We have not yet seen video evidence of Ford’s encounter with Toronto Star reporter Daniel Dale (some security footage is apparently being reviewed UPDATE: Doug Ford says the video will not be released), so for now we’re left only with their two very different versions of events. Ford’s long history of dishonesty, combined with the fact that Dale is an award-winning journalist whose very profession is to document and tell the truth, has lead many to conclude with a reasonable amount of confidence that Dale’s version of events—in which the reporter never left public property nor came close to entering the mayor’s backyard when Ford ran at him, shouting with his fist cocked, and forced him to drop his phone and voice recorder—is the more accurate one. (Add to this that Ford appears to corroborate significant pieces of Dale’s account, but does not provide an explanation for why Dale would yell for help and drop his phone if he didn’t fear for his safety.)

The mayor then waited two hours before contacting a friendly media outlet (I use this phrase confidently, since Newstalk 1010 provides him with a weekly show) to claim that he had caught a Toronto Star reporter trespassing on his property and taking photos of his family. (There is no evidence that’s true, and Ford now admits he never saw Dale come closer than “maybe five meters” from his fence.) That delay, meaning that television cameras didn’t arrive until after dark (no doubt everyone watching the evening news pictured Dale lurking in the backyard after sundown, when in fact he was on public land while it was still light out) is seen by some as a deliberate attempt to distort the truth in a way that undermines the credibility of the Star.

Once Dale’s version of events was published to the Star’s website, even those who believed Dale started to criticize and mock him. Suggesting he had no right to be doing his job (reporting on a story that Ford wants to buy a piece of public land he alternatively says is required either to enhance his home’s security or build a larger play area for his children) on public property in daylight is only upstaged in offensiveness by the pack of people, most of them men and many of them journalists, questioning Dale’s manliness for being frightened when physically threatened and robbed by an agitated man twice his size.

Now, on World Press Freedom day, the mayor is threatening a complete media boycott unless Daniel Dale is fired from his job of reporting on city hall.

There is a temptation to lament that this is what we’re talking about instead of “real issues,” including the “real” story that the mayor is trying to buy a piece of a public park to increase the size of his property. But there’s often more than one issue simultaneously worthy of our attention, and the issue of the mayor’s character is significant and increasingly problematic. How can anyone achieve “journalistic balance” and report on the mayor when a history of blatant and intentional deceit is compounded with threats of physical violence (I am not prepared to define a cocked fist as anything else) towards a reporter?

Years ago, when asked why he didn’t tell the truth about being at the Leafs game, Ford said it was because he was “embarrassed.” He should be deeply embarrassed by last night’s events and his reaction to them as well, but it goes beyond that. We elect leaders to represent the best of us. When Rob Ford charged Daniel Dale, he did so as our mayor. We’re all diminished when this is the kind of leadership we have to look to, and we deserve better.

The package takes a look at what it’s like to live as a member of the one per cent—meaning an income of around $196,000—and combines a short essay by Kay with profiles of five such households. Kay’s essay especially has drawn heated criticism online, the most notable example being a masterful Gawker rant. The author of that post, Hamilton Nolan, seems to believe Kay’s main intent was to argue that those who make $196,000 a year aren’t really that rich, because the cost of living in Toronto is so high.

And Kay does make some arguments to that effect. He writes that “for many Torontonians, that $10,400 [the after-tax, monthly income of someone making $196,000 a year] disappears fast.” By way of example, he points out that living in a $1.5 million house, spending $1000 on a stroller, renovating a kitchen to add granite counters and “spending a fortune on artisanal cheeses” to host a “casual” weekend gathering is really expensive. (“No shit,” replies Nolan.)

But the profiles that follow, like Kay’s examples, don’t support this argument at all. Instead we’re introduced to one man who spends $800 a month on wine in addition to his $1,000 a month on clothes. We meet a retired couple who buy a new Mercedes every three years using cash. One family of four owns a Toronto house, a cottage and two cars including a BMW while still managing to put away $20,000 a year in savings and go on an annual $7,000 vacation to an all-inclusive resort. Another family’s reported monthly expenses only came to $5,780, presumably leaving them with a $4,000 a month surplus.

Most people would agree those sound like pretty rich lifestyles, as Nolan ruthlessly and convincingly asserts, so if the point of this feature is to argue that $196,000 isn’t that rich, these are very strange examples to hold up.

But then, even Kay doesn’t argue that point in his subsequent reply to Nolan. The “admittedly witty” take down, Kay says, “doesn’t change the fact that the growing debt phenomenon among the upper classes I describe is very real.”

Ok, so now we’re talking about debt, I guess. And in Kay’s original essay we can find examples of concern about debt: “the average GTA household is now carrying almost $40,000 in debt on top of a mortgage,” he says, and “the ratio of the average single-family Toronto home price to the income of its occupants” has risen to 5.5 from its historical average of 3.5. But the key word in both of those statistics is, of course, average. These claims that debt is a problem in general for an average household then get juxtaposed with the family putting away $20,000 a year in savings.

So I don’t see how “the growing debt phenomenon among the upper classes” can be the point either. Other than that, I’m at a loss. Is his thesis that “the city [has become] more and more the exclusive domain of the One Per Cent?” That “the era of the ‘mixed’ neighbourhood… is falling away?” That “urban life is unaffordable unless both partners are bringing in serious money?” That previous generations “did not waste a single moment worrying about replacing [their] laminate kitchen counters?”

I don’t know. And I suspect, based on the wounded “can’t we just move on from this” tone of his Nolan reply (he quotes Homer Simpson, “I like it better when they’re making fun of people who aren’t me”), Kay might not know either. Toronto Life has a knack for getting writers to produce bewildering content that’s out of character and lacking in focus. I wonder what kind of direction he was given, and how much he knew about how the family interviews (conducted by Maggie Gilmour and Jasmine Budak) would be framed.

What I do know is that the whole thing is a missed opportunity. Lifestyle inflation is a real thing, and would have made for an interesting exploration in a Toronto context. The increasing cost of housing and debt are serious problems as well, though certainly not limited to the one per cent. And the fact that pretty much everyone seems to think of themselves as “average” continues to be fascinating. It would be great if another publication did a reboot of the Toronto Life feature, this time using a more economically diverse collection of households and exploring the actual cost of living most Torontonians encounter. Maybe someone will yet take that on.

A campaign based on incumbency was both predictable and predicted. What Ford’s opponents also should have predicted, but didn’t, was the degree to which he would use his record to his favour rather than run from it like the embarrassment they assumed it was. Beginning in late 2011 and escalating in 2012 and 2013, the mayor had lost many key council votes and failed to follow through on his election commitments. It seemed at the time that this was the momentum progressives needed to take the city back.

But throughout the 2014 campaign Ford and his supporters repeated the mantra that they needed to “finish the job” they’d been blocked from doing by a “left-wing, NDP, union-friendly council.” If not for an elitist, out-of-touch council, Toronto would be full of subways by now. Our taxes would be lower. Our debt would be wiped out. The Weapons of Mass Gravy would have been found and eliminated.

Instead, Ford’s team had persuasively argued, Toronto was held back because City Hall was still too full of Millerites. Now, Torontonians were looking set not just to reelect the mayor, but also—tired of the embarrassing and paralyzing in-fighting of the past four years—to send a new slate of like-minded councillors to the clamshell with him.

The most dangerous thing about Rob Ford has never been his political ideology or his vision for Toronto. The most dangerous thing about him is his extraordinary incompetence. If Ford could blanket Toronto with a comprehensive network of funded subways, if he could find efficiencies and reduce spending without harming Toronto’s most vulnerable, if he could personally return every phone call and be a champion for every resident, who would stand in his way? The biggest problem with Ford’s first term was not his choice of objectives, it was that he was completely incapable of achieving them.

If council hadn’t worked against him—or, more definitively, if they’d done what they could to try to support him and achieve his vision—he’d be exposed. There would be no Sheppard subway in the works for 2015 as promised, or maybe at all. Toronto would be spending an extra $2 billion to bury an LRT where it doesn’t need to be buried, serving as a big flashing “hey isn’t this the kind of gravy we thought we were voting against” sign. Above all, Toronto would be a meaner, poorer place, with less child care, social services, community programs, recreational activities, environmental protection and potential for economic development. And he’d have no one to blame but himself.

