The Candidate

by Noah Richler

  “My people are telling me nobody cares. That the media won’t pay attention.”

  “They’re wrong,” I said. “And look, a lot of people say one of the reasons Olivia Chow lost the mayoral race is because she had nothing to say about the arts.”

  “Thank you,” said Mulcair. “I’m up here looking at the country from thirty thousand feet. It’s great to hear from our people on the ground.”

  —

  That evening I called George Soule, hoping the success of “The Escalator Works” would bolster the case for a release of a revised version of “That’s My Seat!” I’d already emailed a list of proposed revisions with excerpts from columns by author Michael Geist, a digital media expert, on the subject of the Copyright Act. The first video release had been a success and I could sense in the decidedly more agreeable tone of Soule’s voice, acknowledging as much, that ground had been won. I started by addressing the party’s anxieties about the use of the image of an oil sands project in the environment video and, my loss leader, offered to replace it.

  “If we could find a way,” said Soule, “to make this video stay only in your riding, in Toronto—or frankly, only in Ontario, I’d say it’s all good. My concern is that, with the image in, it goes from being an excellent video to, ‘Oh, another Toronto candidate talking about the oil sands.’ I agree with you—if we were a rational people, a reasonable people, it would be fine. But this is politics and reasonable people go out the window.”

  “So, if I have, say, stuff spilling into rivers, is that okay with you?”

  “If it’s not oil, that’s fine.”

  Then I offered to coordinate the other substantive videos with whatever was the central party’s agenda, suggesting that the Bill C-51 short come next. I alerted Soule that I’d described Bennett as a “vocal supporter of Bill C-51 even now” and let him know this was not rumour but substantiated by what the Liberal candidate had said at the Holy Blossom Temple debate, witnessed by many, and therefore defensible.

  “I have no concern,” said Soule.

  Then we talked about the Harper video.

  “If Tom is asked, ‘Hey, do you know your candidate is making very funny videos?’ ” said Soule, “he can say, ‘Yes, I do, it’s funny, you have to laugh!’ But the thing we want to avoid is that the question becomes—regardless of whether the video is legally actionable—‘Do you think that ad went too far?’ Then that’s the question you have to answer and it becomes a story for a day or two and you’re off message.”

  “Of course, I don’t want to do that. Tom’s the reason I’m here,” I said. “A part of me does think if someone asked him about the videos and he just said, ‘They’re pretty funny, go ask him,’ that would defuse it. But I can tone down the kick and then I think we’d be all right.”

  “Look,” said Soule, laughing, “if we were watching this on YouTube or on a late-night talk show, we’d think it hilarious.”

  I felt an opening. We discussed a few other amendments, and Soule said, “That sounds better.”

  The opportunity for “That’s My Seat!” to go out was still on.

  —

  The next morning, Sarah and I cycled over to Soho House to meet Sandra Cunningham, part of my events team, a relentless canvasser with her husband, Rens, and the president of Union Pictures in her working life. Sandra had set up for an 8 a.m. breakfast with several prominent players in the Toronto film world: Hussain Amarshi, the CEO of Mongrel Media, Canada’s premier distributor of independent and foreign films; Martin Katz, the founder and president of Prospero Pictures and a frequent collaborator with David Cronenberg (who lived in the riding); and Helga Stephenson, then still the CEO of the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television.

