The Candidate

by Noah Richler

  “Oh, yes, I did write that.”

  But Janet is smiling.

  “It’s okay,” she says. “I asked her to read the tweet and she started to laugh and said forget about it.”

  Later, I’d endeavoured to contact the reporters to ask if my posts had been provided to them by a third party (apt phrasing for at least a couple more weeks), or if they themselves had “scoured” my pages. Not just La Presse but also the Ottawa Citizen had reported that my posts had been removed, though I’d not done so until two days after the articles were published. The Citizen also wrote that my posts had been “obtained” (read: “oppo” research received in a brown envelope or whatever is the e-equivalent). I’d reached one.

  “I didn’t scour,” the journalist said.

  —

  On the upside, we were winning the signs war. We’d put up over a thousand—more than the party had ever managed to erect in Toronto—St. Paul’s, and we were not yet done. But they were highly concentrated in NDP strongholds in the west of the riding. The condos were a challenge and so were the streets of the wealthy core. These were like the paper routes I dreaded as a kid—too much distance between houses, lots of people never home, and dispiriting after a while. It wasn’t true that Toronto—St. Paul’s was economically “diverse.” It was a wealthy riding with a few steadily reduced pockets in which lower-middle-class and poor people lived. In the metropolis that is Toronto, you need to be upper middle class just to be lower middle class and, if you’re worse off than that, well, there’s Scarborough or Hamilton. For Toronto’s ridings to be authentically diverse, at least in the economic sense that determines so much else, the sprawling city’s electoral map would need to be redrawn as a pizza, every riding a slice. Each would contain the bready crust of exurbs and suburbs with their bedroom communities and sprawling mansions, then the all-dressed cornucopia of condominiums, town houses and community housing—the everything of downtown—and, at the centre, the dipping sauce of Bay Street. But ours was not that. Ours was a swath of the choice portion inside the rim: all prosciutto and arugula and goat’s cheese, with just a sprinkling of exotic spices.

  —

  Some residents spoke so little English that the signs amounted to free lawn decorations, their real purpose impossible to explain: the rest of the street had them and they looked good so sure, why not? No, no, say the hand gestures, you don’t have to phone, just come and put one up—which I’d text the office to do before the Conservatives or Liberals came by and the homeowner nodded his agreement to them as well or in my place. One house I visited, with just two residents able to vote, had all three of the major parties’ signs posted in a neat row. A Chinese-Canadian senior told me the Conservatives said he was obliged to put up their sign—that it was the law—though it seemed to me more likely he was told he had the right to put up a sign and language got in the way. The Liberals took down my sign, said a few, one a donor and another a local Muslim filmmaker tweeting:

  @noahrichler your #NDP sign was taken from our house. You may want to look into why a few signs have gone missing in your riding…?”

  On my own walks, I’d noticed a couple of signs absent from positions I thought I knew well, and it was tempting to think the worse of it (all ridings get such reports), but I’d decided to be skeptical, figuring it might as easily have been neighbours or vandals. But I’d also had to block several very nasty people on my Twitter account, not exactly charmers, and made a note to talk to Phil. He said he’d come across one house with several of our team’s large signs piled flat in his yard and, when questioned, the man told him they’d been dumped. “Can be kids doing that,” said Phil. “It used to be if we caught them, boy, they’d remember.”

  I had the impression he missed those days.

  —

  “Don’t say ‘Justin’,” says Janet. “Say ‘Trudeau.’ ”

  Janet has negotiated with HQ and I am able to participate in the panel on the environment at the First Unitarian Congregation of Toronto, in the heart of the riding. The mainstream and social media are still a-flurry with my indiscretions, and I am under strict instructions—a teenager with a curfew, an offender under a peace bond.

  “And no reporters,” says Janet. “You don’t talk to anybody beforehand and you don’t take questions from the audience if the subject comes up. Enough with social media, already.”

  We are late enough in the campaign that I am developing a real affection for a number of the people I’m working with. Janet, I decide, would be a good parent, the lenient sort that would have a hard time suppressing her own urge to misbehave.

  “Agreed,” I say. “No reporters!”

