The Candidate

by Noah Richler

  At 4.01 p.m., James Pratt wrote:

  New Edit:

  Today, I was asked by a Toronto Star reporter to comment on a Facebook comment I posted in 2014. The comment was made in the wake of exhaustive coverage of a photo leak scandal involving female actors and models. Clearly, my comment was pointed at celebrity culture and the commercialized spectacle the situation had become.

  Looking at the words in retrospect I can see that my words might be construed as indifference to women and their sexual exploitation, rather than frustration with the obsessive lens of the celebrity industry. This was never my intent.

  I was twiddling my thumbs at home as Wendy explained to seniors at a residence I was scheduled to visit that I was “feeling unwell.” Then Anna Vlachos, a City TV reporter, tweeted to see if I’d be attending the all-candidates debate at the First Unitarian Congregation that night, prompting Janet to ask if there were other posts that should worry the campaign. “There’s one somewhere where I call Harper a shitty little man,” I answered. “I may have taken it down though as a rule, I do this very little as it provides others a story of cover-up.”

  Obviously the situation was beginning to exasperate my campaign management team—as it was me, also, though Pratt had either ignored or not picked up on my having provided him the cue for a conversation about firing me. This I couldn’t ignore: the party was doing more than putting up with me, it was providing support.

  “Sorry,” I added to my note to Janet. “I know you have other things to do, but I’m clearly being picked on here. And I also believe that standing up to this mild form of cyber-shaming is actually a winner.”

  —

  The next morning, Joanna Smith filed a short, fairly innocuous Toronto Star item about my Jennifer Lawrence Facebook post, but the La Presse article was generating a fair amount of insult unimpeded by lousy grammar and spelling in both official languages. I was “a terrorist of thought” and, of course, I was the hateful racist son of my father Mordecai, whose writings against Quebec sovereignty had enraged the separatist old guard twenty-four years earlier.

  @T.: If want to expulse the Quebec from Canada, cause we aren’t enough anglo for you, you can go fap yourself with Stephen Harper

  @P.: allez au diable avec votre religion multiculturaliste trudeauyiste. Les Québécois de souche n’ont opas des lecons à recevoir!

  @F.: What sort of influence a primitive racist hack like @noahrichler would exert in @NDP_HQ #NDP government?

  But there was sweeter news. A former professor at the Montreal lyçée I’d attended had vouched for my character—what did that get him?—and, after a Montreal contact high up in the party wrote suggesting I be in touch with a major Bay Street player (and possible donor), the imperatives of the real were overtaking the distractions of the virtual. I emailed but, at the start, was not getting very far. Still, the online conversation was a lot more fun than the Twitter ones I’d been in.

  —

  From: Noah Richler

  Sent: Sep 27, 2015, at 12:05

  To: S.

  Subject: Trying again

  Hi S.

  Noah Richler here. I was hoping we’d be able to meet and briefly chat so trying again.

  Best,

  Noah Richler

  From: S.

  Sent: Sep 27, 2015, at 4:20

  To: Noah Richler

  Subject: Re: Trying again

  Hi Noah. I am out of the country and won’t be able to attend. Good luck. S.

  From: Noah Richler

  Sent: Sep 27, 2015, at 8:15

  To: S.

  Subject: Re: re: Trying again

  Hi S.

  Just tell me if “good luck” means don’t bother trying again. No one wants to be a nuisance!

  And for your amusement, check out my campaign video, “The Escalator Works.” It’s gone viral. And that’s the truth.

  Best

  Noah R.

  From: S.

  Sent: Sep 27, 2015, at 10:20

  To: Noah Richler

  Subject: Re: re: re: Trying again

  Hi Noah. “Good luck” generally means “I probably won’t be there for your journey. I may not even share your goals and aspirations, but I support your efforts and certainly wish you no misfortune.” Having said all that, I genuinely admire persistence and would be happy to meet at my office.

  S.

  P.S. I watched Escalator and thought it both clever and likely effective.

