The Candidate
Page 26
“Hey!” says Vaughan, chirpily. “It’s the litterbug.”
“Excuse me?”
“Throwing trash in the video.”
I mutter something under my breath about the litter landing on Trudeau’s face being the Liberals’ “Fairness for the Middle Class” pamphlet, so the trash is of their making. Bennett makes a show of being off to Edmonton for a First Nations meeting, busy at the job she is applying for (and the further one she is obviously negotiating), and Vaughan tells me he really did do everything he claims. Whatever. I step outside for a post mortem with Becky Fong in the parking lot and she couches her disappointment graciously. Farmer walks by and I offer him a ride back into the city.
“We need real democratic reform,” says Farmer. “This campaign is really costing me, just by not working, as I imagine it is you too. But Caroline’s on her MP’s salary; she’s being paid the whole time.”
His observation makes enormous sense to me. I think of the Liberal candidate in Ottawa—Nepean, Catherine McKenna, having claimed that she’d knocked on 50,000 doors since her May 16, 2014, nomination, a rate of over 100 a day—an already impressive count that, if we are to believe the claim of a November tweet (“After knocking on 100,000 doors with my team, I’m hardcore”), would rise to an astonishing 700-plus doors during the remainder of the campaign, equivalent to one door a minute for twelve hours a day without breaks. The improbable pace is beside the point; already McKenna had been able to campaign for 457 days, and only select candidates are able to afford this. In Saskatchewan, the NDP candidate Sandra Arias has quit, citing a financial burden that she and her family can no longer carry. I decide that at remaining debates I’ll bring it up—insist that if there is to be genuine electoral reform, then a stipend should be paid to all contestants gathering the requisite number of signatures so that not just the relatively entitled can afford to participate. The stipend would be paid out of the sitting MP’s wages for the period of the campaign, divvied up accordingly.
—
Less than two weeks to go, and too many conversations at the door are marred, now, by indifference and even boredom. People have made up their minds. The election campaign has been going on for too long and if, on the one hand, the extended campaign has served my team (and especially unknowing me) well, it is, on the other hand, going on three weeks too long for the NDP at large. My last meet and greet is on Kilbarry Road, opposite the madrasa of the wealthy that is Upper Canada College, and I arrive and find myself staring at rows of gleaming wine glasses and plates of hors d’oeuvres that my generous hosts have laid out for the occasion only to discover that apparently their neighbours have much better things to do—and there’s not even a ball game on tonight. I feel really bad. I like my host. I’ve taken his money. I try to figure out the etymology of the word pariah. It’s not a Latin word. It’s not Hebraic. Must look it up.
“I’m sorry,” says my host. “I must have invited two hundred people.”
“No worries, really.”
“I don’t know what happened.”
“What a lovely garden. Is it okay to step out?”
—
Nick, the sign blitz guy:
In addition to canvassing my polling subdivision, the campaign office asked if I would help out on a Saturday sign blitz on Manor Road—in the Yonge/Eglinton area—as there was no NDP sign presence on that street.
None at all.
After three hours of knocking on doors I was able to place two lawn signs: three hours of work for two signs!
Back at the campaign office, Wendy greeted me. She smiled and said, “Thank you, Nick. We didn’t want to send a rookie canvasser there because we were afraid the disappointment would be too great.”
—
Another town hall, this one at the Marriott. The candidates are assembling and, as we wait, I take a moment for a little smartphone math.
Problem: 90 percent of a candidate’s vote depends upon the performance of the leader in the last three weeks of the campaign. Calculate the prospects of an NDP win in Toronto—St. Paul’s accordingly.
Okay.
Given (1) in the 2011 federal election, the NDP’s Jack Layton, who was tremendously popular, won 30.6 percent of the vote, and the Liberals’ Michael Ignatieff, who was not popular, took only 18.9 percent, and
Given (2) my predecessor William Molls’s portion of the 49,000 votes cast in Toronto—St. Paul’s amounted to more than 11,000 votes equalling 22.6 percent of local ballots cast, and Carolyn Bennett still took upwards of 22,000 or 40.6 percent of the vote; and if
Given (3) Ignatieff’s 18.9 bomb equalled a 5.1 percent drop in Liberal popularity, and 90 percent of Layton’s 30.6 surge equalled, since the first day of the 2011 campaign, an 11.6 percent NDP rise, and
Given (4) that in the 2015 campaign we’ve seen, to date, a 7.9 pecent rise in the Liberals’ popularity under Trudeau, and a 9.6 percent drop in the NDP’s under Mulcair;
Then (5) what is the multiplier e, for E-Day, to be applied to approximately 79,000 eligible Toronto—St. Paul’s voters in 2015, if, in 2011, u represents undecided votes, N represents bedrock category, 1 NDP votes and L bedrock Liberal votes, so that
“Please give us something to work with,” says the candidate sitting next to me.
And here we go again, the same routine wearing thin: Sam Roberts, the teleprompter, the leader in his statesman’s grey suit—for fuck’s sake, could he not ditch the jacket just once? Now Mulcair’s coupling Trudeau with Harper as much as he is able: the Liberals and Conservatives are standing together to support Bill C-51, the Keystone XL pipeline, fifty billion dollars in tax cuts to corporations and the “secret” TPP trade agreement. Harper will be stopped—but by Trudeau, is finally the dread.
“I will never side with Stephen Harper to trade away good Canadian jobs to put Canadian family farms at risk,” says Mulcair. Canadians, he says, “deserve to know why Justin Trudeau is not standing up to fight for auto jobs and for our supply management system.”
There’s nothing wrong with what Mulcair is saying, but he’s off key, and his assault of the TPP is another symptom of the party not quite getting the city: Torontonians are worried about copyright and Internet privacy and national sovereignty; they’re not worried about Quebec egg farms beyond the compensation they’ll have to pay to that province.
“Only the NDP is saying it’s time to make corporations pay their fair share,” says Mulcair. “We’re going to raise their taxes.”
It’s something to work with, but just a little—and late.
—
Coffee at Leah’s and, across St. Clair, a couple of Liberal canvassers are striding confidently, the joy of the sunny day theirs. They are young, fit and, a gift of the age, beautiful. Their hair is long and thick, they’re laughing and there’s a healthy spring in their gait. They are girls with—was it Patricia Highsmith who said so?—“nothing written on their brow.” This is their time: if not Muskoka, then this pleasant trotting about Toronto—St. Paul’s and a high school credit for community service. The pair has about them the sense of a future they cannot possibly imagine will be anything but rosy. Raymond Carver’s poem “Happiness” comes to mind; two young boys delivering the morning paper in his instance, two teenage girls in mine.
Happiness. It comes on
unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,
any early morning talk about it.
You’d keep them at the door, these two. Let the light in. Some of my canvassers, by comparison, look like they crawled out from beneath a rock. They wear old T-shirts and ragamuffin outfits and shoes with thick soles for comfort. My best friend, the fella who got me into all of this, shows up looking like he slept on a bench—and not just for one night. I tease him about this and so does Phil, but still he does it. It’s a bit of a WASP thing, like the kids at Oxford who’d boarded at Harrow and wore sweaters with gaping holes in the elbows because money was not a worry and they were to the manor born. Others are the geeks of a prior age,
folk that arrived at their own identity weirdness too soon to have made dot-com fortunes. “The walking wounded,” says Janet, after one such pair leaves the office. I wonder how many votes my bunch wins and how many they frighten right into the arms of the Liberals. If summer is theirs, then our season is February, November—overcast days with work to be done. But they are my gang, I’d have no other, and today what I’m seeing are the ties that bind across party divides; the belief this system works.
Later, someone will come out on top—the Conservatives, the Liberals or perhaps even the NDP: whoever’s brand of “change” winning out before, inevitably, being worn down by the exigencies of office. The federal NDP would be no different, its record as yet unblemished simply because the party had not known power yet. Ensconced, it too would come by its stars and its scandals, its freedoms and constraints. But, for now—in this moment before the die is cast—there is nothing but best practices in the hurly-burly of the country’s 1,792 campaigns.
Okay, not quite.
—
@Carolyn_Bennett 6.19 PM 10 Oct
Yet again @noahrichler folks r placing illegal signs on public property on Sat—City can’t remove them til after wknd/longwknd #elxn42 #TSP
@noahrichler 7.14 PM 10 Oct
@Carolyn_Bennett You fret over signs (as #teamnoah’s curiously disappear); I’m thanksgiving as good Canada wins out!
@Carolyn_Bennett 7.21 PM 10 Oct
@noahrichler We have #neverdoneitneverwill #lookelsewhere Rule is #nosignspublicproperty #StopIt Take those signs down now #elxn42
@noahrichler 7.26 PM 10 Oct
City quite right to remove signs erroneously placed; it’s the #NDP2015 signs that #LPC removes from TSP lawns that offends
@Carolyn_Bennett 7.29 PM 10 Oct
As I’ve said @noahrichler #neverdonethatneverwill however my supporters wd love to remove your illegal signs on publicproperty&don’t
@noahrichler 10.04 AM 12 Oct
A good citizen, checked & our signs in public spaces permitted Sure you’re as good a citizen & will tweet same to followers
@noahrichler 10.05 AM 12 Oct
PS Happy Thanksgiving, a gorgeous couple of days as we head into final week!
@MrTishman 10.24 AM 12 Oct
@noahricher @Carolyn_Bennett I suggest U check again “election signs are not permitted anywhere on public property”
#whatthefucklikeIdonthavebetterthingstodo.
@noahrichler 12.54 PM 12 Oct
@MrTishman @Carolyn_Bennett Not my job to educate a politician unaware of rules after 18 years. But here’s a starter.
I’d attached a jpeg of the City of Toronto Election Sign permit to the last tweet and the conversation ended, and Bennett took to direct messaging:
Reason your signs r being removed by city is because they are on illegal sites—paying the fine doesn’t mean weren’t speeding NDP has always interpreted that “deposit 4” illegal signs was a “permit”—it’s not—every illegal sign costs U $25 when city removes it no signs are allowed on public spaces!
“Okay, so help me out here,” I say to Ron Grant, our signs expert and the veteran of several campaigns. “If the City permit says that I am ‘entitled to place election signs on selected public property locations,’ then why do the Liberals persist in saying that ‘no signs are allowed on public spaces’?”
“They always say that,” says Ron. “The Liberals put me through this every time—and every time they’re wrong.”
Some of the locations Ron has used for signs really impress me: like the pair of large lawn signs staked in an “L” formation at the northeast corner of the busy junction at Bathurst and Dupont—impossible for cars in the constant stream of busy traffic not to see. Good work, I thought, but the next day my Twitter feed gave me pause.
@Lybasspring 2015-10-11 @ 10.04 a.m.
@Carolyn_Bennett @noahrichler
Lowballing political discussion.
Shame.
@noahrichler 2015-10-11 10.35 a.m.
You know, I agree. I’d say last night Was the low moment of my TSP experience and I apologize for my part in it.
—words, I had not realized, I did not need to tweet as I could have spoken them in the office with as much effect: Lyba Spring was one of our own volunteers.
—
I am not in charge: with just a week to go, the rest of the team is increasingly busy organizing for E-Day and has too much work to be bothered with me. Liz sends me out on foot again, this time with American Sarah. She’s an unflappable, unfailingly positive woman who knows something about nursing the moody, as I may be now, and I am feeling all the subtle techniques of her having been personal assistant to whoever was the divo who employed her in Manhattan. Today, she is my babysitter and I can sense in her upbeat chatter that there was likely some sort of conference back at Bathurst—something along the lines of, “Get him to canvass more, at any rate we need him out of the office.” The elevator opens onto the third floor of the seniors’ residence. The smell of disinfectant is overwhelming, though the nurse says she does not notice it anymore. A woman in a wheelchair is screaming, “Hold the doors! Let me in!” The nurse giving us the tour says to ignore her as the woman wails, “Please! Get me out!” We arrive at the floor’s common area, where perhaps twenty residents are sitting against the walls or in wheelchairs. A large television monitor is mounted on the wall, though it’s uncertain anyone is watching it. American Sarah prods me into action: Doris is West Indian and savvy and tells me she has no children when I ask if her family comes ’round. Fred’s face is in his lunch. The brown turtleneck of a much younger man in a heavily motorized chair is speckled with dandruff and his ears could use a shave. We chat. He tells me he’s a writer, I wonder if I’m looking at the future and I don’t have the courage to ask what put him here. Now the Filipino nurse behind the desk is doing her version of a Māori haka and yelling with a big smile, “NDP, that’s for me!” The woman in the wheelchair is still screaming, and Fred lifts his face from his food tray and starts to laugh. A South Asian woman with an arch-English accent tells me she’s from South Africa.
“She’s not,” says the nurse, in earshot, and not as an aside. “She’s from England and lived in Peterborough most of her life.”
The woman looks up at me and smiles beatifically. She puts a hand on my forearm.
“I like Harper,” she says softly. “I’ll vote for you.”
At what point, I cannot suppress the question, are these solicitations unethical? They’re setting up a pre-election poll in the lobby and I am speaking to a woman whose memory may have a half-life of a couple of hours.
Outside, American Sarah asks, “Why do we think it’s fair that old people who can’t make sense of newspapers anymore are able to vote, but not teenagers or temporary foreign workers or Canadians living abroad?”
“Pass.”
The seniors’ houses and hospices are a circuit: Balmoral, Christie Gardens, Jackes, Mt. Pleasant, Russell Hill, Tichester, more.
At the Meighan Retirement Residence, I speak during the ball game. They’re a good crowd and animated and have plenty of challenging questions—about the budget, the environment, ISIL and not seniors, which is interesting. I suppose it’s natural that we begin life with overwhelming narcissism and lose it as we age, and I wonder when it is that our sense of ourselves and of others is most in harmony. It’s a beautiful afternoon and so I step outside to sit on the bench in front of the residence for a moment and one of the women I’d been chatting with joins me. She’s in a wheelchair, but appears quite able. I tell her she seems to be in a good home.
“Life,” she says.
“Well, it’s better than the alternative,” I say gamely.
“No,” she says. “It’s not.”
—
Another day, another home. At Pine Villa, a woman asks the same question repeatedly and other residents are yelling at her to shut up. Ten minutes into my chat, a reti
red police officer wearing a U.S. Navy Veteran ball cap (“Proudly Served”) takes issue with—well, not so much the NDP’s policy in the Middle East, as me. He’s yelled down, too.
I press on. Somewhere, I am thinking, Trudeau has landed his motherfucking jet and is telling factory workers good times are about to begin, and eager student interns with the PMO in their sights are trolling my Facebook and Twitter posts one more time for tidbits their first sweep missed. In the shadows, the CPC is sending out crafty special advisors on refugees—you met one, he handed you a card—and here you are providing entertainment in the lounge where residents have been assembled for afternoon tea. The nurse on duty tells you Bennett did not perform that well and the Conservative candidate plain gave up. This is encouragement of a kind. You know these are the needy, unglamorous votes that other parties are, at best, only perfunctorily seeking. Not only Conservatives but also Liberals have learned from Margaret Thatcher’s playbook that appealing to all is a losing game and a “waste” of resources: securing half of a select 80 percent—that tranche of Canadians identifying as “middle class”—will put you over. These folk ailing before you are not part of the “middle class” all the parties are on about; nor are they the youth vote the Liberals and Elections Canada are working hard to get out. No, they are folk at the margins and the NDP is their best chance. For some, their only chance. Trudeau, you don’t doubt, has moved on to another youth rally by now. Maybe he’s in Montreal with Mélanie Joly. Not a wrinkle between them, they might as well be MTV hosts, the votes of their massive teen audience not the last they’ll cast, a wooden casket the next step, but the first of several generations, if not a lifetime of voting. That’s clever.