  Kinsella, I’ll have to tell him some time, was right—but tonight social media are the last things to worry about.

  —

  THE LIFE AND DEATH OF THE CANDIDATE

  The Single Extant Canadian Work of William Shakespeare, Believed to Be an Early Draft of His Tragedy, The Life and Death of Julius Caesar

  ACT 1. SCENE II. A public place.

  Flourish.

  Enter THE CANDIDATE; THE CAMPAIGN MANAGER and DOUG BELL, for the course; CAROLYN BENNETT, dressed in red, and KEVIN FARMER in green; a great crowd from Toronto—St. Paul’s following, among them THE POLITICAL WIFE, THE POLITICAL HUSBAND, THE ASSISTANT and the SOOTHSAYER, an advocate for Leadnow.

  THE CANDIDATE: Bennett!

  BELL: Peace, ho! The Candidate speaks.

  THE CANDIDATE: Bennett!

  BENNETT: Here, my lord.

  THE CANDIDATE: Stand you directly in the Campaign Manager’s way,

  When she doth run her course? Campaign Manager!

  THE CAMPAIGN

  MANAGER: Candidate?

  THE CANDIDATE: Forget not, in your speed, Campaign Manager, To touch Bennett; for our elders say, The Liberals, touched in this holy chase, Shake off their sterile curse.

  THE CAMPAIGN

  MANAGER: I shall remember:

  When The Candidate says “do this,” it is perform’d.

  THE CANDIDATE: Lead now; and leave no ceremony out.

  Flourish

  SOOTHSAYER: Candidate!

  THE CANDIDATE: Oh Christ, sorry, my line was set on!

  Who calls?

  FARMER: Bid every noise be still: peace yet again!

  THE CANDIDATE: Who is it in the press that calls on me?

  I hear a tongue, shriller than all the music, Cry “The Candidate!” Speak; The Candidate is turn’d to hear.

  SOOTHSAYER: Beware the ides of Ekos, Nanos, Forum and Poll Tracker.

  THE CANDIDATE: What man is that?

  ASSISTANT: A soothsayer bids you beware the polls. He’s unimpressed by your 23% in March.

  THE CANDIDATE: Then why does he not say so?

  What’s with listing poll trackers and where’s MacDougall?

  Isn’t she for the course? This is getting ridiculous.

  Set him before me; let me see his face.

  BELL: Fellow, come from the throng; look upon The Candidate.

  THE CANDIDATE: What say’st thou to me now? Speak once again.

  SOOTHSAYER: Beware the ides of March.

  THE CANDIDATE: He is a dreamer. Let us leave him: pass.

  —

  The rules of the evening’s discussion are an adaptation of the venerable Quaker practice of “scrupling” that encourages adversaries to “listen, share and search for ways to respond in accordance with their own scruples and principles”—no challenges or confrontation allowed. MacDougall, the Conservative candidate, does not show. The audience is told she is hosting a fundraising event, only confirming my suspicions concerning the Conservatives’ estimation of Toronto—St. Paul’s as a field of money trees. It is also quite obvious that “The Intersection of Climate and Democracy,” as the discussion is billed, is not exactly tops on the Conservative agenda. Nevertheless, I find myself missing MacDougall and the opportunity for a discussion of policy rather than having to listen to Bennett repeat tropes about Toronto—St. Pau
l’s and Trudeau being a leader because he surrounds himself with good people. Now Bennett is talking about “the teachings of the First Peoples of Canada” and “an indigenous way of knowing that will protect Mother Earth,” and I can hear Janet sighing from her seat in the front row.