  —

  The offices of S., a senior managing director of a formidably powerful venture capitalist company, were on one of the highest floors of one of the highest towers on Bay Street and appointed in Old World style: lots of wood, French chairs with velvet seats, writing desks, books on shelves—and art, plenty of it, and good, too. I liked S. immediately. He was impeccably mannered, had taken time out from far more important (and lucrative) things to do, and it was immediately apparent that he had an ossiduous and interested mind. In his office, there were history books but also novels, both on his desk and at the round table where he motioned for me to sit. Photographs of some sort of NGO activity hung on the wall, along with a nineteenth-century shipbuilder’s diagram.

  “Thank you for seeing me,” I said. “I’ve not come to ask for anything, or at least not for money. But I’m saying a lot of things on the campaign trail and I’d like to know whether you think these are true.”

  I explained my affection for Mulcair, and S. said that he had hosted lunches for him—the sorts of meetings, I figured, that Liberals and Conservatives were privy to all of the time but the NDP had to work for. S. did not appear to hold any of the prejudices that, at least in Ontario, were an obstacle for the party, the memory of Bob Rae and his NDP government’s deficits not to be held against Mulcair; no, what mattered was said or done during the eleven weeks of the campaign. S. was heeding actions and the man.

  I asked about the rationality of the NDP’s pledges to raise corporate taxes by two points, and the party’s plans to eliminate stock option tax credits.

  “I think it’s very difficult to argue that options aren’t a form of compensation, or that they shouldn’t be taxed at ordinary rates even though I’m a beneficiary” said S. When I brought up the NDP’s plans for a corporate tax rate hike, he explained he would much rather see the elimination of specific tax breaks, debt forgiveness and other distortions and inefficiencies—such as, for instance, major loans to the automobile or aerospace industries. “But every one of those measures,” said S., “is intrinsically tied to some sort of trade agreement or treaty, so I understand if the NDP is turning that way.”

  “So we’re not in government,” I said, “and I’ll never be finance minister, but how about we raise the corporate tax two points and pledge to reduce it proportionately to the revenue we regain as these loans and distortions are eliminated?”

  “That might work,” he said.

  “And what keeps companies in situ?” I asked.

  “Good roads, good schools, good hospitals and police,” said S.

  We spoke for more than an hour. I thanked S. for his time, at which point he raised a hand and an assistant stepped into the room with a cheque that he filled out for fifteen hundred dollars, the legal maximum. S. handed it to me along with one of the books on the table I had asked about. The meeting had been invigorating, even without the wholly unexpected donation, and I walked out onto Bay Street with a renewed sense of purpose.

  —

  I’d barely made it to the Bay Street TTC station doors when Solberg called again.

  “What this time?” I ask.

  “The Ottawa Citizen,” said Solberg. “You called Harper a pathological psychopath.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Don’t speak to anyone.”

  “I’ll see you at the office,” I said.

  —

  Arrived at Bathurst Street, I handed Phil the fifteen-hundred-dollar cheque.

  “Cash it,” I said. “Now.”

  “
NDP CANDIDATE RICHLER SORRY FOR ANTI-HARPER FACEBOOK TIRADE,” ran the headline of Lee Berthiaume’s story in the Ottawa Citizen. “NOAH RICHLER SORRY FOR CALLING HARPER A ‘PATHOLOGICAL PSYCHOPATH,’ NOT SORRY FOR MOCKING TRUDEAU’S ESCALATOR AD,” said the rerun in the National Post and the rest of the Postmedia chain of newspapers.

  Be careful what you wish for, indeed: the Facebook post was another of the three Sean and Young Ethan had identified in their August SWOT analysis—comments Sarah had complained about long before—and one I’d had in mind when I’d described, in the Toronto Star article the party had not let me pitch, “numerous anti-Harper comments, a couple of which are, let us say, colourful.”

  Now, a rite of twenty-first-century life, I was experiencing what the Welsh writer Jon Ronson has called the Internet’s “great renaissance of public shaming.” It was coming at me full on, I was in the stocks, and it was costing me—and the campaign. The article Jonathan Kay wrote out of his afternoon accompanying me on a canvass was positive, but qualified by the social media mess. Several columnists, including Kelly McParland and Chris Selley of the National Post and Eric Andrew-Gee of The Globe and Mail, were preparing their condemnations of candidates and their “gaffes”—lists in which I’d now be permanently included. Selley, who’d had it in for me before, would be particularly damning; the comments, he wrote, were “to political debate as a late-night 7-11 hot dog is to hunger.” Gary Clement, the children’s author and National Post political cartoonist, emailed to say that the full-page cartoon strip spread that had come out of our having spent a day canvassing together, was being killed. Bad luck that was, had the Ottawa Citizen story broken only a couple of hours later, then the page would have been off to the press and too late to reverse. And I was ordered not to participate in an evening of music and protest organized by Andrew Cash and the marvellously irascible radio polemicist, Torquil Campbell, lead singer of the pop band Stars. Quebec sovereigntists and assorted Liberals were still berating me on Twitter and Facebook, though—the analytics were what I was interested in—already, the conversation peaked. Lie low, Pratt had said, the furor will pass.

  Looking again at the egregious Ottawa Citizen headline, I felt, for the first time during the social media storm, a tinge of regret. The words “Noah Richler Sorry for Calling Harper a ‘Pathological Psychopath’ ” would be the first to appear after a Google search of my name for at least the foreseeable future (and probably cost me work), though it was not my slam of the prime minister that irked. No, not at all. What really bothered me was the redundancy of my bad phrasing. There was no getting around the fact of my awful syntactical overkill. Harper was pathological or he was a psychopath; he did not need to be both.

  This was something I would have to live with for a very long time and I was gutted.

  October 29, Ottawa, the Holiday Inn and Suites.

  Like we couldn’t splurge a bit after our big day and fight it out with the Liberals at the Marriott or the Château Laurier? This does not bode well. Mulcair’s trying to make a point and Trudeau looks the hero simply by delivering yet more platitudes about the need to get along. It’s fascinating, really, that the qualities that get a fella somewhere can be so jarring once he’s arrived. Good that we’re in caucus because he’s looking like Harper now—a man with no friends, a man who can’t trust. Maybe it’s Gerald Butts that’s unsettling him—Butts is freaking everybody out, the Liberals’ Mr. Poker Face in the corner of the room, tapping into his BlackBerry like a modern-day Madame Lafarge knitting names into her scarf for the inevitable day, only months off surely, when the government falls and it’s off to the races again. Mulcair is our Danton, he keeps talking about the historic victory but he’s being sabotaged daily by his own party. I mean who needs enemies when there are Jacobins everywhere you turn demanding their pound of flesh with no eye to the long game, and your best friend is Naomi Klein, la Petite Robespierre, now in her seventh consecutive day of rallying for the Leap Manifesto out of a tent right in front of Parliament, the nerve of it—like our minority government needs another division exposed. The press said Trudeau would lead the coalition, but they hadn’t banked on Butts’s savvy, the scrapper from Cape Breton knowing Mulcair and the Tories will look like the bickering old white men they are soon enough, the Liberals better off leaving the NDP to deal with the whackos in their party—pipelines but no rail, pie-in-the-sky promises to unions already giving us the squeeze and no fight against ISIL—even before you get to the Leap loonies on the lawn. Adam Vaughan’s been sucking up big time and his reward was Fisheries, serves him right. Dodged a net there, pal. Now we’re coming to the biggies, you’d made your backroom pitch for Heritage but Pratt put an end to that.

  “Sorry, Richler, the Quebec caucus is dead set against it.”

  “Pourquoi?”

  ‘ “What is it about the blue and white?’”

  “Jesus. We’re in government, we’re not on social media. I can explain—et en français, ‘tabernac’.”

  “How should I put it?” said Pratt. “Let’s see. You’re on the wrong side of revenge—of, well, revenge politics, shall we say. But I can give you the address of the nearest HomeSense. You’ll need a cushion on the backbench.”

