Why I'm Not Planning To Run

Since losing my bid for re-election in 2019, I have been asked many times if I would run again. It is a question I often ask myself as well. With the arrival of Mark Carney as Prime Minister and an election expected to be called at any moment, it is a question that has taken on more meaning and urgency.

I have long believed that if you disagree with the options, you have an obligation to run. I do not want to spend the rest of my life wondering if I should have done something more to contribute to the redrawing of Canada’s role in the world that will be necessary over the next years, to help navigate our country past the existential threat it currently faces.

The obstructions to running are not philosophical — there is great value in serving — they are deeply personal. The sacrifices required are similar to starting a new business in a high risk sector, and to do so in a very public way with high risk, but low reward. The impact on family, on finances, on health, cannot be overstated. Politicians who retire to “spend more time with their families” may sound cliché, but at some point most politicians realise the lifestyle is simply not sustainable. Many realise it too late, or believe the personal sacrifices are worth it for the greater good, only to retire from politics and find that after years of profound stress, unwarranted public attacks, and time apart, their families are no longer there waiting for them, that their contributions have already been forgotten, and are left wondering what it was all for.

I started my campaign for election at the beginning of June of 2013, barely 6 weeks after Justin Trudeau had won the leadership in which I’d volunteered extensively on his data team. I had been working for MPs in riding offices or on the Hill since the spring of 2009. I had been involved longer than that, volunteering on the media monitoring team for Stéphane Dion’s leadership in 2006 as well as various roles on numerous other campaigns at the federal and provincial level. I knew what I was getting myself into, having seen it so many times, and I was ready for it.

For my nomination and election campaign, I had to scale back my work and largely survive on savings and eventually on a line of credit over the 28 and a half months between when I sold my first membership on the 1st of June, 2013, and when I won my election on the 19th of October, 2015. My daughter was born in March of 2014, during the nomination campaign and in the midst of a provincial election, and we went from a dual-income-no-kids family to a basically no-income-with-kids family as I had dropped to working only one day a week by the end to campaign full time, and my wife quit her unionised job when her employer refused to grant her unpaid leave to campaign with me following her maternity leave.

We were kept afloat in large part by living with my parents in the house in which I had grown up, in the small town of Sainte-Lucie, Quebec, near the eastern edge of the country-sized riding of Laurentides—Labelle, while retaining our small apartment near Parliament Hill in Hull. For us as a family, it would have taken years to recover financially if I lost, yet few thought I could win in the rural riding that had, until the Orange Crush of 2011, been among the safest seats in Quebec for the Bloc. In my determination, I never really considered the obvious reality that I might not win.

Through those more than two years, I campaigned hard, knocking on thousands of doors and driving over 100,000 km before even being elected, attending numerous events and meeting enormous numbers of people. The reception was overwhelmingly positive and the 2015 change energy kept me going. We were well-funded, thanks in large part to my parents’ fundraising ability and a healthy balance left over from the previous candidate, and I waged an effective air war, with the slogan “d’ici, pour ici” — “From here, for here” — airing on both local radio stations for nearly the entire 77 day campaign. My opponents’ radio ads only started in the last week.

On election night, I squeaked out a victory, coming up between the rising Bloc and the falling NDP. A week earlier, I would probably have lost to the NDP, a week later to the Bloc.

After winning, I threw myself into the work whole-heartedly, attending events constantly, often five or more in a single day, each in a different town, regularly meeting the 43 mayors and their councils, the 7 chambers of commerce, and every community group I could find, communicating constantly with the local media, digging up grants for organisations that didn’t know about them, solving complicated citizen files some of which had been rotting on the desk of the previous MP for years, and avoiding the national spotlight or activities and meetings outside the riding that would not be of benefit to the communities within my riding, not to mention the four or five days a week I had to be on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. Being an MP is an 80-100 hour per week job for virtually the entire year, and I was lucky enough to be only two hours from the capital — many MPs take longer to get to the airport than I took to get all the way to the legislature — with our daughter young enough that my family could travel back and forth with me between the riding and Ottawa, up until she started kindergarten as we went into the 2019 campaign, raising questions about how we’d manage our family life after the election that we never had to answer.

My agenda for June 18th, 2016. I would have every event we could find in the riding put in my calendar and would attend whatever I was physically able to.

