Fire and Ashes (6 page)

This aspect of politics—tendentious political misreading of something you said years before—was new to me. I was fully prepared to take responsibility for what I’d actually written, but what I had written wasn’t the issue. It never is. The issue is how your opponents turn your “record” to their advantage. “Oppo research,” the search for incriminating clips, photographs or sentences ripped out of context, has become a key tool in the arsenal of modern politics, and the ferrets that specialize in “oppo research” have a vast new hunting ground on the Internet. In the age of Facebook and Twitter, you have to choose between never saying or doing anything that could be used against you or letting the chips fall where they may. I’d vote firmly to let the chips fall. You can’t hold your life hostage either to the ingenious malice of your opponents. If you stop saying what you think now, you’ll forget what it’s supposed to sound like when you finally get the chance.

As we surveyed the demonstrators through the limo windows, I felt a comic desire to explain. I wanted to tell the young men and
women in George Bush masks, “If only you had seen what I had seen in northern Iraq in 1992, how Saddam had gassed the Kurds, you would understand why I believed he had to go.” To the people in the Guantanamo jumpsuits, I wanted to say, “If you’d actually read
The Lesser Evil
, you would know I despise torture as much as you do.”
⁶
It was all a misunderstanding. I could explain everything. I had yet to grasp that in politics, explanation always comes too late. You never explain, you never complain. If you’re lucky, you just get your revenge.

Inside the car, with the demonstrators baying at us on the other side of the smoke-tinted windows, Zsuzsanna and I looked at each other. For a split second, I felt like turning around and heading back to Harvard, but her gaze sent an unequivocal message. This wasn’t exactly how we’d imagined the homecoming, but there was only one thing to do: get out and fight.

We pushed our way through the protesters and the television cameras and reporters who had come to see the fun and I fought my way through the lobby to the podium in a sweltering hotel ballroom. My team had assembled a crowd of supporters up front and they were clapping and cheering while the crowd at the back of the hall tried to drown me out. The placards they waved told the story. My nomination was anti-democratic, a stitch-up. I was an enemy of the Ukrainian people. I was an apologist for George Bush.

I remember being full of indignation. How could the Ukrainians accuse me of despising them? My great-grandmother and grandfather were buried in Ukraine.
⁷
When I visited there, I told the crowd, the people had greeted me with the traditional gifts of bread and salt. If they had welcomed me as a friend, how could my fellow citizens take me as an enemy? And besides, I said, why did we persist in dividing ourselves this way? I wasn’t Russian and they weren’t Ukrainian. We’re just Canadians. I shouted myself hoarse above the chants—“Shame!
Shame! Shame!”—coming from the Ukrainians and the protesters in the Guantanamo jumpsuits, and the “I like Mike!” coming from our own people.

The Valhalla Inn was my first exposure to politics as raw combat. Truth be told, I rather enjoyed myself. I exuded righteous indignation at the bad faith of my accusers. I had yet to learn that good or bad faith doesn’t come into it. In politics as combat, any stick will do, and in combat what matters is not proving your good faith but winning. That night I prevailed. The men in black had brought in the national party president, Mike Eizenga, to oversee my nomination, and there were party lawyers there to ensure that it was all done according to the rules. I was duly nominated by the assembled party members, despite the baying crowd, and then spirited out the back door and whisked off for my first meeting with my election team.

They must have been in shock, as I was, at the opposition to my candidacy, but as we shook hands and got to know each other, I knew they were all I had. They were local community people from the riding, less than a dozen in all, including the formidable Marion Maloney, in her wheelchair, and Jamie Maloney, her son, at her side; Armand Conant, a real estate lawyer who was to become the official agent for my campaign; Mary Kancer, Jean Augustine’s assistant, and several other veterans of Jean’s small organization. Jean called her team “the little engine that could,” and as I looked them over the team seemed little indeed, but I was wrong about them. They turned out to be devoted people and they are friends still. They could not have known what they were in for by throwing in their lot with me, but they stuck with me to the very end.

I was now nominated, possibly the most controversial candidate in the Toronto area. Over the next fifty-five days, my campaign team—a mixture of downtown lawyers, computer whiz kids and local
community people—tried to turn me into a competent politician. It wasn’t easy. I must have been a comic sight when I began canvassing door to door, believing that every voter deserved a Socratic dialogue of many minutes’ duration. My team would roll their eyes and drag me away to the next house.