  Question time comes and Adam Deutsch, Green Party candidate Kevin Farmer’s right-hand man, says again he’ll probably vote for the NDP, which is nice. Then someone I have not seen before stands up with a slim binder in his hand and addresses not the candidates but the audience. It is actually fascinating; there is something approaching contempt in the way he has turned his gaze away from us and I know already I shall not forget the moment. He identifies himself as a member of Leadnow and explains the mandate of his organization and its polling of ridings that might see a split of the “progressive” vote, allowing a Conservative to come up the middle. Leadnow, he says, canvasses with a view to endorsing the Liberal or NDP candidate best poised to win, pushing the Anything But Conservative (ABC) vote in the direction most likely to achieve that end. I can hear Janet sighing again, and when it comes my turn, I tell him how misguided I believe the principles of the organization to be. My message the length of the campaign has been that a vote carries vital information in the short but also mid- and long term and, regardless of who wins, that it pushes a whole packet of conversations along. For instance, the idea of a parliamentary coalition that Stephen Harper and the Conservatives used, in 2008, to warn of an unholy alliance intent on overturning his government “without your say, without your consent, without your vote” had, by 2015, become a more rational and practical discussion about how a Liberal–NDP coalition might operate. And if, in the election just a few weeks away, the result was, once more, a party with but 35 percent of the vote handed 100 percent of the power, then it would become an even more vigorous and informed one about proportional representation. This is how votes influence a society over a period of time rather than on one particular day—but all this is undermined, and the information of a vote distorted, when a person votes “strategically.” If people cast their votes with a view to just one issue, rather than a party’s platform, then they are rescinding their right to complain about everything else the winning party has proposed, forfeiting their say in a plethora of issues for the sake of Leadnow’s simple instruction.

  The Leadnow speaker is unbothered and the scrupling rules prevent me from vigorously presenting my position. The man has made the pitch for his ABC strategy and announces it is the only purpose of his attending. I wonder whether or not I should be alarmed or offended that Leadnow is not actually polling in Toronto—St. Paul’s. The soothsayer and his colleagues are looking more and more like the enemy, but it’s hard to pay attention because the polls have been relentlessly negative from the start. I am looking for a miracle.

  Janet greets me outside. “What’s Bennett going to do next?” she says. “Come in with a headdress on?”

  —

  Things it is becoming harder and harder to talk about:

  Balancing the budget

  Pulling out of the fight against ISIL

  Keeping plans to purchase the F-35

  Hiring 2,500 more RCMP

  Israel

  Child care

  —

  Regular sleep is out the window. At today’s 3 a.m. wakeup call, I dream that I am sorting bounced cheques and the bed combusts. Come seven, I have joined Sarah in the kitchen for the first of my two double espressos. The candidate’s successful weight-loss program is the following: black coffee, revolting fast food you’d rather not finish and other meals on the fly, and the adrenalin-burning rush that ensues from a constant sensation of being half an hour late for you don’t know what.

  The radio is on. Sarah flips a pan-heated tortilla with a spicy avocado-and-tomato mix on my plate. Real food. Cooking is usually my call, but the campaign has retired me.

  “See,” I say. “Your life’s not over. Just different roles.”

  “Have you called Rocco Galati yet?” asks Sarah.

  “No,” I say.

  “Have you organized T-shirts?”

  “No.”

  “Have you arranged for a closing night party yet?”

  “No.”

  “Have you—”

  “I told you. The answer to every question you ask me is ‘No, I haven’t done that yet.’ ”

  Sarah flips from Jazz FM to Radio One despite Janet’s instructions, and Éric Grenier, the CBC’s “poll tracker,” is cheerily imparting NDP-unfriendly news. We are continuing our slide in the polls, and I am doing my best not to compute. At the door I have been saying with a shrug, like I’m imparting a confidence from my own years in the trade, “Don’t listen to journalists, don’t listen to pollsters, it’s a flawed science. They failed to predict the NDP victory in Alberta, Kathleen Wynne’s in Ontario, the Orange Wave in Quebec—or David Cameron’s Conservative victory in the U.K., for that matter. Listen to yourselves; the polls are wrong!” And the thing is, I believe this myself. Sort of have to.

  The Liberal Party’s child care ad is running again.

  While two people claim to speak for the middle class, only the Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, Justin Trudeau, will back up his words with actions. He will raise taxes on the wealthiest one percent, and cut them for the middle class….

  “Man,” I say. “Why isn’t the NDP advertising? We’re the CBC’s core audience, for Christ’s sake.”