  I liked this bunch and appreciated the opportunity that Sandra had created, but doubt had started to creep in and I wondered whether I was guilty of hubris—or, as I preferred to see it, was doing something for a party in need of a hand. It was stunning to me that in a country in which, no matter one’s position, the importance of arts and culture was the fulcrum of manifold arguments, the NDP was demonstrating no noticeable interest towards the sector in Toronto. In 2008, Harper’s Conservatives were, in all likelihood, kept to a minority by Québécois rage against the CPC’s cuts to the arts and the prime minister’s view of its practitioners as “a bunch of people at a rich gala all subsidized by taxpayers claiming their subsidies aren’t high enough.” A given of the current election—and of the preceding decade—was the cost to the Conservatives of their antipathy towards the CBC (a repository of “progressive,” if not NDP, votes), so that the NDP’s seemed such a silly and easily remedied omission, all the more remarkable from a party leader who’d been a minister in Quebec. Of all the provinces, Quebeckers have understood the Gramsci-esque messaging potential of both sports and the arts the most. But whereas Trudeau knew how to play it, the NDP was only indifferently courting the sector. To my mind, the oversight spoke not only to a failure of vision but to a certain Calvinist streak in a party that seemed to uphold a very old-fashioned idea of work as its covenant. Even in the autumn of 2015, the ethos of the party was rooted in (Ontario) factories and (Western) fields and (Quebec’s supply-side) farms; in closed-shop unions and assembly plants rather than the modern-day fact of a world in which technology and disintermediation have promoted very different kinds of labour—problems, certainly, but also founts of ingenuity and a new lexicon of terms. Making a very personal appeal to historic ideas of labour was routine for Mulcair. Saying that he was the second of ten children (then rapidly naming his brothers and sisters according to age), remembering how his father had been laid off, or how, before becoming a lawyer, he’d worked in construction to get by, were all staples of Mulcair’s stump speeches, when perhaps a reference to Amazon warehouse workers unable to afford the goods they stock might have had more clout and a ring of the present. The party’s insistence on balancing the books was designed to appeal to wavering Conservative voters and others anxious about the financial mess attributed to Bob Rae when he was NDP premier of Ontario. But the policy was also rooted in the NDP’s long history of not having had any money to spend in the first place, and believing that debt and interest payments borne of deficits are a direct threat to ongoing funding for health, education and social programs. So if there were any interest in the arts, it was only expressed through ties with unions and notions of stagehands and carpenters that the party’s socialization made familiar. (A powerful Toronto film mogul, not at our breakfast, had written Sandra to say, “Noah is running an election campaign and should not waste time on a hopeless case like me—but everyone else on my set is probably voting NDP.”) The party balked at anything beyond that; the gambles and risky outlays of directors and producers who are by nature big spenders borrowing big sums with a view to repaying investors and, ultimately, earning fat fees—this sort of ethos lay outside the borders of the party’s imagination. Concomitantly, the arenas of sport were perceived solely as ones of chauvinist nationalism and individual accomplishment—both phenomena with which the old-fashioned Dipper is ideologically uncomfortable—rather than extraordinary theatres in which, in Canada, the frontiers of inclusivity, equality and human rights are constantly and thrillingly being pushed out on behalf of women, people with disabilities and the ethnically and religiously diverse. Not one but two of the political circuit’s greatest avenues to popular appeal were no-go areas, their social resonance only dimly understood. (I’ve never forgotten being sent to pick up Sarah’s younger daughter at primary school and watching her beat the boys she was playing with at basketball well aware that, when I was a kid, the response of boys would have been to take the ball away from her. These ones were just casually losing: the symptom of a social barrier broken down. How exciting—and how important.)

  And so, for a morning, I played a game of pretend—I was the minister of heritage designate, why not. Amarshi was distressed by the dominance, in the world of film distribution, of just a few inordinately power
ful international corporations—Amazon, Apple and Netflix—and the effect this was having on domestic production. Helga Stephenson’s preoccupation, a topic not mentioned by any of the party leaders, was with the preservation of film—and, more broadly, the National Archive that Conservatives held in disregard (unless the subject was military). Martin Katz was restless; he’d likely calculated the odds and was less interested in playing the game.

  “Marty is mad at the NDP for vote splitting but he thinks you are a good candidate,” Sandra had warned. “Baby steps.”

  —

  Evening came and my iPhone rang as I’d finally made it through the crowds and into the Roy Thomson Hall lobby for the Munk Debate. It was a 613 area code: Ottawa, James Pratt.

  “Noah, I have some bad news.”

  “You do?”

  “We just got the heads-up. La Presse has been through your Facebook and there’s going to be an article tomorrow.”

  “I’m going to lose reception. I’ll call you later.”