It’s a horrible thing to contemplate, though. Once implemented, Ford’s plans not only become exposed as wrongheaded or completely unworkable, they also become exposed as genuinely harmful to real people. How could any reasonable councillor of good conscience knowingly vote in a way that would negativity affect so many of their constituents and the city itself, just to make a political point in aid of positioning for a future campaign?

No, fighting back was the only thing they could have done. Still, as October 27th, 2014 drew ever more near and the prospect of another four years of Ford became more and more likely, this time with a more supportive council, it was an inescapable thought. Maybe we’d be better off if we had allowed him to win. And, by doing so, allowed him to fail.

But that wasn’t the most annoying thing about him. He was indisputably one of the best of us. Nothing you did or created ever looked remotely impressive next to Andrew’s projects. When Andrew decided to shoot a pseudo-demonic  birth scene in a candle-lit church using a tracking shot, there was no going half-way. He somehow convinced a downtown Anglican church (even after they had seen the script) to let him move in, light the candles and build the track. When he decided that the perfect music to underscore this scene was a Led Zeppelin song, he didn’t settle for one of the widely-available rip-offs, nor did he do what many students would probably do and just use the song and hope he didn’t get caught. He went and secured the damned rights to the damned Let Zeppelin song. (All of this for a scene that, to my memory, was just a brief flash-back in an otherwise straightforward video.)

That wasn’t the most annoying thing about him either. If you were lucky enough to get to work on one of his projects, he’d run you ragged. While creating what we believe to be North America’s first TV pilot written and directed in American Sign Language by deaf (some identified as Deaf) actors and improvisers, we worked 18-hour-days, mostly outside, in the winter, for weeks. At 1 a.m. when you can no longer feel your hands, are running on 4 hours sleep, know you’re starting again at 6 a.m. and still have to strike the set and load the truck, it’s easy to decide that “that last take was good enough.” But Andrew always wanted to get one more shot. He knew it could be better. He knew what “right” looked like, and he wasn’t willing to compromise.

That was the most annoying thing about him. Andrew’s success, from what I could tell, was the result of two things: the exceptional amount of effort that he put in, and the high standards he refused to let go. Even while still at school, those values extended beyond school projects into activism. At the end of our program Andrew moved back to B.C. and became a full-time environmental campaigner, often working for free on initiatives he either created himself or strongly believed in.

Most of us don’t operate with such a strong unwillingness to compromise, especially when it comes to our own employment. In their response to Andrew’s open letter, ForestEthics doesn’t give any indication that the very serious accusations he makes aren’t accurate. In fact, by saying that Andrew was fired for “[violating] the confidence of the organization,” they suggest that what he revealed is accurate information the organization hoped to keep secret in the interest of not biting the hands that feed them. And as Andrew himself points out in a blog post this morning, denials coming from the PMO and Tides Canada (an organization that funds ForestEthics) aren’t as absolute as they could be either.

I haven’t yet spoken with Andrew about what happened. I don’t know anything more than what’s been publicly reported. What I do know from my years working closely with him is that Andrew is not motivated by fame, sets high standards for himself and those around him and strongly values honesty. I know that when he’s a pain in the ass, it’s usually because he’s doing what needs to be done when no one else will do it. And when he decides what’s right, he doesn’t settle for anything less.

Regardless of what you think of the Northern Gateway Pipeline, if you believe Canadians deserve to know the truth about what kinds of chill tactics are being used against NGOs and ordinary citizens, please join this cause.

It would be difficult for a reasonable, disinterested person to conclude Craig Scott is anything other than very qualified to be a Member of Parliament. The human rights lawyer has a bio that hits all the right notes: he’s worked for human rights around the world and here at home, recently turned his focus to environmental justice and is active around housing and poverty.

Additionally, at the Toronto Danforth NDP nomination meeting Monday night, he gave the strongest speech, both in content and delivery. He’s able to comfortably speak to a wide range of federal issues without sounding like he’s just reciting a list of talking points. Verbal cues, like a nod to “evidence-based policy,” hint that there is hopefully more depth to his thinking than can ever be fully apparent in a short campaign speech. And he managed not only to move the room of party faithfuls, but also cause this often-NDP-critic to repeatedly nod his head.

