A Leader I Could Believe In

Stephane Dion set me on the road to professional politics

On April 7th, 2006, former environment minister Stéphane Dion announced his candidacy for Liberal leader, only two years after embarrassing Paul Martin into keeping him in cabinet to continue his work on what was then still more often called global warming. 

[ Continued from Part 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 ]

All of a sudden, and rather unexpectedly, I was motivated and inspired. Here was a man who, as a francophone Quebecer, was an unconditional and unabashed federalist; someone who would not fall for the ultra-nationalist games that had been plaguing our country my entire life. As an environment minister, he had demonstrated his priority in planning for the future, something to which few politicians even paid lip service, and he immediately made it clear that his campaign would be about adding the environment to our policies on social progress and fiscal prudence – what became known as the “three pillars approach.”

I turned a nondescript personal website that I had been running for years as a disorganised mishmash of random, orderless thoughts, jokes, and memories into a blog. It took me only a few minutes to write a simple program to turn the static website into a very basic dynamic one, and, as my first blog post, I immediately wrote a simple endorsement of Dion for Liberal leader, which read, in part:

I'd just like to note that Stéphane Dion has my support for the liberal leadership. As Trudeau, Mulroney, and Chrétien demonstrate, you not only have to pander to Quebec to win majority governments: you have to be from there, though you don't have to be liked there. We also need someone who supports a green economy in a position of influence[.]

I followed the race at a distance, but did not write about it again for another month and a half. Then, on May 18th, 2006, I received an email offering an interview with Stéphane Dion.

From: Rob Edger

To: David Graham

Subject: re: Interview with Stéphane Dion

Date: Thu, 18 May 2006 20:24:08 -0700

Hi!

Stéphane Dion would like to do an interview with you for your blog. If you're interested, give me an e mail:

Cheers,

Rob Edger

I was surprised that anyone was aware of my blog, and checked the logs to see how he had discovered me. Through that I found that a blog named Canadian Cerberus was keeping track of which Canadian political blogs were endorsing which leadership candidates.

As I often did and still do, I turned to my parents for thoughts: was this a good idea? My blog had not been intended to be noticed so much as to be a place to put my own thoughts for my own record. My mother’s advice was, as always, sage:

If you really want to get actively involved in politics, this is an opportunity that shouldn't be passed up. Did you see yourself as a "Liberal blogger" before being picked up by Cerebus? And who the hell are they? Did you google Rob Edger? He has a number of hits that might be explored before going on, including a colossal list of links on his own blog. But his name doesn't come up at Dion's site. I guess it is worth asking him for his credentials in offering this. Let me know what you hear back.

Love, Mom

I was ultimately invited to a group conference call with Dion and a number of bloggers, but used the opportunity to let Rob know I was interested in volunteering as well.

Having not really considered that my blog was now a political blog until my mother asked the question, though, I decided to sign up for two blog aggregators - ProgressiveBloggers.ca run by Wallaceburg, Ontario native Scott Tribe, which still exists, and Liblogs.ca run by Toronto Young Liberal Jason Cherniak, which doesn’t. Facebook existed but social media as we understand it today was still relatively fringe, while personal blogging was at its peak; blogs were taken seriously by a political class that vastly overestimated their influence as they tried to understand the new technology.

I wrote my first analysis of the leadership race on May 19th, 2006, which read in part:

Like a handful of other bloggers, I got a ping from someone offering an interview with Stéphane Dion for this blog, so it got me thinking about the leadership race again. It turns out this blog is listed on this site under the Dion camp in the great leadership blog-off.

So I'd like to address the leadership race a bit here…

On Stéphane Dion, the Clarity act, and his English:

I don't think Dion will have any trouble stemming from the Clarity Act. The people who won't vote for him based on that won't vote liberal anyway - it'll either be for the Bloc, or for a decentralist party like the tories. The Canadian nationalists (aka federalists) in Quebec will flock to anyone who will stand up for their side of the 'sovereignty' debate.

Chrétien proved that you can be relatively unpopular at home in Quebec and still rake in majority governments. People outside Quebec have never minded the accent, and Dion's accent in English is much better than Harper's accent in French. I think Canadians have been and are above judging a person by his accent. We're a bilingual country and I don't think anyone (who would vote liberal) holds that against the candidates.

People have complained about Dion's lack of charisma, but I disagree. He's charismatic in an intellectual way. Harper, too, is an intellectual who has the charisma of a rock and it is not hurting him at all. I believe Paul Martin's obvious artificial charisma and politicking have turned Canadians off this approach to politics for the foreseeable future. Charisma is not a requirement, but intellect is.

On Toronto:

My main problem with most of the other candidates is they're almost all from COTU – Toronto, or the Centre of the Universe – and I believe have a clouded perspective of the country because of that. Toronto is an enormous place and it's easy to forget there's a Canada outside of it. It's no accident Toronto voted overwhelmingly for the incumbent and a large proportion of the rest of the province voted for the challenger in the recent election.

On Michael Ignatieff

The major exception is Ignatieff, who's simply been AWOL for thirty years teaching at one of the most conceited schools in the world, and expects to return like a deposed leader returning from exile to save the country. On the other hand that may also be his strength - he has not been corrupted by Canadian politics over the last generation, but has instead been corrupted by American politics. He simply has no track record that I can discern other than a few votes in parliament.

One thing we do know about him is that he supported the war in Iraq (though he has since changed his mind) which I don't believe, and never believed, was necessary or justified. I marched in the pre-war anti-war protests and I stand by that opinion to this day. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the US government's motives for going to war are related to money and power, possibly in preparation for a long cold war with China, not with any philanthropic goals.

I may consider Ignatieff next time around after he's been at home a little while and has settled into the Canadian political scene a little more comfortably.

My mother, my most loyal reader, wrote me:

Loved the new entry. I guess you should get to know a bit more about some of the other candidates. I have a few of Ignatieff's books, which are uniformly excellent, even the fiction. One major quibble with one of them was, in the book Blood & Belonging, he was awfully squishy regarding Quebec nationalism. Although he was away for so long (and most of the time was spent in England rather than the US) he visited and wrote on Canada a lot. I am really looking forward to hearing more from the thinking candidates before making up my mind.

Love, Mom

Shortly after this exchange, on May 23, 2006, Denise Brunsdon contacted me to invite me to volunteer on Dion’s campaign, offering me a range of possible tasks. It is hard to overstate the significance of this email exchange in the subsequent decade of my life.

Date: Mon, 22 May 2006 14:48:47 -0400

From: Denise Brunsdon

To: David Graham

Subject: FW: interested volunteer

Hi Dave,

Rob forwarded me your email as I'm the director of both the blog and youth campaigns for Mr. Dion and am overseeing the national organizational structure.

May I inquire as to what capacity you'd like to help out with the campaigns?

There are a variety of tasks varying in urgency or glamour depending on how much time and dedication you have to helping elect Stephane as the next leader of the Liberal Party =)

Right now we are looking for:

- riding or campus reps who can be the dion-contact in their area responsible for renewing party memberships as well as signing up new people interested in supporting SD

- phone bankers who help us run through all the contact lists from your area

- writers with excellent technical and emotive writing to help us with website, newsletter, and general other text

- blog monitoring. Much like news clippings, our campaign internally sends out clippings of blog posts and comments about Stephane using some internet blog-tracking software.

Let me know if anything interests you as we'd be more than happy to have you on the team in whatever capacity!

Cheers,

Denise

At this point, I transitioned from an observer to a participant in the leadership race. I volunteered to do blog monitoring, and over the next few days gathered a list of around a thousand Canadian blogs that were in any way addressing the leadership race or Canadian politics. I wrote a simple script that crawled through each site twice per day looking for keywords like “Dion” and dropping them if it found them adjacent to other keywords like, say, “Celine”.

It would send me an email with the entire content of the entry, and I would then manually sort them and forward any legitimate and relevant matches to Denise to forward to the campaign team. I became known internally simply as “Blogclips,” and put about two hours per day, seven days a week, into this sorting and sending task through the rest of the campaign from the end of May until the day of the vote in December, not stopping before the final results were announced on the convention floor.

That was the beginning of 14 straight years of heavy duty politics, inspired to take the plunge in large part by Dion’s leadership and vision.