Getting Disengaged From Politics
The internecine fights of the early 2000s hold a lot of lessons for today's politics
At the close of 2003, Paul Martin finally won the decade-long civil war he had waged inside the federal Liberal Party, sending Jean Chretien into retirement and taking the reins of the country himself.
[ Continued from Part 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 ]
In 13 years of chasing the crown, it seemed to me at the time that he had largely lost sight of why it was that he had wanted it in the first place. In a political generation that knew only civil war, the people around him could not conceive of peace.
For those of us who were grassroots supporters who were complete unknowns to the party beyond a lapsed membership card, it was very disheartening. I did not support Paul Martin in his leadership bid. I had met him when he came to a fundraiser in Mont-Tremblant when I was a teenager and found him to be a mushy and utterly forgettable personality.
I had volunteered for Guelph-Wellington MP Brenda Chamberlain in the 2000 election, having never met her and knowing little about her, as I was a life-long Liberal doing the campaign volunteering that life-long partisans do. By the 2004 election, I had met and learned about her and was no more impressed with her than the new leader she had helped install.
After taking the helm of the Liberal Party, Paul Martin and his supporters systematically worked to remove any elements of non-supportive Liberals from their ranks, culminating in the very public removal of high-profile MP Sheila Copps, who had dared to run against him to the end, by way of the nomination race in her Hamilton riding.
For me, it was too much. I could not support either the candidate or the leader. In 2000, I had voted from the returning office in Guelph, where I was studying computer science at the University. My vote was cast remotely for my home riding of Laurentides for the Liberal candidate, Dominique Boyer, who I would finally meet nearly 15 years later in the course of my own campaign.
In 2004, by then registered to vote in Guelph, I could not bring myself to vote Liberal — the Liberal Party was not on the ballot; Team Martin was, and he was campaigning as if it was him on one side against the Liberal Party on the other. It was a position that reflected the toxicity of the leadership race that brought him to power, and one in which sight of the ideological adversaries of progressive government had been entirely lost.
Discouraged, I went downtown to the campaign office of Phil Allt, the local NDP candidate, took a lawn sign, and went back home to put it up. My wedding was scheduled for the same week as the 2004 election, and I voted in the advance poll. We watched the results come in from a hotel in Smiths Falls on our short honeymoon, which was otherwise spent exploring railroads rather than politics.
Brenda Chamberlain handily won re-election in Guelph–Wellington. Paul Martin was reduced to a minority, and, for the first time in my life, I completely disengaged from politics until the next election, a little less than two years later.
As 2005 wound down, I watched Jack Layton pull the plug on Martin’s minority Liberal government, killing a national daycare program and the Kelowna Accord, two highly important programs that, in my mind, had to pass, for what I saw to be purely short-term partisan gain. It was obvious to me that Harper and Layton shared a fundamental vision for the country: one in which Canada would be divided sharply into its two extremes, in which a middle ground could not be possible, in which the very idea of a political centre could not be tolerated. That my 2004 vote for the NDP had been a regrettable mistake.
Stephen Harper was a clear and existential threat on the horizon, aided and abetted by Layton, and I tepidly returned to the Liberal fold, seeing nowhere else to go and being encouraged by the policy efforts that had just been destroyed. I limited my involvement in that campaign to the relatively meaningless taking of a lawn sign, and watched the party stumble incompetently through an entirely winnable election in a strong economy with significant accomplishment and nearly a decade straight of balanced budgets and social progress.
Martin stepped down on election night on January 23rd, 2006 and, for the first time since becoming Prime Minister, his last night in the role he finally appeared Prime Ministerial; magnanimous in defeat and human on stage. Free of the shackles of expectations and his tightly controlling team, he could finally be himself for that one moment.
A few days after that election, I travelled to Nairobi, Kenya, to celebrate my brother’s wedding and then spend a week on safari en famille. It was a good period to disconnect.
When I returned from the magical experience of visiting Africa for the first time in mid-February 2006, newly elected MP and international intellectual Michael Ignatieff was being widely hailed as the next leader. I wasn’t sure how that was supposed to work — I had never even heard of him in the context of Canadian politics to that point, and nothing about him said “Prime Minister'' to me. I watched to see what would happen next with only one eye, still feeling discouraged and disengaged.
I was busy elsewhere, heavily involved in the free and open source software movement, where I had co-founded a software development project called the Open and Free Technology Community and gotten myself elected to the board of New York based 501(c)3 charitable non-profit Software in the Public Interest. My writing and editing job at tech news site Linux.com, my time-consuming hobby of trainspotting, and flight training as I worked toward my licence left any kind of direct political engagement firmly on the back burner.
But my disengagement was very short-lived.