Full-Time Just On Time

When I arrived in Ottawa in mid September, 2010, I gave myself two years to find full time work on the Hill. Following the federal and Ontario campaigns in 2011, I had found work in the offices of three of the 34 remaining Liberal MPs. A feat in its own right, but left me only working three days a week, and it wasn’t clear where to go next, my chocolate brownies having reached the apparent limit of their influence.

[ Continued from Part 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 ]

Over the winter holidays of 2011-2012, I decided I needed to take an actual vacation, having not done so in the by-then three years since the unceremonious end of my tech career. I bought Britrail and EURail passes — 15 days of unlimited first class rail across Europe cost just $700 at the time — a plane ticket from Ottawa to London, a plane ticket back to Ottawa from Geneva three weeks later, and a new camera that cost as much as all the travel. I contacted pretty much everyone I knew in Europe looking for couches to crash on and had an amazing trip touring England, Wales, Belgium, France, Germany, Holland, Austria, and Italy by train, and even stopping to walk across most of Liechtenstein.

Days after returning to Ottawa, I opened a conversation with someone on a dating website who almost immediately wanted to abandon the conversation online in favour of a phone call. We chatted for a while on the phone, and agreed to meet the next morning at the eternal flame in front of Parliament Hill. 

There, I gave Mishiel a tour of Parliament, and then dropped her off at her church. I went to the Senate chamber and started impromptu staffing Simon Gollish by text, who was playing the Ottawa South MP in a mock Parliament in the Chamber, made easier by the fact that I was working for the actual Ottawa South MP at that time. 

Mishiel and I reconnected after her church service and we had lunch together at a nearby Subway, spent the rest of the day together — and have been ever since. Sometimes it just works! Her quiet patience and infinite support have been the secret ingredient to my ability to do just about everything in my story after that moment.

In the 2011 election, Jack Layton had become a folk hero, winning official opposition for the NDP for the first time in the party’s history. They saw opposition as a victory, and Jack Layton and Stephen Harper had jointly achieved, for the moment, their objective: dividing the country into left and right and squeezing out the centre. When Layton died a few months after the election, Harper took the unprecedented step of throwing him a state funeral, a nod to their close friendship and common objectives.

The election had also cost Michael Ignatieff his seat and his job as leader, and with Dion already deposed, former NDP premier Bob Rae became the interim leader. He made no secret of his desire for permanent leadership, and acted as though his interim position was for the long term.

In the winter of 2012, with Layton’s Toronto-Danforth seat available, I had another opportunity to run data for a campaign, and in late February I temporarily moved to the riding to join the effort on Grant Gordon’s campaign against NDP candidate Craig Scott.

It was an odd campaign. We realised quickly that we were not running against Craig Scott so much as against the ghost of Jack Layton, and, while we improved Liberal fortunes in the riding, we were utterly trounced. But we were also dealing with a deeply unpopular leader who made bizarre decisions and hindered our efforts.

During the campaign, a giant billboard showed up a few blocks from the office. It was from the Party’s national spending limit component of the by-election, so it did not reference the riding. It was a picture of Bob Rae and the message “we’re listening, we’re changing, we want you back!” I did not find ‘baby, take me back!’ to be an especially effective campaign strategy, nor Bob Rae to be the quintessential image of ‘change’. He had been my second choice in 2006, but six years later he had not graduated to my first.

Following the March 29, 2012 by-election, I stayed a couple of extra days with campaign manager and understated political powerhouse Luch Durante to help break down the office and clean up the signs around the riding, and by the start of April, I was back in Ottawa. 

Shortly after my return, I learned that Newfoundland MP Scott Simms, who I had met once before and who had, so far, avoided my chocolate brownie advances, was looking for a new legislative assistant for his Ottawa office, as his current one was returning to Newfoundland to do her Masters. I sent him my CV and dropped by his office to talk to his outgoing assistant about the job and the boss, and why she was leaving.

Scott interviewed me in mid-April, having just returned from a trip to Cyprus. He started the interview by commenting on my tie clip, and offering me lokum — Turkish delight, a very messy treat I was very familiar with from having a Turkish grandfather — that he had received on his travels. An expert ice-breaker, the powdered sugar now covering the table helped set the tone as he invited me to wipe the rapidly spreading mess onto the floor.

There were two candidates for the job and Scott was reluctant to hire someone with Hill experience, lest they have their own ideas on how to do things and be unwilling to be trained to his needs and standards. David McGuinty tipped the balance in my favour one day by letting him know that I would be a very good hire, even if I were “a little quirky”. 

Knowing that I was only available two days per week while I still worked for McGuinty, Valeriote, and Regan, he hired me in the last week of April. I spent one day observing the out-going assistant, one day of her observing me to make sure I got it, and that was it — I was on my own running the Ottawa office, two days a week, while still working in three others.

At first I came in on the weekends and stayed long hours trying to understand what I was doing and keep up, but I quickly settled into a routine and enjoyed the job. Scott was an absolute blast to work for – I have often said since that the most difficult part of working for him was keeping a straight face. The only time Scott ever got angry at me was when I referred to him in conversation as “Mr Simms,” and I will keep the tradition here of referring to him simply as Scott.

As the spring session of Parliament ended in 2012, the idea of running in 2015 started taking shape in my head. Jimmy Karygiannis, a well-known and rather controversial Liberal MP, was in suite 118 Justice Building, across the hall from McGuinty’s suite, and I ran into him and his long-time assistant Margot quite often. One day, as he often did, Karygiannis dropped by to say hi to us and, in conversation, I mentioned to him that I was contemplating whether I should consider running in the election three years away.

He looked at me very seriously, and said: can you reach into someone’s chest and pull out their still-beating heart? If you cannot do that, you should not run. From almost anyone else, I would have taken it as a joke; from Jimmy, I stepped back a little to make sure he couldn’t reach my chest.

Toward the end of the summer, Scott offered to upgrade my part-time position in his job to a permanent, full-time job, and I left the offices of David McGuinty, Frank Valeriote, and Geoff Regan to properly run the Ottawa office of Scott Simms starting on the first of September.

It had been 23 and a half months since I had given myself two years to find permanent, full-time work on the Hill.