Reflections on a different kind of campaign

Me as runner in the 1974 Liberal Campaign (not really)

I think I was about eight when I worked on my first political campaign in 1972. My parents were big Liberals and I can remember going down to Bud Drury’s campaign office and licking so many envelopes that my mother was compelled to go and buy me a freezie.  I was also pretty good at keeping our button table  stocked  and our  bumper sticker display all tidy. Back then, campaign offices were full of nice ladies (mostly) yacking on phones, typing stuff, moving pins around on big maps and smoking like chimneys.  In 1974 , I got promoted to runner on election day, so my mum and I would drive around and collect hand-written lists from the Liberal scrutineers at the polls and take them back to HQ so that identified Liberal could be called and told to go vote.  It was an amazing  machine to watch in action and it was all done without a single computer.

 In our riding, the Liberals  could have run a stick of  kindling and it still would have won, but they didn’t take any chances.  The PC candidate was now Senator Michael Meighen, known to  Stratfordites as a major and generous supporter of the Stratford Festival and sometime Stratford resident.  Sen. Meighen is and extremely classy, articulate, intelligent and kind man. We crushed him like a bug.  Twice. In the 1979 election, I was again promoted to scrutineer.  Scrutineers are the people who work for the parties and keep an eye on the whole voting process at each individual poll to make sure no funny business goes on.  They are the heart and soul of every fair election that has ever taken place.  It was all a fascinating and inspiring education.

Fast forward 32 years.  I am the candidate  for a party that did not exist  in 1979, I am at home writing a “blog”  for a “website” which I will publicize on “facebook” and  by “twitter”, and instantly the vast majority of voters in my riding can read what I have to say, many of them on a tiny computer in their pocket, and they can respond if they want to, instantly.  I don’t need any 8 year old envelope lickers or an army of  people calling people on telephones. In a way it is sad, but in another way it frees us up to make elections about ideas and the exchange of those ideas. At any time, anyone with a computer can look at all the policy documents of all the parties, compare them and make a very informed decision.  This also means that, in theory, elections do not even have to be about which party has the most money for phones, offices, cars, gasoline,  and literally tons of printed paper material.  In theory, that is even more democratic. Social media has now even been largely responsible for toppling dictators in some parts of the world like Egypt and Tunisia and helping those places take their first tentative steps towards the democracy that too many of us here take for granted.  Will a largely virtual political campaign work in this country? We will soon find out.  Thanks for tuning in.

I need a freezie.