  “So where have you put me?”

  “Between Morgan Wheeldon and Alex Johnstone, why we let her run I have no idea. Call it Infamy Row.”

  “Where’s Ashton?”

  “As far away as possible.”

  “Megan?”

  “Safe from you.”

  “Hollett?”

  “Squirm, Richler. And don’t fuck with me on expenses. One coffee is fine for breakfast. If it has to be a double, make it Tim Hortons and not an espresso, you ponce.”

  “Jesus, Jennifer had a serrano fig panini, you didn’t complain.”

  “Count her followers. And Stroumboulopoulos retweets anything she posts. Who retweets you? Your fucking family.”

  Mulcair was dogged in the extreme—as if that was a shock—but his chief of staff, he was the kind of guy who’d stab you in the front.

  “Hey, could be a good turn,” said Ezra over lunch (that got you in trouble, but hell, he’s nothing if not entertaining). “If the coalition lasts two years and you win your seat again, you can retire with a pension in the minimum six.” You’d thought about it, done the math, because now it was looking as if a pension would be the only reward of a situation in which career go-getters were the ones gaining ground and no one was listening to your highfalutin ideas about the economy, the arts—or even the military, for that matter. You were a body—not even that. You were a puppet on a string with a hand raised up to say “Yay” or “Nay,” depending on the order coming down from on high, not below. But still you rattled on about principles and good government, community and the fair chance, hoping one day—this day—your own bloody party would notice.

  “Richler!” Pratt called.

  It was like school, for Christ’s sake.

  “You’re in luck. Tom wants to see you. Public Safety.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Take it or leave it. Me, I wouldn’t have given you anything.”

  Yes, yes, you’re paying attention. That didn’t happen either. But—you’ve heard me say it before—it could have done. (We’re all in the right after the fact but who of us knew at the time, eh?)

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Normally, a piss a moment to be alone, I’d think, “When will we master the biotechnology that makes this bodily function and all the cumbersome infrastructure that supports it redundant?” and “Think of the savings!” or, “Jeez, would the biological revolution be the one that finally shuts Don Tapscott up?” But today, in the stall without a stack of lawn signs or a bike in it—free from volunteers and staff and candidate cards—the thought rushes over me.

  A Liberal majority.

  I walk back to my desk and the world seems oddly different. Like that time when I left the boardroom of Heller and Associates after my nomination run had been given t
he green light, only this time the sensation is strangely opposite. Janet, our well of caustic campaign commentary, is looking at me tenderly as a mother might. How is it that she already knows what I have come to realize so late in the day—or am I simply imagining she knows? She looks worried but I can’t bring myself to acknowledge it.

  I take the telephone Liz is thrusting at me with an outstretched arm. She’s grinning, which means trouble.

  “Hello?”

  “What about the niqab?” says the woman on the telephone. She has a thick Russian or Eastern European accent.

  “I’m fine with it,” I say. “Women are required to reveal their faces to a judge at their official swearing-in. To ask a woman to remove it at a ceremony is to humiliate that person.”

  “It leads to failed states.”

  “Look, I don’t like the fact of the niqab, I don’t agree with women needing, being compelled or even choosing to cover their faces, but I am also confident in the changes in cultures that take place gradually and across generations here. As long as the person wearing the niqab is not infringing upon another’s rights, or that person’s rights are not being infringed by someone else, then we must respect that liberty (and any other) even when we dislike it. If it’s not hurting anyone—”

  “What about homosecchs? You like homsecchsaewals?”

  “Well that’s easy to answer.”

  “You call homsecchsaewals a marriage?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Thank you for calling.”

  Janet hands me a Post-it note with the number of a reporter from the Toronto Sun who has called.

  “What now?”

  “You said Toronto taxicabs were disgusting,” says Janet. She is speaking softly, like she is a doctor and I am the patient, the paper she’s put before me a prescription.

  #Toronto In another of our filthy, rank as piss taxicabs the city licences to keep me safe from Uber’s recklessly clean and courteous cars