I was regularly told by citizens that I met that I was the most present, most active, and all-round best MP they had ever had, though I had a suspicion that most MPs are told something similar on a regular basis. In retail politics, showing up is 90% of the work, and I learned early on that in the eyes of the public, I was either there at that event, or I was nowhere. I never confirmed my attendance if it could be avoided; being late when you’re expected is an insult, but being present, even if equally late, when you aren’t expected is a compliment.

With our daughter growing up in the crazy life we had, I wanted another, but my wife said to me something that struck hard. “You don’t have time for the child you already have, how will you have time for two?” My health, too, took a beating, and I gained an average of a pound a month every month I was in office, gaining some 50 pounds over the four years.

By the middle of the mandate it was clear that Justin Trudeau was losing popularity in the riding. The honeymoon had lasted barely two years. Everywhere I went, and with increasing toxicity and bile, people told me how much they hated Trudeau and how he was destroying the country. Working directly under his leadership and seeing his values and work ethic up close, I could not figure out what they were talking about, but it was clear that the Prime Minister would be an anvil around my neck in the next election, not the image of hope that had propelled me and over 150 other new MPs into office.

Many told me that with the quality of work I had done, with my presence in the riding, and my connection to the people, that I would be fine and would be there as long as I wanted the job.

By the time the election was called in September of 2019, I felt no wind in my sails. The reaction at events and at the door cooled very rapidly. People who had spent years telling me how great a job I had been doing could no longer look me in the eyes. One long-time supporter going back to early in my nomination texted me a week before the election telling me with great pride that she and her largely nationalist family had just come back from voting for me in the advance polls. The next day, she blocked me on social media and endorsed the Bloc on the radio and in all the newspapers, never speaking to me again before going on to become mayor of her town a year later.

It was a common story. People who had enthusiastically and publicly expressed their support for me in person were endorsing my opponent on social media, and many told me and my team that “we want you, but we don’t want your leader.” Polling aggregator “Canada 338” predicted the Bloc winning handily in my riding, and people, believing it to be local polling data and not understanding poll aggregators use regional or national trends to suggest what could happen locally without local data, piled on believing the Bloc would win — and they wanted to be with the winner.

2019 final projection from Canada 338 for my riding, with actual results overlayed.

The Bloc campaigned and won decisively on identity politics, with the slogan, “Le Québec, c’est nous”, roughly translated: “we are Quebec”, with a clear implication that anyone who did not share their ethnic identity and was not their supporter was not a real Quebecer. They lit a nationalist fire under the voters that as an anglophone with an Asian partner I could hardly not take personally.

When I lost on the night of October 21st, 2019, local media asked me if I would run again. Having only served one term, and being deeply emotional as the results continued to come in, I told them I would not be that ex, hanging around hoping to be taken back some day.

I noted to many that had told me that they wanted me but not my leader, with bitter irony, that they had kept my leader but lost me.

By the following week, the newspapers, radio stations, and community television stations in my riding that I had built relationships with for more than five years all but forgot I existed. I had said I wouldn’t run again — and that was that, I was of no further value or relevance. My first request for comment came only this year, over five years after my defeat, when a radio station asked to speak to me about the announcement of Justin Trudeau’s resignation, which I declined seeing it more as a trap than an invitation.

In the 2019 election, I earned roughly 700 more votes than I had received in 2015, scoring well above Canada 338’s projection and nearly four points above their highest margin of error, and bucking the trend for my party in the province by nearly 10 points. The work I had done had mattered and had been noticed, but it didn’t make a difference in the outcome. Over 30,000 people in my own community had still made the effort to go out and check a box saying, in no uncertain terms, that me and my family were not welcome in Quebec, that the practical work I had done to improve their lives was not only not appreciated, but was irrelevant.

In the days following the election, basic tasks like grocery shopping became uncomfortable as people recognised me but could not look me in the eye. I felt like a stranger in my home town, an outcast to those whom I had served. I took the message to heart, and we left the province in which I grew up and parts of my family had lived in for nearly 400 years, and we did so for good just as the Covid pandemic was growing legs, first to Alberta, where we finally had our second child, and now to New Brunswick, where our children can grow up bilingual but without judgement.

I miss the work in Ottawa. I take pride in the work I was able to do and be part of, of making policy changes that made a difference for millions of Canadians on rural Internet access and on child care and on Indigenous rights and reconciliation and on so many other important issues.

I feel a profound sense of moral obligation to run again this year, to contribute to managing and defending Canada in the high stakes environment in which we find ourselves, under the leadership of our new Prime Minister.

But at the end of the day, my family comes first.

My family with Mark Carney in Amherst, NS this winter.