Holiday Cheer And The Future Of These Essays
A few years ago, I received a media request asking for my opinion on some matter as a former Member of Parliament. I responded that I was no longer involved in politics and declined to say anything further. But the thought festered, and I wondered if I really was out of politics. Realising there is still entirely too much at stake, this Substack was born.
From mid 2000 to the end of 2008, I was a news feed editor on a series of related technology news websites focused on free and open source software, occasionally sent to conferences as a correspondent and writing journalistic and satirical pieces as opportunities arose. In my free time, I volunteered both in free software-related non-profits and increasingly actively on a series of election campaigns, mostly but not exclusively at the federal level, all while maintaining the somewhat eclectic hobby of watching trains whenever and wherever possible.
When the tech bubble burst for the second time during the 2008 economic crisis, leaving me suddenly and unexpectedly unemployed a week before Christmas, I had an opportunity to redefine my career. I realised that politics was my calling and, by the following summer, I had my first part-time job in a Member of Parliament’s constituency office. A year later, I moved myself to the Ottawa area to work on Parliament Hill without a job offer or a concrete plan.
A year after that, my time was split between three different MP’s offices on the Hill, having survived the massacre of the 2011 federal election when many far more experienced colleagues did not, with well over a hundred Liberal staffers losing their jobs in that election as a result of the caucus dropping from 77 to 34 seats. By the fall of 2012, I was working full time as a legislative assistant to a single MP. In 2013, I announced my intention to run, and, in 2014, won the Liberal nomination in the deeply rural riding of Laurentides—Labelle, where I grew up. The following year, I won my seat against nearly everyone's expectations in the Justin Trudeau majority of October 19, 2015.
From there, aside from quickly becoming a raging procedure nerd, I spent my four years in office fighting for rural issues, Internet and mobile phone access in particular, repeatedly warning my government caucus that not taking care of rural Canada would cost us rural seats. In 2019, I lost my seat after a single term, along with more than half of the Liberal’s rural caucus, and I went on to start a decidedly apolitical career in my other passion — as a railroader — moving out west just as the Covid pandemic took hold.
It was there, living in Alberta, after a few years of trying that I realised that I could not stay out of politics forever — but also that my young family would suffer were I to throw myself into running and serving again. And so, since the summer of 2023, I have been writing here, to you, with how I see politics from the learned perspective of all of the above activities and experiences, leading to this site’s original title of “A View From the Back Bench,” which I recently removed, finding it too narrow, and have yet to replace.
At first, I wrote once per week and realised that it was not sufficient, given how much is constantly going on, and, shortly after moving to New Brunswick that fall, I started writing to you twice per week, publishing over 100 essays in 2025.
My objective here is multi-faceted; I have never sought to make this a news site. I attempt to synthesise disparate events and facts into a coherent narrative; I seek to make sure that very important events that are not getting public attention are brought up; and I avoid writing about things where I feel I have nothing of any value to add to the discussion. Whether I succeed at any of that, I leave to your judgement.
To that end, I want to thank you and the 400 or so other people who regularly read these essays and especially those of you who directly support my work, allowing me to imagine, that I may once again write and edit full time, and to those of you who take the time to like and share these posts, improving the algorithmic scoring and reach of my writing.
To that end, I would like to ask you: what do you want to hear more of in the new year? What other feedback do you have for what I am doing here? Am I succeeding, in your view, in these stated goals? What should I even call this newsletter? There are entirely too many David Grahams in the world to simply stick to using my name.
In the meantime enjoy this festive period. We shall correspond again in the new year.