Without realizing it at the time, I had passed through the looking glass into the unique psychic world of anyone seeking public office. I was about to spend the next five years of my life in a state of constant dependence on the opinion of others. A French writer of the nineteenth century, Ernest Renan, once called a nation “a daily plebiscite,” and for those seeking public office, democracy is exactly that, a daily plebiscite where you assess, every second of the day, how people look at you in the street, how they greet you when you come up and shake their hand, how they react when you come down the aisle of an airplane and settle into your seat.
⁸
Nobody who has not run for office can quite understand how dependent you become on this daily plebiscite, on the cues, the smiles of recognition, frowns of disapproval that citizens send you when you are out in the public square. I counted on it more than I counted on the polls. The former mayor of New York, Ed Koch, was reputed to have said, hundreds of times a day as he progressed through New York City, “How’m I doin?”
⁹
Now I understood that this was indeed the question. How
am
I doing? How do
you
think I am doing? My own answers to this question scarcely mattered. I put my fate in the hands of everyone I met. I had no idea how completely this ongoing, minute-by-minute scrutiny by my fellow citizens would take me over and begin to shape my sense of my own worth.

As I canvassed for votes in the shopping malls, apartment blocks and snowy suburban streets of Etobicoke–Lakeshore, I would search every face for signs of support, learn to evaluate subtle cues of indecision, evasion or outright rejection. People, by and large, are astonishingly
polite to canvassing politicians, but they also send you signals. The man who takes your flyer through the window of his car, then rolls it up and drives on, is telling you he’s never going to vote for you in a million years. The woman drying her hands on her apron when she comes to the door, but stays to hear your pitch, just might come over; the old man who tries to get you inside to have a good chat is just lonely; the young woman who pops her earphones out of her ears at the subway stop and nods approvingly when you make your pitch about funding higher education is going to vote for you, if she actually remembers to show up on election day. I began to understand who my natural constituency was and who was beyond my reach. We had support among young people, educated professionals and minority groups, but we were losing out to the Conservative Party in the wealthier districts in the riding, among the houses with the big driveways, and we were having to compete hard with the New Democratic Party, to the left of us, to hold unionized workers and poorer households in the south of the riding. We were the party in the middle, and we’d run the country for most of the twentieth century by owning the middle ground, but I could feel our support bleeding away from both sides.

We took over a disused bank at a busy intersection as our headquarters—I had a windowless cupboard to myself in the basement vault—and the place was soon swarming with campaign workers. If you love politics, campaign offices are wonderful places. It is organized chaos: half-drunk cups of coffee everywhere, the remains of Chinese take-away and pizza strewn on tables, Hungarian soup prepared by my wife, perfect strangers streaming in and out, press hanging around waiting for an interview, young pols in back rooms filled with maps, marked in colours to denominate friendly from enemy territory. We even had a minister of the church, Rob Oliphant, who was to become a fine member of Parliament himself, drop by
the office regularly to offer spiritual advice, especially to me. The core of the operation were the “data monkeys,” young men and women, grey-faced and sleep deprived, staring at the canvassing returns on computers, figuring out, in the murk of battle, where we stood.

In the chaos of that disused bank, I saw, for the first time, what a political party could be. In a time of social fragmentation, where we are ever more walled off by class and income, race, religion and age, where so many people live alone, where the public square feels deserted, a political party is the place where strangers come together to defend what they hold in common and to fight in a common cause. Whenever the canvassers would flood in and be handed their polling sheets, before they went out to knock on doors in the snowy streets, I would stand on a rickety chair in the middle of the room and tell them that they represented not just me or their party. They represented the best of the country. A political campaign like ours broke down the barriers of race, ethnicity and class that keep us separate. I had never worked with such astonishing diversity: the Ahmadiyya Muslims, led by a Pakistani military man, Major Khalifa, who flocked in to leaflet the riding at night; the Italian carpenters who hammered in the lawn signs; the Caribbean communities who had supported my predecessor, Jean Augustine, and now, at first hesitantly, came out to work for me; the students and young lawyers, led by Brad Davis, Milton Chan, Mark Sakamoto and Sachin Aggarwal, drawn into my campaign because of the chance it gave for their generation to renew their party; the magnificently robed Somali women from the Maybelle, a multi-storey housing project in the north of the riding; Polish Catholics who managed to reconcile their faith with our party positions in favour of gay marriage and abortion; some Ukrainians, including the pastor of a local church, Father Terry, who stood against the hostile tide in their own community; and a phone
bank of canvassers who made their pitch for our party in a babble of a dozen different languages.

