The Candidate
Page 30
Mulcair steps up, the autocue rolls, but today the NDP leader ad-libs his lines.
“Pharmacare! Health care! Child care!…MULCAIR!”
October 26, Toronto.
We were ten around the table in the private dining room in the back room of a glam bistro off King. Cash looked as spooked as an army veteran. MP for Davenport had been his dream job, he’d been good at it, and now it had slipped away. Scott seemed philosophical and curiously at ease. An MP from the GTA I’d not yet met was going on about how the Liberals had courted her and she’d said no. Chow was talking a lot, and kept referring to Toronto as the “epic centre” of something or other and I couldn’t get beyond the malapropism to actually make head or tail of the point she was making. Nash, it was hard to know what to think of Nash, one of the first Dippers I’d met, who’d complained at the last of the rallies how it never got easier and she was still having to fight for her seat.
What makes the politician, I wondered? As the ten vented—as I was also doing (too much temper, too much outrage)—it was hard to believe, given only slightly different circumstances, that our lot might have been making decisions in government. Today, they—no, we, he corrected himself—appeared gormless, awkward and without the right stuff. We were losers. We didn’t have it. How was it that so many had trusted us—had invested their time and money and labour in the chance this was not the case?
And yet this same bunch, minus the new contenders of which I was one, had done damn well in opposition. I was hard put to think of a party that had performed as admirably as the NDP since 2011, under the relentlessly hard-working, serious, committed leader who was Tom Mulcair.
Things I was told when I started:
This will end.
The days can be unbelievably long.
You will move through a carousel of moods.
Politics is everybody else believing they know better than you.
Politics is other people telling you what happened after the fact.
Some days, the last thing you will want to do is canvass, and then you’ll go out and canvass because that’s what will make you feel better.
Ninety percent of your vote will depend upon the performance of the leader in the last three weeks of the campaign.
The Liberals start slow and then come on strong.
If we’d said fifty thousand and not forty-six; if Zunera Ishaq had thought, “To hell with it, it’s just a piece of clothing,” or Mulcair had said, “I hear Canadians; if we need to borrow from our children, so be it.” If Dan Gagnier had mattered more, if Dan Lauzon had mattered at all—
Politics is everybody else believing they know better than you.
Politics is other people telling you what happened after the fact.
If.
Then the media would be writing about the statesman Canada was always going to prefer, the mistake of Justin Trudeau, the disaster of Gerald Butts and the Liberal surfeit of pretty. The chattering classes would be saying celebrity did not wash here in Canada, place of order and good government, not the flashy. Oh no, not here. This, after all, was the country that did not find consensus in how to fight ISIL, Big Oil or a corrupt Senate, but in the outrage of the CPC denying Canadians their right to the census—their right to fill out a long form.
Maybe then, this same bunch now jockeying half-heartedly (there was really only one message to be had, and that was defeat) would have been in government—and capably, and with no more necessary qualification than Canadians having voted for them.
Ultimately, 1,792 was the number that mattered, and if just 40 people, give or take, had volunteered for each campaign, then 75,000 Canadians would actively have pitched in and done their bit for—well, love of country, and how could I think anything but good of that?
During E-Day preparations, I’d popped in to Wendy’s seminar to thank some of those coming out to get out the vote and monitor the polls and vet the counting of the ballots. I’d recognized the French-Canadian teacher; the son of a friend; the daughter of another; the woman from Nova Scotia with the piano taking up more room than she did in her tiny apartment; the young Jewish woman who’d been at Bathurst most days; the bright young lesbian publishing students; the mushroom seller, a hipster in tweeds, who’d given the candidate a rough time on his very first day canvassing at the Wychwood farmers’ market. It had struck me powerfully, even then, that I’d not met even a third of the people who had worked on the campaign—likely never would. But I was well aware, by then, they weren’t in it for the candidate, they weren’t in it for me, though maybe I’d given their hopes a face and a voice. I’d canvassed, I’d entertained, I’d sat with my orange bomber jacket on under the s’cach for Sukkot; I’d cycled and danced and clapped and led and imagined—and failed. But maybe somewhere along the line, I’d inspired someone else just as, at the beginning of this helter-skelter journey three years back, a couple of this group of ten had done for me.
I looked at the beaten, shell-shocked faces around the table and was proud.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Bryan, the Liberal:
beclown (bI’klaʊn) verb. To make a complete idiot of oneself in public. To behave or speak in such a way, or to make a comment or express an opinion that is so profoundly witless, senseless and obtuse, that you have forever after defined yourself as a person of comical value only. Never to be taken seriously again. Of worth only as an object of ridicule and derision.
So, Canadians voted for Real Change. Now. Thanks for your efforts, etc. Much appreciated. From a post-election vantage point it all seems inevitable, but it was not. And—as is always the case—“hope and hard work” had an assist from luck. Or a terrible NDP campaign. Amounts to the same thing.
On day one, when Mulcair refused to answer questions, I knew they were in trouble. Man, they got off to a bad start—they put him up with Parliament Hill in the background, and played it safe. They thought they were the government in waiting.
The problem was, nobody else did, but that notion informed their shitty strategic thinking. Typical overreach. They believed their own spin, and that’s always deadly. Deadly.
Case in point? The ads Richler put out—you know, the Dipper who ran in St. Paul’s against Bennett. The first one was true to Dipper sensibilities, and the “they haven’t had a new idea since we all had 8-tracks in our cars” tradition. And it was funny, too. I mean the Dippers are many things, but never funny. You can still watch it online, and you should.
The second ad is more interesting, though. You probably have not seen it and you can’t watch it online.
Remember the two-men-by-the-lake thing that Mansbridge did with former PM Harper? He did a rip on that, kicked SH in the ass and took his place in the chair. The CBC complained and—can you believe it—the wise men in Orange caved and made their candidate take it down. And in doing so, the genius in Ottawa—should be my confrère—beclowned himself. Beclowned himself on the altar of Mansbridge!
They pulled the ads to avoid being shamed for their bad “strategic” decisions, and—I’m sure this played a part—they were worried Richler might turn his true Orange message and his last name into a leadership run. He was singing from the hymnbook, but not the new one HQ had written.
What a snapshot of an NDP campaign that could not figure out what they were selling! And if they don’t know who they are, voters certainly couldn’t—and they didn’t.
We took all of the oxygen they were counting on. Having JT and sunny ways to contrast against at least four Mulcair personae—the prime ministerial question dodger, the angry guy, the crazy smiley-faced hyper child, the delusional prosecutor—made it easy. They melted away.
Remember this, my friend. When your opponents have poured gasoline on themselves and are about to light a match, the most savage thing you can do is simply to watch.
—
Megan Leslie fell, and in no time all of the Atlantic provinces were coloured red. The tsunami had come and, reaching Quebec, was leaving just a few isolated ou
tcrops of blue and orange, Ruth Ellen Brosseau one of the few NDP members left standing. Politics is other people telling you what happened after the fact, though Megan had not needed hindsight to get it right.
As Quebec turned, it occurred to me just how little of the electoral conversation had been about the Sherbrooke Declaration; how ineffective the sop, were it that, had been to the province’s so-called soft nationalists.
“This is bad,” said Sarah.
Our constituencies were failing us, or we’d failed them, but we’d seen it coming—enough to make sure there was a deejay, a popcorn machine, boxes of pizza and an open bar, and to make sure that a couple of other NDP candidates sure to lose were able to feel good by being in the room with us, one of them with the campaign management team that was his mother and aunt. But, still, we’d not imagined this would happen. Maybe Janet had—drinking, uncharacteristically, a second glass of red wine.
Not yet nine, I stepped outside to call Carolyn Bennett and congratulate her. That’s what a candidate does, no, or do we just see national leaders do that on TV?
Not since the red of the British Empire had a map looked quite like this.
By the time the red reached Toronto, I was thinking of Germany’s 7-1 World Cup rout of Brazil. This is losing.
—
All results have causes. Nothing is ever “random.”
It had been an election of participation; there was no denying it.
Four million new voters, and 8,224 among the approximately 77,000 eligible voters of Toronto—St. Paul’s alone. (Answer: if 90 percent of your vote depends upon the performance of the leader in the last three weeks of the campaign and Mulcair won 10.9 percent fewer votes than Jack Layton, then a 7.91 percent drop of the Toronto—St. Paul’s NDP vote—14.7 percent versus 22.6 in 2011—is actually a 1.9 percent improvement. Stats, eh?)
“I don’t know where he found them,” said Cash. “They weren’t on our lists.”
We were chatting over espresso, Cash and I, a few days after the devastation. There’s a slightly out-of-body sensation to being walloped as we had been, and the two of us were like a couple of rehab vets languishing in the anonymity of a city knowing nothing of our pain.
We talked futures, the TPP, the arts.
“They made the better offer,” Cash said.
—
Years before, writing about the Bilcon environmental dispute, I’d been racing about the Digby Neck trying to find someone to verify a quote reported to me second-hand. The aggregate company from New Jersey had been buying up land along the Neck with a view to quarrying the territory’s basalt for American roads, and one of the company’s enablers was the principal of a local high school, the student base of which—along with local resources and jobs and opportunities—was diminishing. The dispute was bitter and extensive and I’d been told the frustrated principal had scoffed at the project’s naysayers and its dubious possibilities of work, saying the region “was full of idiots and old people.” Driving along the 217, fuming at the insult of it all, this shit selling out the territory so that he could dine with the Big Boys, I suddenly realized how much a novelist would have enjoyed the man. Loved him. As a character, I mean. The novelist would have inhabited him, enjoyment the ticket if he were to truly understand someone wanting to leave the backwater and the idiots and old people behind him. I started laughing—never did find the confirming quote—because I realized, too, that I’d never be able to write such a rogue. My journalist’s outrage and indignation would be useless to the task and would only have stood in the way of that enjoyment. The journalist takes things too personally, sees the world in the hopelessly limited terms of his own arrogant ego, imagining, necessarily, he knows better.
The election, I also took far too personally—as if not just the 75,852 eligible voters of Toronto—St. Paul’s, but the 6.9 million Liberal voters who turned out on October 19 had rejected me. I felt retired. Done. Didn’t think I’d even write anymore.
I wished that I’d been capable of more of that enjoyment and less outrage: at the sanctioning of Liberal friends revelling in the new government; at CBC presenters falling over themselves to bask in the reflected glory of the new prime minister; at the lingering ineptitude of the party I had chosen; at the curious hatred the mere fact of the NDP at times inspired; at Trudeau’s Liberals putting into place so much of the platform that had been the NDP’s to offer.
The last turn of events bothered me the most. The NDP had lost not only seats—not only the diversity that was theirs, before, to say, “We are you, Canada”—but the opportunity of a lifetime to introduce so many reversals, more than changes, ludicrously easy to effect: reintroducing the long-form census; meeting with the premiers; travelling to COP21, the twenty-first United Nations Climate Change Conference, with the premiers but also critics (where Trudeau, damn it, became the statesman Canada saw beside Merkel); introducing better benefits, child care and affordable housing. There would be credit for all this, but only once, and it would help to shore up the Liberal–CPC dance for another decade.
—
It was the lesson of the BSS morning writ large: politics—or at least good behaviour in politics—is about putting good ideas into the agora for the country at large to discuss. (Get back to writing, says Sarah.) To want the credit for oneself, or for one’s party—well, that was not about introducing an argument or wanting to help and contribute to one’s country. No, that was about being a politician. The International New York Times called to ask for a piece about the election and I flew the white flag. It wasn’t hard. Then I called Chrystia Freeland and said I had good people working for me—Young Ethan, Josh—who had proven themselves deserving. Would she consider them?
“That’s really good of you,” said Freeland, “that the first thing you’d do is try and help your people find work.”
But she didn’t call back: they were Dippers looking for a job.
—
Sarah, the spouse:
Do I regret the adventure? Not one bit. We support one another in all we do, and when I finally came around to the idea of him tossing his hat into the political arena, then I was with him 100 percent. I was proud of him to be honest. Noah was great at connecting with people, if not winning their vote, and actively engaged with his constituents in conversation and debate. Yes, there were some tough moments, but they were moments we shared, not ones I felt alone in. And I have to say it was an awful lot of fun—but, as I feared, campaigning was all consuming and a true emotional roller coaster of a time. I really, really hope he never does it again. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned: never say never.
—
The office was packed away. The computers and the telephones were unplugged, the polls behind what had been Phil’s desk pulled down, the posters of Tom rolled up and the green folders and maps and data sheets packed into boxes. Julian had sent an email round to ask if anyone had a garage big enough to store 1,200 signs and I asked, “What for?”
“So we don’t have to pay for them again.”
“But they say ‘Tom Mulcair’s NDP’ in the top right hand corner.”
“You never heard of stickers?”
Said Sarah: “I think it’s okay to show you Pratt’s video now. We didn’t want to before, because we knew you’d lose your shit.”
She swiped at her iPad and opened up Facebook and then the NDP Canada page and brought up a campaign video in which Pratt—wearing sunglasses, the paunch pushing the buttons of his untucked short-sleeved grey shirt—plays the swaggering tough guy. The House of Commons is behind him and he is walking across the green summer lawn of Parliament Hill and towards the camera, swinging his arms and then thrusting the back of his hand, four fingers splayed, as he makes the case for Tom Mulcair, “a guy who quit as government minister on a position of principle, because he wouldn’t stand by and let the government turn a provincial park into a bunch of condos, a guy who was courted by both the federal Liberals and the Conservatives but, instead, de
cided to run for the NDP at a time when we were the fourth party in a province where we had never won—because Tom Mulcair is a guy who stands up for what he believes in.”