. By E-Day, it would garner 175,000 Facebook views and a further 25,000 on YouTube. Before the weekend was out, the video had been liked more than 600 times, with over 1,700 shares. Trudeau’s initial “Real Change” ad had been launched August 30 and achieved only 43,000 Facebook views, with 1,954 likes and 788 shares, though the reach of the Trudeau ad that “The Escalator Works” parodied did, of course, far exceed ours: in the month since its launch, it had accumulated 157,000 views on Facebook, with 5,200 likes and 1,961 shares, but also a whopping 1.7 million YouTube views, attributable to Trudeau’s national profile and the television and radio broadcasts we were never in a position to afford. Our own party had issued seven videos, none of which had cracked 100,000 views on Facebook (though “Performance Review,” released two weeks prior, reached 95,000 Facebook views and accumulated a further 361,000 views on YouTube).

  I was being recognized on the street, a boon to a campaign unable to pay for lawn and window signs with the candidate’s headshot. The video was also providing other benefits: it was putting the Toronto—St. Paul’s campaign on the map of the party brass, and it was doing its own small part to lift a national campaign caught in drudgery. The video had vaulted over the traditional boundaries of the Internet’s political echo chambers and was being enjoyed by gatekeepers forgetting their own allegiances for a while. David Frum and Ezra Levant were other pundits that had pushed it, and CTV’s Don Martin showed a part of it on the network’s television program of political review, Power Play, and tweeted, “This hilarious Richler ad is wasted on just one candidate. Why Mulcair didn’t seize it for himself is odd.”

  By comparison, Carolyn Bennett’s “Toronto—St. Paul’s Model” video—a treatment of the nonsensical contention that an MP’s consulting of constituents between elections was a matter of her invention—had accumulated fewer than fifty Facebook views, and less than half that number on YouTube. Here was something to gloat about, though the pleasure was not universal. Our Twitter feeds were offering early signals that we were getting under the Liberals’ skin, even as we were enjoying that from coast to coast, in English and French, media were reporting on it.

  NOAH RICHLER’S PARODY OF TRUDEAU

  ESCALATOR AD INJECTS SOME HUMOUR

  INTO THE CAMPAIGN

  —The Huffington Post

  NDP CANDIDATE MONKEYS WITH JUSTIN

  TRUDEAU ESCALATOR AD

  —The Straight

  UN CANDIDAT DU NPD PARODIE LES PUBS DE

  JUSTIN TRUDEAU

  —Journal de Montréal

  Hell, even one of my CBC television contacts called:

  “Loved your video!” said the producer. “Why didn’t you give me the heads-up? I do a roundup on my show.”

  “Didn’t think of it,” I said—but, sensing an opportunity, “we made another with Stephen Harper for a target. What about using that?”

  “Sorry, Noah, no. I can’t have it on the show.”

  “Why not?”

  “We know each other.”

  “But you just said—”

  “Breach of ethics.”

  “Right.”

  “But, really, it was great!”

  —

  If I’d wondered on occasion about the NDP’s failure to act in concert, then I did not need to wait longer than September 27 for more obvious and damning evidence of the party centre’s disinclination to get behind local campaigns working the trenches. On the Sunday, the NDP held a town hall on the subject of the environment at the Daniels Spectrum in Regent Park. This was the downtown riding of Toronto Centre, historically Liberal, in which Linda McQuaig, the former Toronto Star columnist and best-selling author of It’s the Crude, Dude: War, Big Oil and the Fight for the Planet and The Trouble with Billionaires, was putting herself forward federally a second time. She’d lost against Chrystia Freeland in the November 2013 Toronto Centre by-election and now here she was running in a constituency of slightly adjusted boundaries against the Bay Street alumnus Bill Morneau, another well-resourced, well-accredited political newcomer, this one tagged to minister of finance in the event of a Liberal win.

