When I first moved to Ottawa, I did not believe I could ever be a Member of Parliament. In spite of Marva’s observation years earlier that politicians also put their pants on one leg at a time, it seemed wildly improbable that I would ever run. But in working for Scott, I got to know a significant proportion of MPs from all parties and slowly realised Marva had been right: there was nothing particularly special about these people — and for some it wasn’t entirely clear how they’d ever even managed to put their own pants on. Running slowly entered the realm of possibility.
[ Continued from Part 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 ]
Scott was an exception. He thinks on his feet and was not the type of MP to require any kind of hand-holding. While many MPs bring staff with them everywhere they go and expect extensive briefing notes and much of their work to be done for them, Scott did his homework, reading the necessary briefing notes provided by Library staff and other background information needed to understand issues, and thought and spoke clearly without assistance.
Shortly after starting work for Scott, the permanent leadership race for the Liberal Party of Canada following Ignatieff’s inglorious defeat got going in earnest. I supported Justin Trudeau from the beginning and joined the National Capital Region campaign team, stating my desire to work on the national data team. I attended meetings downtown of the regional team and at the end of 2012 I joined the data team, where I became responsible for managing the technical side of the campaign’s phone banks — the digital lists that volunteers anywhere in the country could sign into to make phone calls. I ended up configuring and managing about 90% of all the phone banks performed during the leadership campaign, and worked on a variety of related data collection and analysis tasks. Free time was not something I greatly sought.
Out of interest, I wanted to attend Scott’s committee meetings. He was on the Canadian Heritage (CHPC) committee, which, as a former journalist, was his preferred file. All MPs are entitled to a staff member present at committee, even during in-camera sessions (which, counter-intuitively, means closed to the public), but Scott’s staff had rarely done so in the past. While some MPs require their staff to script out their committee interventions, Scott was more than capable of working unassisted.
So he told me if I wanted to come, sure, and asked me to pick him up a latté at the nearby Second Cup on the way to the 131 Queen St committee room, using the loose change in his desk, each time. It became a bit of a running gag for us and made most of the other members of the committee envious, but it gave me the opportunity to get into the weeds on his files to a much greater extent, and get more of a taste of his day-to-day work. None of the MPs I had worked for to that time had brought me along to a committee meeting, and I only knew it from watching it on the internal CCTV feed.
I had been working for Scott for about a year when I told him I was interested in possibly running in 2015. The thought had been on my mind since the previous year, and while Jimmy Karygiannis’s rather crude advice had give me some significant doubt, wondering if it I would be truly up to it, the policy work I was finally able to do and the leadership campaign and the energy I felt from its result were strong motivators.
I had long believed that if you do not agree with the options presented to you, you have an obligation to run, and I also believed that candidates have an obligation to run in the riding in which they live or to which they are legitimately connected.
Looking at my home riding, there were no obvious Liberal-friendly community leaders setting up to take the riding. Jean-Marc Lacoste had worked hard for a year and a half leading into the 2011 election and, while he went on to become the association president, his thorough defeat had not been inspirational. I suspected that somebody with no history of community nor party involvement would show up at the last moment, become the Liberal candidate, and win as the MP for Laurentides–Labelle. If someone is to have the role, I thought, there’s no reason it couldn’t be me.
With the near-death of the Bloc in the previous election, I told myself Quebec had finally moved beyond language politics, and being an anglophone would no longer be an issue — I expected that I would be able to work on actual matters of policy.
And so I told Scott: I would rather work beside you than behind you. With his blessing and, ultimately, mentorship, I got to work, selling my first few memberships in Sainte-Agathe on my weekends, which were still mostly in the Laurentians even after four years in Ottawa. I approached Ottawa lawyer Andy Singh, who I had met on the leadership campaign the previous year, to be my campaign manager, and he immediately set about cracking the whip on me to get me into shape, starting with the basics: what was my elevator pitch?
To this day, I still don’t have a very good one.
To read the story of my nomination, refer to these posts from last year: