The Candidate

by Noah Richler

  Can’t recall the last time an election left me so happy: voters doing the smart thing. Hell, Rob Ford can have Toronto, Quebec’s back!

  Or the Instagram photograph I’d shared of thousands of Quebeckers at a Montreal demonstration against funding cuts, waving pro-Radio-Canada banners, with the caption:

  #SaveTheCBC #Wake​UpEng​lish​Canada Quebec leading the way in this country when it comes to anything.

  The idea that the February 2014 tweet and the April 2014 Facebook post proved me to be anti-Québécois was preposterous and insulting, but this is the sort of routine and lazy muckraking that passes for journalism in the present age.

  “The whole team is on it,” said Pratt. The moment I made my exit from the Munk Debate at 8:17 p.m., the flurry of emails concerning (the French text of) an apology began.

  On September 28, 2015, at 8.17 p.m., James Pratt wrote:

  Hey Noah,

  I’ve cc’d Valerie Dufour here. She’s trying to contain this from our Montreal office.

  The statement is as follows:

  I would like to offer my sincerest apologies to all Quebeckers offended by comments I have posted in the past to Facebook. My comments were injurious and inappropriate and do not reflect my views of Quebec and the Québécois. My comments were written during the last Quebec provincial election, during which Madame Pauline Marois’ PQ was proposing a “charter of values” with which I was in profound disagreement. I make no secret of the fact that issues of identity are impassioned ones for me. This is not an excuse for my remarks, but places them in context. I have a visceral reaction to the politics of exclusion that is stronger than I am. In the same way, I find it reprehensible that Conservatives are trying to apply the same recipe of fear and division to the current election.

  At 9.53 p.m., Noah Richler wrote:

  Hi James, Valerie

  Thank you for this. I will tell you straight up that I am not comfortable with the apology as written and in fact wholly understand why I wrote the posts in the first place.

  The tone of the apology is also distinctly not mine and that matters. This political life has been easy for me so far because I wholly believe in the NDP platform and the cause which is why I am able to argue it passionately.

  The Kay post deserves no apology. I am making a positive political point. The Canada Council tweet is funny and ironically admiring of Quebeckers’ mastery of the see-saw of provincial-federal negotiation. Only the “Blue and White” post is dubious, though I can defend that easily too.

  Also, I have formed a relationship with the Quebec press that is by and large good and it explicitly was not formed by walking away with my tail between my legs. I believe that confidence of the sort that Tom displayed vis-a-vis the recent niqab imbroglio in Quebec is more winning.

  At 10.01 p.m., Valerie Dufour wrote:

  Duceppe will hit Tom and the NDP hard. I see the nuance in what you are saying but I am afraid our opponents will not and will not want to. BQ partisans have already hinted at something on Twitter. My job is to protect the brand and the leader and I feel that apology is needed. Quebec media will make us pay and we don’t need it right now.

  At 10.03 p.m., Noah Richler wrote:

  Hi James, Valerie,

  I feel strongly about this. If you make me feel like a hypocrite, everything changes, and there is nothing in any of these posts that I cannot (and even entertainingly, eloquently) defend. The idea that Duceppe will gain advantage is absurd. And I am also not stupid. Direct your complainants to me and no-one is embarrassed. Speak to Greta. Speak to my campaign managers. Speak to the 150 witnesses who saw me beat Carolyn Bennett in my debate with her soundly.

  There is no need to run scared. And in fact, in what has not been a great week for us, I’d say we would be better off if we stood our ground confidently instead of worrying at every corner. You have your apology, but I will not be false or craven without necessity.

  A contracted apology is attached. No changes without me seeing them. You might want to check the grammar.

  At 10.08 p.m., James Pratt wrote:

  Is the apology strong enough? My experience with these is less is more. The media and our opponents will give us one line. Is the line they’re gonna take in this “I’m sorry”?

  At 10.54 p.m., Noah Richler wrote:

  Hi Valerie

  I acknowledge your expertise, and James’s. I have cut the line about my visceral reaction to the politics of exclusion being “stronger than I am” which is not true.

  So, final text:

  I would like to offer my sincerest apologies to all Quebeckers offended by comments I have posted in the past to Facebook. My comments were injurious and inappropriate and do not reflect my views of Quebec and the Québécois. My comments were written during the last Quebec provincial election, during which Madame Pauline Marois’s PQ was proposing a “charter of values” with which I was in profound disagreement. I make no secret of the fact that issues of identity are impassioned ones for me, my professional life having been dedicated to the study and celebration of the ties that unite us across this marvellous country. This is not an excuse for my remarks, but places them in context. I have a visceral reaction to the politics of exclusion and, in the same way, I find it reprehensible that Stephen Harper is also playing Marois’s game of fear and division. I adore Quebec. I adore Canada.

  At 11.05 p.m., James Pratt wrote:

  I think we’re good here Noah. I’ll give you a shout in the a.m.

  —

  Politics is everybody else believing they know than better you. And, as with just about any job, rise too high in the profession and inevitably it comes back down to human resources and controlling uncontrollable staff. The Conservative candidate, who, previously a service technician, is caught on camera pissing in a client’s mug during a house call, unwittingly provides the election its greatest moment of—well, call it bad taste. An NDP candidate is, bizarrely, reminded of a phallus by the uprights of Auschwitz concentration camp’s electrified fence; another makes a slack comparison between the boorish elements of crowds following politics and sport.

  “It’ll blow over,” said Pratt, “but we have to protect the leader.”

  The last candidate was in the kitchen when, the following morning, Normandin’s column appeared and the NDP leader telephoned one of his 338 from 2,342 kilometres away.

  —

  Tom, the leader:

  “Eh, misère!”

  Chief of Staff Alain Gaul’s exclamation from across the aisle on the campaign plane left no doubt: we had a problem.

  “Qu’est-ce qui se passe?”

  One of our Toronto candidates had made it into La Presse, but for all the wrong reasons. Old tweets and Facebook posts had taken on a new life.

  I’d recruited Richler, enthusiastically, and realized there’s something about writers—they like to write!

  But every thought shared now floats in the miasma, waiting for its moment to be reanimated unannounced. As if a colleague, with perfect recall, suddenly takes issue with a phrase used in a conversation with a friend three years prior.

  The new normal of election campaigns.

  The niqab issue had been dogging us for weeks, but instead of changing channels with a trip to the Arctic, in Iqaluit we’d be forced to talk identity politics again.

  I volunteered to make the call.

  Lucid about the implications, Noah’s reaction to the situation was the embodiment of the old political maxim, “when you’re ‘splainin, you’re losin’.”

  And his French, it turned out, was very good. He’d attended one of Montreal’s best French schools and had a deep first hand understanding of what made Québécois tick, so he got it.

  We agreed that he’d apologize because ‘splainin’ would only put a circle around the stain.

  So we turned the page successfully…on that one.

  —

  Mulcair had asked about my Quebec bona fides and, apologizing profusely for the trouble I
’d caused, I’d supplied them. But nothing came of it in Iqaluit and, to be fair to Normandin, the column that appeared the next day reported rather than it opined, and concentrated on the apology that had been the night’s work. Pratt had been supportive and stressed that the team was behind me. It looked as if we were out of the bush and into the clearing.

  —

  But I was not.

  Joanna Smith, the Ottawa correspondent for the Toronto Star, had emailed to ask about a Facebook post from the fall of 2014, in which I’d written:

  I’m not sharing the Vanity Fair Jennifer Lawrence story because I don’t give a toss beyond finding it more than a wee bit ironic that a woman whose image has been so blatantly manipulated by the magazine for their mutual financial advantage protests of her leaked nude photos that “it’s my body, and it should be my choice.” Yawn.

  No matter that the six-page Vanity Fair story about Jennifer Lawrence, whose cellphone had been hacked, was causing an explosion of reaction on the Internet at the expense of attention paid to victims of the Ebola virus, then at its apogee. The Internet does not accommodate rebuttals, and now it would be back to the apology board, unless I elected to get ahead of the story.

  —

  From: Noah Richler

  Sent: Tuesday, September 29, 2015 1:24 PM

  To: James Pratt

  Cc: Greta Levy; Valerie Dufour; Janet Solberg

  Subject: Fwd: [Toronto Star] Facebook post re Jennifer Lawrence photos

  Hello Illustrious Four

  I’m off to the campaign office and have to rush.

  An important development: Joanna Smith of the Ottawa bureau of the Toronto Star (see forwarded message below) has also been in touch vis-a-vis another Facebook post.

  The fact that this and the La Presse items have happened over the same twelve hour period is interesting to me.

  I have written a piece that I would like to submit to the Toronto Star, a paper read in my riding. Please note that if I do not speak for myself that Joanna will speak for me. As you did yesterday.

  Read the piece. If I am to get it in — and I’ll cc the publisher John Cruickshank and the editor-in-chief Michael Cooke, both acquaintances, so that if they do not run it, it’s a stain on them — then I must do so by two p.m.

  Please do not be timid. There is nothing here that affects the brand. Valerie, you will see that within the piece, I apologize again to the Quebeckers.

  This is about getting in front of the story as I did with the drugs stuff. It’s about us stepping up to the plate and saying enough’s enough, we’ll do this on our terms rather than having Smith and others frame the story (don’t believe her little flattering tidbits of interest about the video, it’s a ploy) and the dribble, dribble of a fight that we are facing in so many realms.

  I’ll be monitoring my cell.

  Best,

  Noah

  —

  “I do not Apologize.”

  For the Toronto Star, September 29, 2015.

  By Noah Richler.

  A couple of years ago, I entered into conversation with a number of NDP Members of Parliament about the possibility of running for the Party. I was wary. As a writer, I enjoyed a particular kind of authority from at least appearing to be objective, and this would be lost. I was worried that friends and associates would themselves be wary and talk to me in a different way and I didn’t want that.