In addition to those qualities, Scott brought with him the largest selection of influential NDP endorsements. Backing from impressive individuals like environmentalist Rick Smith, Rev. Brent Hawks and Maher Arar was paired with the green light from his party’s political establishment: current MPP Peter Tabuns, Toronto and York Region Labour Council President John Cartwright and past President of the Ontario NDP and Toronto Danforth Riding Association Janet Solberg.

I do not suggest that any of these endorsements were anything less than honestly earned. They are, however, somewhere between difficult and impossible for another candidate to overcome. In that way—barring a shocking underdog victory—a small group of well-connected people chose Craig Scott as the next MP for Toronto Danforth before the NDP or any other party had even held a nomination meeting.

There are three main ways in which I see these endorsements exerting an influence on the voting membership. Most obviously and legitimately, the approval of respected like-minded individuals makes a candidate more attractive. Party members are very similar to voters in a public election in that they are busy individuals who don’t have a lot of time to fully vet each candidate. In both party and public elections, quality endorsements serve as a helpful shortcut for voters. That doesn’t mean voters will vote strictly based on endorsements, but they’re likely to take well-endorsed candidates more seriously and begin their decision process with a bias towards them.

Further, some endorsements come with critical campaign resources like lists, volunteers and money. Key party and labour individuals have increased access to these resources, which can be deployed to help win both the nomination and the public election. Some savvy voting members may also see the writing on the wall and conclude that nominating a candidate with these kinds of connections is the best way to ensure future electoral success, though that’s more difficult to demonstrate.

Finally, and of greatest concern, is the dissuading effect enough of these endorsements can have on other prospective candidates. Within political parties, prospective candidates who come up against the chosen individual of the party establishment often feel pressure not to run at all, either directly or indirectly. Sometimes those candidates declare themselves and then withdraw (in the federal riding of Toronto Centre, Liberal Rob Oliphant dropped out to support Bob Rae, and, provincially, former George Smitherman staffer Todd Ross dropped out to support Glen Murray when Murray received Smitherman’s nod) and sometimes we never really learn what might have been (many believe that former Toronto budget chief and Liberal party member Shelley Carroll would have run for mayor if the Liberal establishment hadn’t anointed Smitherman instead).

In other words, we know Scott was the best and most qualified candidate on offer to NDP members Monday night, and may end up being the best candidate the residents of Toronto Danforth get to select from when a by-election is called. We don’t and can’t know if he was the best of all the candidates who may have considered a run. And, after all the other parties have gone through a similar process to pick their candidates, voters will get to choose from the candidates the parties have already chosen, never knowing who else might have been on offer.

Reasonable people will disagree on if this really represents a problem and, if it does, how best to fix it. But we should all at least have a better understanding of the process that goes into becoming an MP, especially if we hope to improve our democracy through voting or other reforms. It’s not as straight forward as simply letting the voters decide.

Early history

The beginnings of the Green Party of Canada were inauspicious to say the least. Very little about its founding convention in 1983 at Carleton University is publicly documented. Instead, we have an oral history that describes a mishmash of variously interested activists who couldn’t even agree on what kind of organization they were creating. A member who attended that first meeting, Dan Murray, describes “some guy…walking around handing out mimeographed sheets” saying he should be elected leader. Murray says “the dude was shunned and laughed at. I remember asking him why we would want one of those when every other party already has one?”

After officially registering on August 8, 1984, the federal party (much weaker than its provincial counterparts in British Columbia and Ontario) didn’t hold another federal conference or have a constitution until 1988, and until 1996 officially prohibited the leader of the party from acting as the party’s spokesperson.

Joan Russow, elected leader the following year, made some gains for the party in terms of media attention and electoral success, and, during the 2000 election, embarked on the party’s first national leader’s tour. Yet it wasn’t until the 2004 election under Jim Harris (who had lost the leadership to Russow in 1997) that the party made its great leap forward.

Breakthrough

Harris (now somewhat famously) recognized a huge opportunity in the newly implemented $1.75 per vote funding for any party that broke 2% in a federal election. In 2000 the Greens had garnered 0.81% of the vote with only 111 candidates, so Harris figured that even if all they did was run a candidate in all 308 ridings they’d pass the threshold.

He was right, and with 582,247 votes (4.3%) in the 2004 election the Green Party of Canada became a million dollar political organization overnight. This was both an exciting breakthrough, and the result of a “fake it ’til you make it” trick. I joined the party shortly after the 2004 election to discover it only had approximately 800 members. In order to pull-off the full slate, a third of the party’s membership had stood as candidates, sometimes in ridings on the other side of the country from where they actually lived.

Later that year at a general meeting and leadership convention in Bragg Creek, Alberta, there were signs the party wasn’t ready for this sudden success. Members (myself included) spent the first full morning simply arguing over the agenda. When someone proposed it should include a singing of the national anthem they were blocked by a member (who was also, not surprisingly, a former and future candidate) who explained that they “don’t believe in nations.” By the end of the weekend and after substantial amounts of rye whiskey consumption (I leave it up to you to decide if that fact is pertinent) the meeting had improved enough, and I had met enough good people, to become tentatively reassured I was in the right place.

Still, major internal growing pains were never allowed an opportunity to settle down or heal. Minority governments necessitated perpetual election readiness, straining the reborn party’s finances and volunteers, and taking the focus away from important—and, in some cases, still unresolved—questions about internal procedures, governance, and purpose.

Elizabeth

The 2006 policy and leadership convention in Ottawa that elected Elizabeth May leader was another huge step for the party. Thanks largely to her pre-established national profile and the influx of new members her leadership campaign generated, for the first time not only did CPAC broadcast the whole convention, but as the leadership results were announced Don Newman himself reported live for CBC Newsworld from the floor of the convention centre. Pundits credited May’s strong showing in the London North Centre by-election later that year, as well as strong results in four simultaneous 2008 by-elections (including my own), with helping to secure further credibility with the national media and, in another first for the party, an invitation to the 2008 election leaders’ debates.

Disappointment

That highpoint was followed by a pronounced denouement. While the party did slightly increase its share of the popular vote in 2008, after much hype it failed to come close to electing a single MP. In addition, comments May made about strategic voting had demoralized and angered a number of candidates and key volunteers who felt like their leader had advised people not to vote Green. As the election night “victory party” wound down at the Supermarket in Toronto, some key party members put on a brave face, but privately had a hard time seeing a way forward.

Following that disappointing result, the party’s Federal Council and Federal Campaign Committee (of which I have intermittently been a member) established several key objectives for the next campaign, but there was an understanding that the number one objective, to elect Elizabeth May, was the only one that really mattered. It was a strategy that explicitly placed all of the party’s eggs in one basket, and which former staffer Mark Kersten described as a Hail Mary pass. As the polls closed on May 2 2011, there was little doubt that the Green Party was heading for either its best federal result ever and a real breakthrough, or a politically devastating result that would threaten its future existence.

Last night

The best result yet

The list of people who believed last night’s result to be impossible is too long (and includes too many people within the party itself). But Greens are in the business of accomplishing the impossible, and last night the voters of Saanich—Gulf Islands made history. There are thousands of people who worked hard for years to make this happen, both directly and indirectly, but there isn’t a single member of the Green Party of Canada who could have brought it home other than Elizabeth May.

Nor is there a single measure of success that’s as important or as significant as establishing a beachhead in the House of Commons. Before, May wasn’t even allowed to answer media questions in the Centre Block foyer. Leaders’ salary and core office staff, paid for through public funds if you’re in the House, had to be carried completely by the political operation.

On actual issues, on votes and debates in the House of Commons, one voice will make a difference. Even in the minority Parliaments of the last few years, a strange unanimity has often dominated what should have been controversial debates. In 2007 for example, not a single MP opposed restarting the Chalk River nuclear reactor even though the regulator said it was missing a “key upgrade” that is “key to nuclear safety” and is required to make sure that “the core doesn’t melt down.” Similarly, not a single party in the 40th Parliament opposed the federal subsidy of the commercial seal hunt, even though many Canadians—and, increasingly, foreign governments and trading blocks—do. Further, critical issues like the climate crisis frequently get shoved out of the way by short-term political concerns. Regardless of where you stand on these issues, many Canadians who were previously unrepresented now finally have a voice.

As witnessed by the many Conservatives, Liberals, New Democrats and independents publicly celebrating the results in Saanich-Gulf Islands last night, Elizabeth May’s election isn’t just a victory for Greens, but for all Canadians who value a diversity of voices and want to see an elevation in our nation’s level of political discourse.

The worst result in a long time

And yet, while electing an MP was the only thing the Green Party needed to do last night to credibly claim victory, there’s also some bad news in the results and threats in the future. At less than 4% nationally, the party’s popular vote is the worst result since 2000, falling even lower than in 2004 when many candidates had principled objections to things like ordering lawn signs, asking for votes, combing their hair, etc. The cost of focusing resources on one riding was worth it, but there was a cost.

For example, local campaigns that receive at least 10% of the vote get 60% of their expenses reimbursed. In other words, a campaign that spends $80,000 is guaranteed to start the next election with at least $48,000. That’s a huge advantage in terms of riding strength and stability, and many Green riding associations (EDAs) were just starting to tap into that opportunity and build a fiscal foundation to carry them from election to election. Almost all of that evaporated last night, even in ridings that ran their strongest local campaigns ever only to see their vote reduced by more than half.

Serious challenges

The financial sustainability of the national party is also not guaranteed. The per-vote subsidy that gave birth to the modern Green Party of Canada is almost certainly doomed. For the first time since it gained national prominence, the party has to figure out how to fundraise on its own.

One of the biggest stories today is the soul searching and rebuilding the Liberal Party will have to do in the next few years. In the long run that could be positive, but Liberals are only in this position because they were forced. The Green Party isn’t so lucky: it needs to force itself to ask some hard questions and evaluate its own performance.

In addition to fundraising, the biggest challenges (and the biggest disappointments of the campaign) are in organizing and communications. For the second election in a row, the party failed to field a candidate in every riding despite promising to do so. (I don’t buy for a second the excuse that that’s due to a more vigorous vetting process. Frankly, if you’re not even finding rape jokes in the “favourite quotes” section of a candidate’s Facebook profile, I’m not sure I buy you’re vetting them at all.)

With regard to communications, ironically the party can be thankful its Director of Communications started this campaign with zero Twitter followers. I don’t think any of his counterparts would have gotten away with saying intervention in Libya was “sexy.” (See Lisa Raitt.) And I’m sorry, but when the person writing the alerts you’re pushing to iPhone users can’t compose a proper sentence, then rightly or wrongly, I lose confidence in your ability to govern. It’s not good enough to blame the media. The party needs to take responsibility for its own failure to communicate its message.

What’s next

This isn’t the first time I’ve openly mused about the Green Party’s future, and despite what I’ve said above, I’m more optimistic than ever. Still, these weaknesses give Greens reason to be thankful for a majority government, if only from a political strategy perspective. This is the first time in the history of the modern Green Party that we know when the next election is going to be. It’s the first time since 2004 that we can stand down from “election readiness mode” and take a step back. We have four years to build a fundraising base, reinvigorate and motivate grassroots volunteers, professionalize (though I know we don’t like that word) organizing and communications and plan to make sure that this wasn’t a one-off. We need great candidates in winnable ridings, and we probably need most of them to start campaigning within the next two years. We need to build our (virtual) bench strength so that when Elizabeth May is done being leader there’s someone who can take her place. (That day will come sooner than it feels right now, and right now, there’s no one.)

Today is for celebrating a hard fought, well earned, impossible victory. The party has come a long way since Carleton University in Ottawa, since Bragg Creek, Alberta, even since London North Centre. Tomorrow, as President Bartlet was fond of saying, we need to quickly move to “what’s next.”

Maybe I’m just in a contrarian mood. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I haven’t blogged in awhile and I figure some link-bait like a top-10 list is what I need to regain some momentum and clout. (Yes, Twitter friends, apparently that’s how that word is supposed to be spelled. I’m surprised too.) Whatever the reason, if you’re a political candidate considering taking the fail whale for a ride, here are some reasons you might want to think twice.

