Learning to campaign, for real
Frank Valeriote's campaign was my first full-time campaign
In the year following Frank’s nomination, I expressed an interest in getting involved with his campaign and helping him win the eventual by-election. It took a lot of patience, taught me a lot, and left me addicted to the street-fight of election campaigns.
[ Continued from Part 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 ]
Shortly after Frank beat Marva in 2007, I had contacted Anna, someone I had met on Frank’s campaign and who I had interpreted to be senior on his team, about helping, and had thought that my interest had been properly expressed. I never heard anything back and for a year I had no tangible involvement, and so I concluded that the campaign either did not want or did not need me. For the next year, I turned my focus elsewhere. It is said that when a volunteer expresses interest, you have just 3 days to take them up on it before you’ve lost them.
In the summer of 2008, I was in Ottawa attending the Ottawa Linux Symposium for my sixth (and ultimately final) time as a journalist covering the proceedings. My favourite conference each year, it was a discussion of Linux without the suits and marketing that come with conference-trade show hybrids. I much preferred it that way; it was just the meat.
On July 25th, 2008, Stephen Harper called four by-elections, including the long-anticipated one for Guelph, where I had been living since 1999. Only a day earlier, after being in Ottawa every summer for years, I had finally accepted to visit Parliament, having joked each year that I did not want to visit it until I worked there, never believing I would ever actually do so.
There I was, in Ottawa, two blocks from Parliament, yet far from the most important federal political event to happen at that moment. With the conference done, I returned by train to Guelph on the 28th. The next day, I celebrated my 27th birthday by going to Frank Valeriote’s campaign office and reminding the team that I had been wanting to help, but had not heard back in the year since the nomination.
I was quickly put to work assembling campaign lawn signs. Thousands of plastic signs had to be attached to metal rods so they could be quickly put into the lawns of those who had accepted to take them, in a curious and highly wasteful electoral tradition followed by almost every candidate of every party at every level of every government in Canada.
After a few days of doing this and other tasks in the office, the two people responsible for the data, whose faces I can still see but whose names I cannot remember, were trying to solve a technical problem with the handheld barcode reader used to enter data from door-to-door canvassers into the party database, ManagElect. The data entry volunteer set the appropriate information: Liberal, not Liberal, etc., in a form, then the barcode reader read a number and typed it as if it were a keyboard into a field, and the elector’s answer at the door, as written on paper by the canvasser, would be entered into the database. Simple, graceful, and completely useless if the barcode had, say, a coffee stain on it.
Under the barcode in small print was a number; the number the barcode reader would presumably be attempting to read. The two were having trouble solving the problem of a whole page of barcodes that couldn’t be read, and had heard that I worked in technology so asked if I could help for a moment. Leaving the lawn signs, I went into the back office and suggested they try typing the number under the barcode into the field. One of them struggled from the wrong side of the desk to move the mouse, upside down, to the right place on the screen. I frowned, took the mouse from him and turned it around to face him, to chuckles all around. We experimented and confirmed this work-around would accurately enter the correct data. From that moment, I was on the data team.
For the next 11 weeks, I worked my writing and editing job at Linux.com, and then came in as soon as I had finished my day’s responsibilities and did the campaign’s data until bedtime. I loved it; it was the most intense campaign work I had yet done, and it gave me a profound sense of purpose. I also invited Joseph Angolano, the brains behind the ‘no’ side victory in the 2007 Ontario referendum on electoral reform that I’ll get to in a later essay, to participate and he quickly became Frank’s director of communications, producing absolutely devastating newspaper ads and other communication products, commuting daily all the way across the GTA by bus from Scarborough to do so.
It was a profoundly dirty campaign. Houses with Liberal lawn signs were getting spray-painted and their cars vandalised, including several cases of cut brake lines, directly endangering the lives of the occupants. It was a very distressing period for the campaign and our deeply compassionate candidate, who was barred from offering direct help to the victims under election law as it could be construed as vote buying.
On September 7th, we were getting ready for election day the next day. The by-election campaign had run its course, we were tired, but we felt the wind in our sails. In a tight four-way race with the Greens, Conservatives, and NDP, we were fairly confident we would win.
Then that day, Stephen Harper visited the Governor General and called a snap general election. The by-election was cancelled with advance votes already cast. Election Day turned into a day off, and we entered the weird world of a double-campaign that would drag on 82 days before its conclusion on October 14th, 2008.
Stéphane Dion came through during the campaign, with the RCMP escort and entourage that comes with an election-time leader. I had grabbed a small pin from a bowl of them available to everyone at the Dion campaign swag table at the leadership convention two years earlier. It was a round pin with a green circle around a red maple leaf, representing Dion’s green messaging.
It was also now the security pin for Dion’s entire entourage. I showed mine, grinning, to one of his senior advisors, who looked at me, shocked, and said “where did you get that? That is your get out of jail free card!” I told him of its provenance and suggested many others likely had one as well.
Among numerous MPs and other party leadership figures, two of whom borrowed pens from me never to be seen again, Michael Ignatieff came to the region to speak during the general election campaign, and many of us took a bus to the event in nearby Kitchener. There, Ignatieff gave an impassioned speech about how this election was a referendum on Stéphane Dion, which was completely not the message we had been campaigning on, and left me feeling frustrated. It would lead to one of the most profound exchanges I would have when meeting Dion at a private supper in the Laurentians two years later, after he was replaced in a palace coup by Ignatieff.
In the dying days of the of the campaign, I drew the first question at the televised all-candidates debate, and without consulting the campaign team, asked a partisan question targeting the rising Green candidate, who up until then I had gotten along with:
Do you live in the riding? If so, why is it important to you? If not, why are you running here?
It was an easy question to knock out of the park for Frank, but Green candidate Mike Nagy was the 9th of 10 candidates to answer and visibly stewed while waiting his turn.
He lived only a few kilometres outside the riding, and had run twice previously in the riding which, before the recent redistribution, had included his home. He could have answered about his profound connection to the riding, but instead started his response by attacking “Frank’s assistant” and being very defensive about his proximity to the riding. Frank was mad at me for asking the question — but people in the community were suddenly talking about the fact the Green candidate didn’t live in Guelph.
On October 14, 2008, we won our election in Guelph in a bruising 32% Liberal-29% Conservative-26% Green victory, with high profile NDP candidate Tom King, having run out of steam before the end of the marathon campaign and coming in a distant fourth. But the Liberals were eviscerated down to 77 seats nationally; to that point our worst-ever showing, and Green candidate Mike Nagy had come in a strong third, a harbinger of things to come when Mike Schreiner took Guelph provincially for the Greens a decade later.