Certain individuals stood out. Steve Meganetty, the “sign guy,” a tall, white-haired man in jeans with a deadpan drawl, plastered the whole constituency with our election signs. He was a long-time party veteran who drove an hour and a half each way from his home in Niagara to help me out. He was sick of the party infighting that had broken out when the current prime minister, Paul Martin, had forced out his predecessor, Jean Chrétien, in 2003. Since that time, a once-great national institution had fragmented into warring clans. When I asked Steve why he came down every day to work for me, he said simply, “I want my party back.”

Then there was Baljit Sikand, a warm-hearted Sikh man who always sported amazingly stylish and highly coloured turbans and who ran the Bloomingdale Limousine Service, with dozens of drivers, from a small cabin beside a greenhouse in Etobicoke. If you had Baljit on your side, you had a sizeable portion of the local Sikh community, and you also had the benefit of the unparalleled local intelligence that anyone who runs a taxi and limousine service in a community is bound to acquire.

It was a December-January campaign and I did three canvasses a day, dressed in a parka I had once bought for a trip to the Arctic, together with snow boots, snow pants, toque and gloves. The sun went down at 3:30 p.m., so we slogged through the snowy streets in the dark, my canvass team and I, determined to show that the “carpetbagger,” the “parachute candidate,” as my opponents were calling me, could earn it the hard way.

We knocked on thousands of doors, and I still remember some of the encounters. There was the lady who came to the door, drying her hands on her apron, with a little boy in tow. “Brian here has asthma,” she said. “What are you going to do to get the pollution out of the air?”
I did my best, half-frozen in her doorway, to give her an environmental platform she could believe in, but as she went back inside to finish getting Brian his supper, I wondered whether I had made the sale, and I felt the gulf that separates voters’ preoccupations from the rhetoric of policy platforms. But I also began to understand, from this encounter and a hundred others, that I was doing politics for her.

A young couple in tears opened the door on Christmas Eve, and when I said I would come back later, they beckoned me in and told me they had just returned from a funeral for their nephew. He had been out with some friends when they had been caught in a sudden exchange of gunfire between two drug gangs. Their nephew, barely twenty years old, had been struck in the back by a stray bullet and killed instantly. I went to the memorial service for him down at City Hall several weeks later. When, in Parliament, we led the fight against the government’s attempt to dismantle Canada’s gun laws, I was standing up for those grief-stricken constituents I had met on Christmas Eve.

Politics at the doorstep also give you the measure of the divided worlds that it is a politician’s job to reach across. I remember an elegant woman in a baronial doorway at the end of a winding driveway, questioning me on the party program and then dismissing me by saying she couldn’t possibly vote for any party that would raise her taxes. Then there were the miserable, unlit, stinking apartment buildings where immigrant families would not open their doors, and those poor young adults who did were half-naked, tattooed, eyes wide open with crack and gone to the world.

Our local campaign drew support from Liberals across Toronto, and as we gained in experience, we gained in enthusiasm. The national trend, however, was going the other way. We had gone into the election thinking our party would win. The Liberal government had cut the deficit, and our methods of restoring fiscal discipline in the 1990s, however
brutal, were admired worldwide. The economy was growing and the prime minister was widely credited with creating the conditions for sustained prosperity. But we had been in power for thirteen years and both the party and the government were visibly tired. We were also tarnished. In the wake of the 1995 referendum that had almost resulted in a victory for Quebec separatism, the government had authorized a program to sponsor events in Quebec that would boost the image of Canada in the minds of Quebeckers. Some of the money, millions of dollars in fact, had found its way into the wrong hands, and half a dozen crooked operatives had skimmed some into their own pockets. The prime minister had ordered an inquiry and guilty parties had gone to jail, but the Conservatives were baying for our blood over the “sponsorship scandal” and the public seemed to be agreeing with them.