  But, more worrying to my family certainly, my partner and I knew that to run for political office would be to risk immersion in an often tawdry world where not only are the gloves off but the punches come below the belt, from behind, and when you are sleeping. As a rule, dignity went out of politics long ago though fortunately there are, from time to time, politicians that rise above the seaminess of their milieu and remind us of just how elevated public service can be.

  All of which is to say that I was prepared for the other reason my family thought I should not run, which is that inevitably there would be a moment at which journalists and rivals gleefully trawling my Facebook and Twitter posts of the last several years would confront me with them. Curiously—you tell me if it’s a chance—within the same twelve hours my campaign team has learned of a La Presse article corralling what that newspaper is pretending are anti-Québécois posts, and this paper, the Toronto Star, has been enquiring after a Facebook comment I made in the wake of the over-the-top coverage of a Hollywood film star complaining about the release by a cellphone hacker of some photographs she had taken of herself naked.

  This is the moment that my family and I were anticipating, but I can’t say dreading. It is such an ordinary occurrence, and the ordinary response is for the subject to apologize and feign horror and shame in light of the person he or she was but is no longer and to recede, tail between the legs. Sometimes the political party will boot out the member. We’ve been through this a lot.

  But this is not going to happen here. Because I own my posts, and I’ll defend them.

  And I will fight back against this paper, one that I have contributed to with great enjoyment over the years, plucking a Facebook comment out of the air and trying to frame an obvious comment about celebrity culture as anti-feminist.

  Sorry? Absolutely not.

  These journalists or party operatives or disenchanted “friends” (that ironic Facebook term) are, in truth, lazy. How easy but also boring to have to trawl through all that social network nonsense! What amuses me is that if my pal from La Presse had really wanted to dig up a troubling view of mine, then he could more easily have turned to an edited, reviewed and published piece that I wrote for the New Statesman in which I suggest that an axis of Islamophobic Conservatives and Québécois extremists is what may do the NDP in. It would hardly have been plausible for me to describe that work as off-the-cuff or written emotively, mea culpa, etc.

  And the Ottawa bureau of this newspaper might have turned to some of my numerous anti-Harper comments, a couple of which are, let us say, colourful.

  But that dirt is not in fashion because harbouring enmity for Harper is not a story. Most of us do and still the work I’d be ashamed to do as a journalist continues. And one result of it will be that people like myself, in conversations with their partners as I myself was a couple of years ago, will not run for fear that a slip of the tongue or a risqué or witty or even intelligent remark, made while out of office and not even entertaining the prospect, will come back to embarrass them.

  This has to stop. And it stops here.

  Sorry. I’m not saying sorry.

  —

  Wrote Valerie Dufour, my buddy now:

  “You criticized Katniss? Let us read!”

  —

  From: James Pratt

  To: Noah Richler

  Cc: Greta K. Levy, Valerie Dufour, Janet Solberg

  Re: [Toronto Star] Facebook post re Jennifer Lawrence photos

  Hey Noah,

  I’ve got it with the war room. Are these posts still up? I think we may need to go through your feed.

  This is not good but let me check with folks about how best to deal with it.

  I’ll be in touch.

  James

  —

  My iPhone lit up—a 613 Ottawa number again.

  “Noah,” said Pratt. “We need you to stay home.”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “You’re not to take calls from anyone.”

  “You know,” I said, “if I’d offered the Star editors a piece about how celebrity culture was sucking up attention on the social networks at the expense of people dying in Africa, they’d have sucked it up and been thrilled by the hits.”

  “Noah,” said Pratt, “you don’t get it. You’re on the wrong side of revenge porn.”

  —

  “I don’t know which party is the enemy,” I said to Doug. “I’m not apologizing. This is the second time and it’s silly.”

  If there was ever a moment in the campaign at which I was thinking of quitting, it was this one. And I knew Pra
tt knew it. The party was keeping me on board, but the planks of the deck were straining as the crafting of another apology was underway.

  At 3.54 p.m., Noah Richler wrote:

  Hi James, Janet,

  At moments like this, taking a stand leads to a new conversation—one about media ethics and witch (warlock) hunts during a campaign, and you might well find a lot of people rallying around that idea, as we all want good people to run.

  Instead—and I am saying this as a team player—your office is running scared again. I am sorry we are such a timorous bunch. We are allowing “apologies” to be made as bogus admissions of guilt when they are in fact acts of convenience to you but extremely damaging to me, my reputation, my family and the dedication of the friends that have supported my campaign.

  You are also—as the “War Room” (I hate military metaphors) has likely calculated better than I—greasing the way to losing one of your smarter contributors.

  Perhaps, as Greta said to me sometime ago, intelligence and politics are not an easy mix.

  I remain slack-jawed at the suggestion even that I am on “the wrong side of revenge pornography.” You should be letting me take on any such accuser. But this is your game, not mine.

  PS It would be foolish to have me skip the Quakers’ environmental debate tonight especially as—serving us and this daft farrago—argument and insult are not allowed. Janet will explain.