  …Thomas Mulcair will do neither, continuing to send Stephen Harper’s child benefit cheques to millionaires. Mr. Trudeau will cancel them and send more money to families who really need it. That’s real change.

  “I don’t know why we’re not cancelling those cheques. It makes it really hard and I’ve lost one of my best lines,” I complain.

  “Which is?”

  “Our plan is not about stuffing cash through the door for the parents to use. It’s about the children.”

  Not once, during the whole campaign, will I hear an NDP advertisement. The Liberal one really grates.

  —

  Vaughan Road is my comfort zone, and as I journey along it in the later stages of the campaign I mumble quiet thank yous for the orange NDP signs with my name on them on almost every block. But, west of Oakwood, into little Jamaica, red is starting to pop up amid the orange. The Liberals start weak and come on strong. The front door of one house is wide open, hip hop blaring out into the fall air as three black men lounge on the front steps, a Bennett sign affixed to the porch. I pencil in a “4” on the sheet and turn up Northcliffe towards Eglinton. We are at the very north end of the street, a block south of where the Eglinton Cross-town LRT line is being built, its construction a source of local consternation. Hang on to your houses, I want to say, hang on to your bankrupted businesses—don’t sell, because when the subway is finished, you’ll be laughing all the way to the real estate bank. But sell now and you’ll get nothing, your community will be ruined, and the developers will be laughing—at you. This may be better advice than any of the political stuff I’m pushing. The street here is lined with small one-storey strip malls of a kind that will have historical value soon enough—if they avoid demolition, that is. I pop into a dive bar in the middle of one, a couple of customers or maybe dealers hanging about outside, just room for a pool table and shot-taking inside, and a white guy is behind the bar who has probably been working there for forty years. He won’t take a window sign, he says, “but I’ve got to congratulate you for coming in here. Never seen that.”

  Outside, past the co-op in which, on one of my first canvasses, I’d met the couple whose son had cystic fibrosis, I see the father sitting on a low wall and taking in the gentle afternoon sun.

  “Hey,” I say, the memory of the moment providing me a lift. “Remember me? I’m the NDP candidate!”

  He nods. He’s not smiling.

  “What’s your position on Syria?” he asks.

  “It’s a terrible situation, we should do what we can to—”<
br />
  “How do we know they’re not terrorists? Those refugees come here and they get everything. All my life I’ve been working and you’re going to give them houses and money so they don’t have to? They not welcome here. It’s not fair.”

  —

  It’s been a while since anybody asked how Mulcair and the NDP would fare in a coalition. At the apartment door of a “1” I am offered reasons why.

  “I’ve voted NDP all my life,” the man says, “but now I have to vote Liberal.”

  “Why?”

  “We have to get rid of Harper.”

  The man’s daughter is standing beside him, and she says she lives in the neighbouring riding of Davenport and will be voting Liberal too.

  “But you have an NDP MP already,” I say. “Andrew Cash. And he’s doing a really good job.”

  “I know,” says the daughter. “But we can’t take any chances.”

  “The Liberals are prepared to invest,” says the father. “They’re not hung up on balancing budgets. The Liberals are left of the NDP now.”

  “That’s not true,” I say. “You’re being duped. The most progressive policy is to tax corporations more and the Liberals won’t be doing that.”

  There’s more I want to say—that we’re not in a recession, that we keep deficit spending in line so we’re not paying a whack of interest down the line—but increasingly, I see the need to make the case for voting as you believe. The NDP, I say, is the only party insisting on the repeal of Bill C-51; the only one with explicit plans for carbon pricing or promising a specific system of proportional representation; the only party planning to raise the tax on corporations. A vote for the Liberal Party is a vote against the sum of these positions. In all of this, I am beginning to hate the polls—not for the data they gather but for when they do it and their sabotage of decisions I believe voters should arrive at themselves, rather than through the exertions of a public conversation that might as well be about best-seller lists or the latest cultural fad.

  “Think of it like a case before the courts,” I say. “The whole country is on jury duty and polls are pronouncing on matters sub judice. Pollsters should be banned from publishing anything influencing such an important decision in the three weeks before election day.”