At my nomination meeting at the Mont-Tremblant bowling alley on September 18th, 2014, party officials had assumed that my opponent would win. My opponent had told her supporters and local journalists that the meeting was “just a formality” and had greatly underestimated the strength of my support, and the weakness of her own.
[ Continued from Part 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 ]
Anticipating a win, I had a prepared a victory speech, and took the podium without an invitation from the embarrassed party organisers, and gave it, this time, without the constraint of a timer, nor the advantage of a week of rehearsal.
Party favourite Julie Tourangeau’s team was utterly without grace in defeat, refusing to acknowledge the loss or even speak to me from that point forward, posting on social media only about the heartbreak loss.
Third-place candidate Mylène Laframboise, on the other hand, joined me in celebration. She threw herself completely into my campaign, though we’d never crossed paths before. Within days, she became the President of our riding association and supported me closely right through the election, becoming a close personal friend in the process.
Tourangeau’s team, along with most of the provincial Liberal organisation that had supported her, collected signatures, fundraised, and generally campaigned for the NDP candidate, local ER doctor Simon-Pierre Landry, who had defeated incumbent MP Marc-André Morin in their own controversial nomination race, with reports getting back to me that their stated goal was to ensure my defeat in the 2015 election so that she could be the candidate again the next time around.
The morning after such a victory is an odd time. Media requests, social media messages, and personal correspondence of congratulations come roaring in. Information on what comes next was rather more fleeting. All I knew for sure is I now had 13 months until election day.
Numerous volunteers helped in my nomination campaign, especially at the nomination meeting itself. There was an energy brewing across the country for the charismatic new Liberal leader and people, for the first time in a decade, were not shy to announce their support for the party. There was a desire among my supporters to meet Justin Trudeau and we hoped for an opportunity.
While Pablo Rodriguez, the Quebec campaign chair who had left my nomination meeting just before the announcement of the results, never reached out after my nomination, the work of the campaign got underway fairly quickly.
Less than two weeks after my nomination, in late September of 2014, Noémie, from the party Leader’s office, reached out to me. With the nominations done in the neighbouring ridings of Mirabel, with Karl Trudel being acclaimed, and future St-Jerome mayor Janice Bélair-Rolland being acclaimed in Rivière-du-Nord, Trudeau’s team wanted him to do a swing through our ridings on his way to Ottawa from Montreal on October 17th.
The opportunity was tremendous. The wind was in our sails after the win and I felt it would be possible to get 200-plus people out on just a couple of day’s notice. I pitched a campaign-style event at any public venue. Her response was cool; while she never said it, they were clearly intending to do this on his Parliamentary travel budget and not on party funds, and so it had to be business meetings rather than campaign events. The acclaimed candidates in the two ridings to the south, both lacking any campaign experience or large teams from a contested nomination, were happy with a round-table with local business and municipal leaders for a photo op.
I saw no value in a round-table and photo op a year in advance of an election; I wanted to motivate my troops and pushed hard to have a hand-shake event of some type.
Over the phone, Noémie suggested a roundtable meeting at the Mont-Tremblant movie theatre then owned by Mylène Laframboise, my adversary-turned-President. From there, our correspondence switched to being mostly in writing. After two weeks of emails back and forth with me asking for a partisan event or meet-and-greet of some sort and the leader’s office asking me to find an existing event to piggy back on, on October 3rd, 2014, she sent me:
Hey David,
We just landed on an answer. The Chief of Staff would like the Leader to do a roundtable on local issues. Ideal participants would be some mayors, Chamber of Commerce presidents, local business owners, etc.
The purpose would be to discuss the main issues in Laurentides—Labelle from a variety of point of views with the key local players. It’s also a good way to introduce you to all of them and establish you as the local voice.
Could you please put together a proposed list of participants? Ideally between 10 and 15.
I would also like your suggestions for a location. Is City Hall an option? Or the Chamber of Commerce. Ideal time is 2:30 PM.
We can keep some time afterwards for interviews with local media.
I will get back to you on time for liberal supporters, but lets start with landing on the roundtable.
Sounds good?
NJ
At this point, I forwarded the entire thread to date to my parents, with the simple note:
These people are idiots.
The realisation, a year and a half into my campaign, that the party did not have the faintest concept of my riding or what rural Canada is all about, struck very hard.
The sentence “I would also like your suggestions for a location. Is City Hall an option? Or the Chamber of Commerce” stuck to me for the rest of my time in politics. The riding had seven chambers of commerce, more if you consider the ones that operated under a different name like Business Association, and 43 active city halls, each with a mayor and at least 6 councillors, as well as three county halls, and dozens of community centres. Not to mention that the invitation was exclusive of the much more grounded community organisations and seniors clubs that make the backbone of rural community activism and engagement.
That single phrase, “Is City Hall an option? Or the Chamber of Commerce.” directly resulted in my efforts to create a national Liberal rural caucus a year and a half later.
The email exchange went on for another week. I held out hope to the very end that they would come around and allow a campaign-style stop to which I could invite our supporters and volunteers. Their insistence on doing a town hall meeting to me was counterproductive, and if I could do it again, I would simply have refused. At the time, I did not realise that was an option.
Realising that the town hall meeting was the only thing they were actually willing to do, I tried to figure out how to go about it. I had not courted municipal or business leaders through my nomination campaign, and it was not my intent to do so in the general election campaign either. As I often said at the time: if I convince all 43 mayors to support me, I will have 43 votes. Moreover, people who see themselves as community leaders either have a chosen party that they will not generally abandon, or will support the candidate who offers them a usable advantage — such as a campaign team ready to go in their town that will help them in exchange.
Realising that the event would be an expensive and time-consuming failure if I tried to organise it myself, I approached Guy Vandenhove, the president of the Ste-Adèle Chamber of Commerce. He had made his money and had plenty of time and a strong sense of community engagement, and, I suspected, some political aspirations of his own. His girlfriend was long-time Liberal MP Dominic Leblanc’s wife’s sister, and he made sure everyone he met knew that Dominic was his brother-in-law.
He had also been one of the three non-supporters who had come to the Laurentides—Labelle Liberal AGM a year earlier intending to take over the association without a plan or an organisation, leaving with a bit of egg on his face. He had wanted to be responsible for selecting and electing the Liberal candidate but had ultimately supported me at nomination, seeing which way the wind was blowing more clearly than the party had. I knew that getting him facetime with Justin Trudeau would be something he would not pass up; his ambitions could be weaponized.
That week, Vandenhove was presiding over Ste-Adèle’s wildly successful Oktobierfest. This was a conversation to have in person, and I found him at the event without prior warning. I told him that Justin Trudeau would like to meet with the community leaders of the Laurentians and that we would like him and the Chamber of Commerce to take the lead to make it happen.
Vandenhove was not one to miss an opportunity and he immediately, on the spot, cancelled a trip to Vietnam scheduled for that same weekend. We put together an invitation list of mayors, business leaders, and community leaders, sending the list to Trudeau’s office for approval.
We received it quickly enough — they didn’t particularly care who was on it and didn’t vet the list in any way, they just wanted to make sure I had one that sounded credible — and organised the event. Councillors from Pays-d’en-Haut, the southernmost and smallest county of the three in the riding and the one hosting the event, came on behalf of their mayors. Few mayors attended as it was a provincial seminar day for them, and no representation was there for the bulk of the riding.
Worse, conspicuously absent from our invitation list, was our own supporters and volunteers who had spent the last year getting me elected as the candidate. The Leader’s office did not want them — making this a policy meeting meant it could go on parliamentary budget; having partisans would have made it a partisan event, and Liberals were to follow the rules to the letter, especially in matters of election law and public money.
Only one journalist attended, Isabelle Houle, a journalist from the local paper who had interviewed provincial Liberal candidate Isabelle Leblond in her campaign office in my presence just a few months earlier. She had interviewed Leblond for more than half an hour on a wide range of topics and received concise, credible answers, and then asked: what cabinet post would you like? Leblond answered that that was not why she was running, but Houle pressed the question and Leblond bit, describing her business background and stating which ministry she felt would be most appropriate should the opportunity arise. A common rookie mistake; the headline on the article simply stated: Isabelle Leblond wants to be the Minister, all other substance ignored. The article itself is no longer available on line, the paper since having changed hands and shuttered. Having Houle present as the only journalist was not good news.
Vandenhove had organised a pre-meeting luncheon of his guests and used the intervening hours to turn the discussion into a formal printed booklet to submit to the Leader and his team, with a copy on each desk of the roundtable. While the meeting itself was interesting, running over an hour with good discussion and the media interview, a single story deep into only a single one of the riding’s 10 papers was the entire extent of our press coverage.
The local radio station, CIME-FM, had put the event in their news cycle for the day but had not sent anyone to attend, so all of two people who’d heard about it on the radio waited outside in the hopes of seeing Trudeau.
The leader had come to the riding and no partisans were invited, with the exception of Mylène Laframboise, my opponent-turned-association-president. It left my entire volunteer and supporter base feeling slighted, their contributions diminished if not totally forgotten.
For me, the Leader’s only official visit to my riding was a fiasco from which I, organisationally, never fully recovered.