1. You’ve never tweeted before now.

You’re heading into a very short election, and while Twitter isn’t hugely complicated or difficult to use, it does involve a bit of a learning curve. Better you focus on the tools you already know how to use well then start trying to learn a new one at this late hour. Also, a big part of using Twitter successfully involves building up a following overtime, and unless you’re already a very high-profile person it’s probably too late for you to start that now.

2. You’re not going to do it yourself.

So, given point number one, you might choose to hire a social media expert (or, more likely, take advantage of the most pimple-faced volunteer in your campaign office) to run Twitter for you. But this isn’t like outsourcing your flyer text (which presumably you direct and approve) or hiring a speech writer (to create a product you will ultimately deliver with your own voice). Twitter is real-time and interactive. Done well, it should be spontaneous and (with apologies to Andrew Potter) authentic, and unless you’ve staffed your tweets out to someone who knows you so well they can speak for you and finish your sentences, it’s not going to work. Even then, if someone else is doing your tweeting for you that probably means you’re not actually reading anyone else’s tweets, which brings us to…

3. You’re not interested in real conversations.

Twitter is not a broadcast medium. It’s not just another channel for you to get your message out there. One of the amazing things about Twitter is that previously inaccessible people from famous movie stars to local columnists will actually respond to strangers and even enter into conversations. If you’re not going to do that, and do it quickly (people often expect Twitter replies within a few hours, if not immediately) the only message you’ll be sending is that you’re not going to be a responsive representative.

4. Your tweets will be boring as sin.

This is the hardest point for me to admit because, as a recovering politician myself, I’ve been guilty of this multiple times. It’s almost impossible to avoid: when you’re in a campaign, your life suddenly becomes A) more hectic and full than it’s ever been, and B) extremely lame to any sensible outside observer. Since most people use Twitter to comment on their day or share what they come across, it’s hard to blame candidates from publishing an endless string of “great meeting with a residents’ group this morning,” or “getting a positive response at the door” or “watch this video of me saying all the boring stuff I’ve been tweeting,” but NOBODY CARES EXCEPT YOU AND YOUR IRRATIONALLY SUPPORTIVE PARTNER. (And they’re probably just pretending.)

5. You’re just going to spam people with your party’s talking points.

The major parties have already started sending out suggested talking points as tweets. They even come complete with hash tags like #elxn41, #lpc and #gpc so that you’re not just spamming your own followers, you’re also spamming all of the other people trying to follow those hash tags. You’re not adding any value, and everyone will just tune you out.

6. I don’t want to have to explain to you how hash tags work.

I just…don’t.

7. You might say something stupid.

This is my least favourite reason, and I don’t fully buy into it, but regardless of what I think it’s hard to imagine this list not containing this point. Frankly though, if you or your campaign team is worried you’ll say something on Twitter that could get you into trouble, you’re just as likely to say that same thing to a reporter or at a debate. The difference with saying it on Twitter is that it’s more likely to be reported as part of an eye-rolling “dangers of social media” narrative, or mischaracterized by political opponents or reporters who are Twitter-illiterate themselves. (I’m not saying all politicians or journalists are Twitter illiterate. I’m saying that with your luck, the journalist assigned to cover your tweet screw-up will be.)

8. You’ll mostly be tweeting to the choir.

Who do you think is really going to follow you? The average voter does their research by watching the news and visiting a few websites, they don’t want to be bombarded by your talking points and boring itinerary all day. The two groups of followers you’re most likely to pick up during an election campaign are the faithful and trolls. Even if you manage to pick up some real undecided voters as followers, how many do you think that will be? 50? 100? Is that going to decide the election?

9. It won’t help you get elected.

Go knock on doors. ID your voters. Make phone calls and send email before you compress your bumf into 140 characters. Get your name in the local paper and your voice on the radio. Unless you can clearly explain how your tweeting is going to lead to votes, why are you devoting so much of your limited time and energy towards it?

10. You’re going to stop after the election.

Twitter is a community (or, rather, a collection of communities). If you’re just crashing for your own selfish interests, it’s obvious to everyone else. Imagine if the election campaign was the first time you showed up at the local rate payers meeting or worship service or whatever, and then you never went again. (Wait, you’re not doing that too, are you?)

All that being said, if you can avoid all or most of these pitfalls then go for it! Done properly Twitter can be a great way to communicate with new people and keep up with breaking developments. I just don’t think it’s worth doing badly.

I wish I could give you some examples of great political tweeters to model yourself off of, but for my own sanity I follow very few. I think my local MP and MPP Bob Rae and Glen Murray do a pretty good job (Rae clearly writes his own tweets — his voice is unmistakable, and Murray engages with his constituents, especially those who disagree with him, perhaps more than any other elected official I’ve ever seen). I’m told that federal ministers Tony Clement and Jason Kenney were both pretty good before the election, but that now they’ve succumb to the above traps. Who am I missing?

First of all, it turns out these three people (Peter So, Blake Batson and Teresa Charlebois) have very little understanding of the controversies currently surrounding the federal government. Usually they simply admit that fact, though Baston begins by confidently referencing “the Bev Oda issue with the contract,” which Charlebois picks up later to refer to “the contracting and the swaying.”

That’s hopefully not a big surprise to any of us though, right? I think most of us already assume that the majority of Canadians don’t know the difference between Bev Oda and Len Blork, let alone the difference between an altered CIDA memo and a contracting.

What stuck out to me in this conversation, rather, was the repeated assertion that these voters don’t care about almost anything this government does, because all governments are pretty much the same anyway. Scandals like the Oda ado (our first palindromic scandal) “plague every single government” said Batson by way of explaining why they don’t affect his vote.

“Every government has their scandals,” added Charlebois. “Think back just to our last government before the Conservatives, they had their fair share of scandals too so it’s kinda hard to just say ‘ok, well the scandals now are going to necessarily sway how I would vote personally’ because correctly or not I feel like scandals happen with every party and every government.”

Anna Maria Tremonti’s questions did not move beyond the topic of scandals specifically, but over and over again I’ve heard the same complaint at the door about issues as well. “You’re all the same,” people tell me. “It doesn’t make a difference who I vote for.” And who can blame voters for having this kind of reaction? The level of political rhetoric in this country pretty much amounts to “Health care? Economy? Transparency? I’m in favour of them all!”

The result, my politician friends, is that you have turned yourselves into fungible commodities. In the eyes of too many voters, you are completely interchangeable with each other. According to the people over at Wikipedia, this “occurs as a goods or services market loses differentiation … goods that formerly carried premium margins for market participants have become commodities, such as generic pharmaceuticals and silicon chips.” And members of parliament.

So, find a point of difference. A real one of both style (to grab attention) and substance (to hold it). Be bold. Be a little crazy, even. Iceland’s Besti Flokkurinn or “Best Party” took control of Reykjavík’s City Council last year partly by promising not to keep any of their promises. “All other parties are secretly corrupt,” the argument went, “but if you vote for us we’ll be openly corrupt.” They won more council seats than any other party.

When the best poll numbers our governing party can muster are in the high thirties, and the party that’s formed government for most of our country’s existence is stuck in the twenties, there are very few ideas not worth trying, especially if you can figure out a way to actually look, sound and act differently than any other talking suit. And if you fail, at least the stakes are low, because you can’t do much worse than the status quo.

The results are in

I’m particularly proud of and happy about three things today. First, friendships that have been made and strengthened. A campaign is a community, and ours was a great one to be part of.

Second, and related, that we had such a strong showing without a big political machine behind us. This was a grassroots multi-partisan campaign that grew as we went along. Some of our most dedicated volunteers were people that joined us after we knocked on their doors, like a snowball rolling down a hill. I’m so humbled that so many great people gave so much of themselves.

Third, the strength of the other candidates. What an amazing thing we accomplished here. Over and over again people told me that there were multiple council candidates they wanted to vote for, who they thought would make great contributions to council. How often does that happen? When was the last time you voted in an election and thought, “gosh, there are just too many good choices?” It’s remarkable.

This week, we’ve got work to do closing up the campaign office, returning rented furniture, collecting and recycling lawn signs. Claire and I will then spend the weekend at a bed and breakfast in Prince Edward County before I return to work from my three-month leave of absence on Monday.

I’ve learned a lot during this campaign, and hope to share some of that in this space over the coming month.

More to come.