  —

  At the Munk Debate on Foreign Policy—the fourth of the 2015 election’s televised debates and the third in English—Mulcair walked into the forum, a gladiator with the wrong armour. Outside Roy Thomson Hall, a great pressing throng of social activists was taunting ticketed patrons in their finery, and for once it was the sartorially splendid kept in line by police manning barricades and waving leaders’ campaign cortèges through. I tweeted how encouraging it was to see politics and not just Toronto International Film Festival events get a crowd at the Hall, the 2010 G20 Summit the memory, and thought little more of it. But, once inside, Sarah and I sat in gobsmacked silence. In the stands were Liberal and Conservative barons baying in league like bloodthirsty Romans for the end of the Orange Pretender. “Change” was what the day’s patricians knew was coming—they could sense its inevitability in the angry faces of the plebs outside—so “change” would happen, but not so much change that they’d be out of pocket, or the order that had served them be threatened. If there needed to be a change of costume, then its finery would be red, not orange.

  Never, during the campaign, did I feel in the presence of so much hate as on this day; never so much relish at the gall of one man’s trying. Blue ties, red ties; the silver-haired incumbent or the younger pretender, it didn’t matter. What was so ugly and obvious in Roy Thomson Hall that night was that there would be no new order, the one of convenience would persist. Mulcair and his team had arranged for their own defeat, snookered by players better at the game and only let in to the club so that established members could watch the arrivistes’ humiliation. Earlier in the campaign, Trudeau had threatened to pull out from the Munk Debate because it was not going to be bilingual and tickets were too expensive, said his team. The first issue had been resolved, host Rudyard Griffiths putting a few questions to the leaders in French, but the ticketing issue was forgotten about. The latter objection had been fought out in the media rather than directly with the organizers of the debate, a decoy of a point surely raised for political advantage. For, as the Liberal and Conservative war rooms surely knew would be the case, the tony crowd served the NDP’s interests least of all. That evening, Trudeau strode on to the stage, arms open, with a confident, welcoming, come-to-me gait. Harper, still in the running, stood tall in the centre. But Mulcair looked uncomfortable from the start: stiff, dowdy, looking no one in the eye. It was as if the NDP leader knew the party had no friends in the room, and was unsure what to say or how to speak to anyone outside of it. As Harper and then Trudeau won rounds of applause for their points, and Mulcair, sneers and approbation, he looked a beaten man, shrank into himself, and made even Harper seem trim. The hostility was unsettling. Mulcair spoke less and less. Bill C-51 came up and Mulcair sensed an opening and declared the NDP had been “the only party to stand up in 1970 when Pierre Trudeau put hundreds of Canadians in jail without trial, without even any accusations.” But the remark backfired. It allowed Justin Trudeau to invoke his love of his father on a day that was, fortuitously, the fifteenth anniversary of Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s death, and to lay personal claim to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, multiculturalism and even state bilingualism (“which, as my father understood it, Mr. Mulcair, means saying the same thing in French as you say in English”). Mulcair had made himself appear petty and patronizing; he’d been calling the Liberal Party leader “Justin”—and allowed him to perorate. The audience loved it.

  Sarah and I sat quietly, mildly uncomfortable and astonished. Cheers for Trudeau, cheers for Harper. Jeers for Mulcair.

  “If power stays in these people’s hands,” said Sarah, “I don’t think a revolution is impossible.”

  Sarah is not given to such remarks, but that’s what it felt like: an establishment unfazed and not minding that eager Liberal operatives in slim-fitting suits and bowties were in their midst, congratulating each other on how well their leader had done. So what if it was the Liberals’ turn now? Votes were a meaningless veneer for this plum lot. Enjoy the fresh new faces at the table. There really wasn’t a whole lot of difference between the parties, certainly not at the Bay Street end of the map. They’d manage, they’d make the adjustments. They’d hold on to power whichever way the vote went.

  —

  My iPhone at zero bars in Roy Thomson Hall, I was unaware during the debate of the machinating going on behind the scenes at NDP Central but Pratt’s email subject line made the prospect of impending trouble clear enough: “Fw: Red Flag need your input ASAP.”

  The La Presse reporter Pierre-André Normandin was asking about a tweet and two Facebook posts he was intending to publish. The tweet dated to February 2014, sent out by me from the floor of a Canada Council Literary Forum being held in Montreal, at which the francophone delegates had, in summation, put forward a fairly staggering list of twenty-nine “priorities,” significantly more than half the number the entire national congress had tabled. “Have to admit,” I wrote, “no Canadian is better than the Quebecker at demanding things.”

  The tweet was neither shocking nor an original thought. Any student of this country’s provincial–federal politics understands completely the part that negotiating relations with Quebec’s francophone (not sovereigntist) community has played in the country’s political evolution. And since even before the establishment of the nation-state called “Canada,” territorial and then provincial and municipal governments of la belle province have been particularly adept at playing their hands. Ironically, I was also making the point in admiration—highlighting the example of Quebec’s fierté, instrumental, as I have already pointed out, in obstructing a Conservative majority in the 2008 federal election.

  My second offence—a Facebook post dated to April 2014—was a share of a Jon Kay column for the National Post published in the week preceding the last Quebec provincial election. Its headline was “Pauline Marois an enabler for society’s worst, most phobic, most parochial sentiments” and Kay’s lines were, underneath, “People say weird and batty things all the time. But only in Marois’ Quebec does the most powerful politician in the province provide encouragement.” I wrote:

  To Jonathan Kay’s credit, this is gently put. I also believe that a lot of Quebeckers understand that the rest of Canada (a good place) is fed up in a different way than it has been historically, and that it can imagine life without Quebec on present terms, and without upset. Monday’s election can’t come soon enough.

  The idea that, in the nearly forty years of argument since the first Parti Québécois government (in 1976, under René Lévesque), a lot of Canadians were able to imagine a Canada living with Quebec on altered terms—i.e., not without that vital territory, but imagining what that altered arrangment might look like—is hardly the stuff of scandal either. Canada (all of it) is the country that, foremost of any democracy in the world, is persistently and expertly negotiating the constitutional terms of its very existence with itself. It is amusing to me even now that the province regarded not just by souverainistes as
a “distinct society” should take umbrage at the shocking suggestion that the rest of Canada might be engaging with it in an evolving manner.

  The Facebook post of February 27, 2015, however, was a more delicate matter—and, mea culpa, I recognized the text of it from the SWOT page Young Ethan and Sean had left on my desk and that it had taken me nearly a month to consider—and discard. This second Facebook post shared an article (“20% de Québécois se dissent racists”) in which, at the height of discussion of the PQ’s “Chartre des Valeurs”—an election platform document demanding, among other measures, the barring of any religious ornament or headgear on anyone employed by that province’s government (save Christian crucifixes, or the great big one affixed to the wall of the Quebec legislature)—a full fifth of Quebeckers polled willingly described themselves as racist. The report appeared on the same day that, in Paris, a bunch of Chelsea soccer fan hooligans pushed a black man onto the Paris Métro railway tracks, chanting, “We are racist, we are racist, and that’s the way we like it!” Which was when I wrote:

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

  I was not suggesting that either all Chelsea football fans or all Quebeckers adoring the province’s blue-and-white flag are racist, but that the racists within each following represented by blue and white have a happy get-together. But the wording was definitely sloppy and I was not about to win an Internet debate on a question of logic. (“If NDP supporters wear orange, do all who wear orange support the NDP?”)

  Normandin falsely claimed the Twitter and two Facebook posts had “rapidly disappeared.” They had not. In July, when the team had established my candidate’s event page, I had altered my Facebook settings to make my posts available only to “Friends” rather than to “Public” viewing. So they must have been fed to Normandin—who is not, even in the lexicon of Facebook, a “Friend” of mine—and the posts in question were not fully removed by me until October 1, two days after the La Presse reporter’s article appeared. Normandin did not respond to the request I made to discuss his article. Had he done so, I would have asked if the discovery was his own—and why, as a more conscientious (or, perhaps, simply less busy) reporter would have done, he did not note the tweet I put out after Pauline Marois and the PQ lost the April 7, 2014, election, which said: