2008 had been a busy year for me. I wrote dozens of essays and articles, ran data for a pair of election campaigns, started my first newspaper column, became a regular guest on a local radio show — Royal City Rag with Jan Hall on the University of Guelph campus radio, CFRU — made several televised presentations to city council, got my first official recognition of any sort, and was a proud part of putting the community on the path to the return of its commuter trains. The higher the rise, as they say, the harder the fall.
[ Continued from Part 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 ]
After the election, my life went through a number of rapid and dramatic changes. My marriage reached its logical conclusion and the dominoes fell quickly. On November 25th, I went to take my wife to Aldershot Via station to pick up the Amtrak to Albany to visit her family while we contemplated what was next. Our car, a 1993 Oldsmobile Cutlass Cruiser, the last of the 8-seat station wagons, had other ideas. She had to go by rather expensive taxi, and I had to get the car to the shop for what would become its final repair. I returned to my home office upstairs, and opened my computer to a curt note from my boss informing me that our website, Linux.com, had been transferred to the Linux Foundation, and none of the staff, including himself, were included in the deal.
As a contractor rather than an employee, given the lack of legal existence of my employer in Canada, there would be no severance, and for the same reason, I would not be eligible for employment insurance benefits. I would be entering the Christmas holidays suddenly unemployed, single, and car-less.
Minus a marriage, a car, and a job, I had the opportunity of a lifetime to reconsider what I wanted to do. It was a clean slate. But I would have some issues to get through, first.
I started experiencing panic attacks and my doctor diagnosed me with clinical depression. He prescribed me powerful antidepressants, telling me I would need to stay on them for two or three years.
I had no drug insurance and reluctantly paid close to $50 cash for the pills, taking them home and staring at them for hours, trying to decide what to do. Taking long-term, mind-altering medication for what was an objectively short term problem seemed wildly irresponsible to me.
A month later I thanked my doctor, telling him the medication had worked, and returned the unopened bottle to him.
Given the confluence of events, Laura and I continued living together, though in separate rooms and exploring — and comparing notes on — outside dating lives, and did not inform our families of what was happening until the following summer. We had been together since high school, when she had asked me out in a lengthy email written entirely in Morse code, and while the marriage did not work, the underlying friendship had remained strong.
I reached out to the newly elected MP, Frank Valeriote, whose campaign I had just worked on asking if it would be possible to work for him. The answer was negative; he did not have room for me and his hiring was complete. I applied for numerous jobs in Waterloo’s tech sector, securing several interviews. It was in the midst of the economic crash of 2008 and none of them produced a job offer; an unemployed and unkempt technology journalist was not in high demand.
Free of permanent employment, I was not also free of opinion, and I still had my $25 per month gig as a newspaper columnist. At the end of the year, the Canadian and American governments were printing money and handing it to large, usually profitable businesses like banks and auto manufacturers. It offended me to my core to bail out lenders rather than borrowers, and shareholders rather than workers. I used my final column of my 2008 mandate on the Guelph Mercury’s Community Editorial Board to address this economic injustice, being especially critical of subsidising the auto industry.
Frank Valeriote was, at the time, the Liberal Auto industry critic, and when I saw him at his New Year’s Levee a few days after the article was printed, he was not terribly impressed with it and let me know as much, with his wife scowling at me and saying something along the lines of “but we still like you anyway.”
I was, once again lucky, though.
In April of 2009, he offered me a very small contract, in the neighbourhood of $200, to update the content of his website, which I did promptly and sent in the invoice. In May, my brother had his first child and my estranged wife and I travelled to England together in late June, my family still being unaware of our now long-running situation, for his son’s baby-naming ceremony.
When we returned, I went downtown to Frank’s office to ask if there was any news on my still-unpaid invoice from two months earlier. Brenda, his executive assistant who had followed him from his law practice, asked me if my ears were burning. Not yet familiar with the expression, I looked very confused, and they offered me instead to come work part time in the office doing database work, digitising their rapidly growing collection of case files.
The reaction was as surprising as it was life-changing; Frank’s office offered me a part-time job on the spot, having already been considering me for it without my knowledge. I readily accepted and started within a few days.
And so, I had my first paid job in politics, working 15 hours a week for $15 per hour reading and interpreting case notes and putting them into a database, one page of one file at a time, and in so doing learning the grunt work of a constituency office.
Finally having work after half a year without, Laura and I were able to complete our separation, and in August she moved across the street, the better to continue sharing our one car for a few more months. As we went through the physical act of splitting up, we only had two items of contention: Vij’s first cookbook, and a pressure cooker.
She kept the cookbook. I kept the pressure cooker. A few years later, I had the opportunity to tell the author when he came to Procedure and House Affairs Committee to discuss the Senate Appointments process the Prime Minister had put in place, per committee Hansard from November 17th, 2016:
The Chair:
[ ... ] Mr. Graham is first, with only five minutes.
Mr. David de Burgh Graham (Laurentides—Labelle, Lib.):
That shouldn't be a problem.
Thank you, Vikram, for being here. I'm familiar with your recipe book. When my ex and I split up, it was the only thing we fought over.
Voices: Oh, oh!
Mr. Vikram Vij:
There is no reason to fight; just share.
Days after letting our families know of the reality of our situation by phone, I took advantage of an opportunity to drive Frank to Ottawa for a summer Agriculture committee meeting to visit my parents at a restaurant in Hawkesbury and let them know that while it was over, we were okay. Being a six hour drive away, I knew they were worried about the sudden and unexpected news of our separation.
Over the next few months, I went through a rapid and radical transformation. Having always hovered around 250 pounds and having not cut my hair since high school, sporting a few strands of overgrown facial hair that could never quite qualify as a beard and a long ponytail, it was time to finish entering adulthood. Motivated as much by a complicated dating life as by a need to find a profession that could actually pay the bills, I began walking everywhere and lost 60 pounds in the space of a few months in the winter of 2009-2010, cutting my hair short in March.
By that point, I also detected a frustration from my office that I was still there, but a shyness to ease me along. I didn’t realise it when I was hired, but they had only budget to keep me for four months. With my divorce, they had been tolerant of me, but in spite of my aesthetic reforms, I would always be the university student-appearing nerd who lacked the refined professionalism of federal office to Frank.
The time in the office was important in my political development, giving me full exposure to casework and the minutiae of public life for the first time.
Most people don’t differentiate between levels of government and their jurisdictions, and people would come to the office for all kinds of things. On one particularly memorable occasion, a man burst into the office and, with a thick Scottish accent, repeatedly and loudly demanded that Guelph get “more psychopaths”.
While the three of us in the office were quite convinced the city’s quota had just been met in our front office, it took us quite a while to figure out what he was actually asking for was “more cycle paths”, which was even less of a federal jurisdiction than what we had originally understood him to be requesting.
In June of 2010, I indicated my interest in moving to Ottawa and working on the Hill. I wanted to move home, back to the Laurentians, where I had not lived since my teens, and work two hours away in Ottawa in the place at which I had not wanted to visit before finding work: Parliament.
My request was politely but firmly refused, and I decided the time had come. By dumb luck, my next door neighbour had just left a note under the windshield of my car. It said if I ever wanted to sell my house, to call him first.
I took him up on the offer, sold him the house for fair market value, and headed for the Laurentians. With help, I loaded a U-Haul, loaded my car onto a trailer, and Vanessa, a WWOOFer headed to my parents house, then still a WWOOF - worldwide opportunities on organic farms - hosting farm, accompanied me for the day-long drive home.
From there, I started I settled into a small rental apartment I found on Kijiji about 25 minutes walk from Parliament Hill in old Hull, and set about figuring out how to work there.