  A hand from the leader showing off his team’s pedigree was in order. Back in early August, McQuaig had been challenged on CBC News Network’s Power & Politics by the Conservative Michelle Rempel concerning an article she’d written years earlier about the cost to the environment of oil sands development and the need for some sort of carbon pricing. McQuaig, to her credit—presumably these views were part of the reason she’d been selected as a candidate—did not rescind her position. “A lot of the oil sands oil may have to stay in the ground,” responded McQuaig. When pressed, she’d said just how much was to stay below ground would be known “once we properly put in place a climate change accountability system of some kind.”

  The Conservatives and their allies in the media jumped on McQuaig’s statement with alacrity. What the Toronto Centre candidate said was proof, said Harper, that the NDP would “wreck our economy.” The Alberta Business and Taxpayers Coalition declared that it would travel to the riding to campaign against McQuaig (no cowboys or roughnecks were spotted outside the Daniels Spectrum on the day) and, predictably, there was fury on the social networks. And yet there’d been nothing particularly controversial about what McQuaig had said, and, in the weeks following, even some to the right of centre would support her point of view—as a senior BP oil executive also would.

  Oftentimes, the furor and venting of pundits and Internet denizens are simply to be waited out. Truth is the tortoise to the hare of sensation, and it catches up eventually. But at this NDP town hall, the tortoise was locked out—or at least kept safely to the side of the stage and the action. I’d arrived early and was enjoying pats on the back from party members and others in the audience who’d seen “The Escalator Works,” and that was pleasing. I’d also cornered George Smith, one of Mulcair’s handlers, before the town hall started, to plead with him for a moment with Mulcair. It seemed to me a blatant omission for the NDP to have nothing at all to say about sports—or, more naturally my field, the arts. These were two realms mattering greatly to the people of Toronto and beyond, but about which the NDP was markedly silent. Trudeau, delayed for a time by the headline news that was the Syrian refugee crisis (as I’d been warned), had since made a big announcement about arts funding and the NDP could not afford to be mute, I told Smith—did the party leader have a moment?

  On the stage were two high stools waiting for Mulcair and his interlocutor. As my colleagues arrived and the public were let in, I watched for the usual bagging of premium front-row seats in plain view of the cameras’ lenses. Surprisingly, McQuaig took one of these.

  “Aren’t we talking about the environment?” I asked.

  McQuaig nodded.

  “It’s not you up there?”

  “No.”

  McQuaig was not so familiar to me that I was reliably able to gauge her mood, but I sensed a measure of despondency and I was certainly unsettled. The Spectrum filled, we waited, we clapped, we stood, we sat, we stood, we clapped some more, well rehearsed by now in the routine of an ecstatic rock-star entry for “Canada’s n
ext prime minister!” “We’re All in This Together” blasted through the speakers again, Mulcair and Pinhas made their entry again, the NDP leader took the stage again and the teleprompter started to roll again. Then Mulcair was joined by Jennifer Hollett for a brief chat about the NDP’s environmental policy. Apparently more utility was to be found in Hollett’s VJ experience than McQuaig’s credentials, the local candidate shunted just as my environment video’s image of the oil sands had been. Certainly we were not seeing a leader extolling the talents and virtues of one of his 338 in situ. Mulcair took a few planted questions from the audience, a “town hall” is anything but, before telling supporters there was certain to be a place in his cabinet for Hollett.

  Mulcair was performing well—the best I’d yet seen him—but what kind of support was this, I worried, that a leader should distance himself from a candidate arguing exactly what the party and a majority of Canadians believed? I was appalled, and not even on my own behalf. Welcome to politics.

  —

  On my way out, the NDP leader’s chief of staff, Alain Gaul, took me aside to tell me that Mulcair would telephone from the car. I was almost home when he did.

  “Hi Noah,” said Mulcair. “You’re keeping out of trouble?”

  “Trying.”

  Mulcair laughed, I told him he’d performed well, and made the case for some kind of event about the arts:

  “Trudeau pledged to double Canada Council funding and restore CBC money that the Tories cut—”

  “We did that in January.”

  “Sure, but no one remembers and we should get out in front,” I said—and then, putting a word in for my team’s cause, “you could come to Toronto—St. Paul’s. The riding is filled with very powerful arts players and the arts community is a very vocal one. Or go to Davenport, but do something.”