Anyway, it wasn't my first leap into this
sordid arena. My father ran for
MLA (the equivalent of a state representative) in 1955 in Wainwright and I
helped him hand out brochures and tack posters to telephone poles. He was a Liberal candidate running in a
province dominated by the Social Credit party. I'm not biased, of course, but dad was a quantum improvement
on the straw-chewing rube incumbent but that cut no ice in rural Alberta. Straw-chewing
rubes were popular. My father lost decisively. The Social Credit party could
have run a garden slug and not even bothered to endorse him. It was my first exposure to the
intellectual vacuum that was Alberta politics.
In 1965, bright-eyed from four years of
college training, I agreed to act as campaign manager for a co-worker running
for alderman in Edmonton. My
candidate, a Mr. Basset, was a nice man with no real political ambition beyond
fighting for some community issue I've long forgotten, maybe a leash law or a
plan to remove the slivers from the park slides. His problem was twofold - no one knew who he was, even many
of his neighbors, and this was in the days before the ward system so every
aldermanic candidate was a city-wide candidate. The upshot was that no less
than 70 candidates were on the ballot to fill 7 positions. It was chaos. Imagine trying to select 7 favorites from a list of 70. Many
Edmonton voters couldn't count to 70. My great achievement in this short campaign was listening to
some of the most stultifying brain-dead campaign speeches in the history of
representative government. The
incumbent aldermen were overwhelming favorites even if their collective
brain-power would hit a wall with 8th grade algebra. Modesty prohibits me from
touting my campaign slogan "For a civic asset, vote Basset". He liked it, finished 35th and said
he'd had enough. I agreed. Given
his fundamental anonymity, I credit the slogan for the 35th place finish,
although it could have "Basset" being near the front of the ballot.
In 1970, i was asked to be campaign manager
for a lupine young lawyer trying to latch onto the Lougheed bandwagon. We didn't get along. He was a duplicitous piece of shit and
an affront, I thought, to whatever fresh new honesty was emanating from
Lougheed's young corral of candidates. The smirking creep was a harbinger of
the greasy conservatives we find in North American politics today. We parted company in short order.
Fortunately, the electorate found him as distasteful as I did and he quickly
lapsed into anonymity.
So now it's 1985 and I volunteer to help a
Calgary MLA who I have never met. Yet,
he was a rare honorable man who as a backbencher had sponsored a lot of
worthwhile legislation. He was
someone with a vision of a better Alberta. Unfortunately, he was running a distant third to an
ex-football player who parlayed an easy-going manner into a durable political career, even if he
always seemed a tad distracted by his real love in life, betting on the
ponies. In second place was a
hotel owner who parlayed a mop of black hair, a mouthful of perfect teeth and a
smile that could endure a thumbscrew into a challenge for party leadership.
One Wednesday night in October, I drove the
25 miles out to Stony Plain at attend a election for party delegates for the
leadership convention. This is
politics at its rawest, rural folk gathering to recommend which of their
neighbors deserved the trip to Calgary in November. These people were - as Gene
Wilder so accurately described in "Blazing Saddles" - the 'common clay, you know, morons.' It was a prescient description.
My job was a) to hand out brochures for my
guy in the vain hope the material would sway stolid minds at the last minute and
b) help with the vote count or scrutineering. I felt I was fulfilling my community obligation.
The handing out of brochures went
badly. This was a well-attended
affair and i was busy trying to accost people as they rushed in the door. Most of them ignored me. But in two separate incidents, a man,
then a lady, reminded me of something I truly did not know and would not have
cared had I known. "You know he's a fucking Jew, eh?" they both barked. I stood gaping after the first one but
had the presence of mind on the second to remind the lady that at least he
didn't fuck the sheep like some I could name. This was obviously a sensitive subject in the Stony Plain
area as she spent most of the night glaring at me and slapping her husband on
the arm. I had forgotten anti-semitism lived in Alberta
Next came the speeches. The idea was the crowd would vote to see which six people from their community would be selected to attend the leadership convention and, believe it or not, no less than 45 men and 3 women announced their wish to be one of those six. 48 people for 6 spots! Holy democratic overkill! It would be fair of you to ask at this point why such a modest political outcome could generate such a huge interest. Well, I'm afraid the answer has little to do with democratic town hall enthusiasm and more to do with the possibility that getting close to the Premier could be good for one's bank account. Surely everyone knew there was a zillion publicly-appointed jobs that paid obscenely high wages, fees, and benefits and are landed due to proximity to the Premier. The zeal was, in truth, plain old avarice. Help your boy gain the Premier's office and he'll surely reward you. What can you say about a political system in which the citizen sees the guy at the top as a dollar sign?
Next came the speeches. The idea was the crowd would vote to see which six people from their community would be selected to attend the leadership convention and, believe it or not, no less than 45 men and 3 women announced their wish to be one of those six. 48 people for 6 spots! Holy democratic overkill! It would be fair of you to ask at this point why such a modest political outcome could generate such a huge interest. Well, I'm afraid the answer has little to do with democratic town hall enthusiasm and more to do with the possibility that getting close to the Premier could be good for one's bank account. Surely everyone knew there was a zillion publicly-appointed jobs that paid obscenely high wages, fees, and benefits and are landed due to proximity to the Premier. The zeal was, in truth, plain old avarice. Help your boy gain the Premier's office and he'll surely reward you. What can you say about a political system in which the citizen sees the guy at the top as a dollar sign?
Anyway, tradition dictated that each of
these 48 hopeful trough feeders got to make a speech telling the crowd what
made them worthy of being selected. The prospect of 48 decidedly untrained
public speakers stammering for support was nothing if not daunting and could
easily become a brain-killing marathon that lasted until sunup. That would not
do. So each candidate was given
one minute to make his or her case.
One minute.
You haven't lived until you hear 48
one-minute speeches by non-public speakers. They ranged from "Uh,
you know me . . . Clyde Stool
. . uh" to "I'mFredFrutzandIcanserveyouallrealgood andyouseknowitsovoteformeyahear." It was pure agony, a display of mass
insanity and I have no idea how the crowd actually decided who to vote for
other than they were each introduced as someone representing one of the three
premier candidates. The two men
and one woman who stood up for my guy were booed. So much for my brochures.
They voted - it took a while and the
cliche, "herding cats' was front and centre. Eventually, though, I joined six other people in a
second-story windowless room to do
our duty as scrutineers. Keep in
mind here, I had never done this before. How hard could it be?
Well, hard enough. Seems no one had any idea as to what
was to be done. Three boxes full
of voting slips sat ominously on the floor, the six scrutineers eying them as
if they were props from an Indiana Jones movie about to release some
unspeakable scourge. No one said
anything. They were waiting to be
told what to do. It occurred to me
at this point that unless somebody did
something, we'd be stuck in this room until those voting slips turned to dust.
Did I mention this room was a tad on the
warm side? Did I mention that all
six of my colleagues smoked - aggressively? If I was going
to survive, I needed to move. So I
took over, acted like I knew what I was doing and let common sense run the
show. I paired them off and gave
each pair a box and a letter-sized pad of note paper. After a long time spent instructing each pair with an exact
set of steps to record the vote, handle the voting slip, and deal with possible
anomalies, they began to count, stopping only to light up another
cigarette. I stepped out of
the room for a minute. The crowd
below milled about like cattle twitching at the sound of a thunder storm, most
of them chain-smoking and acting like the Vatican freaks watching for a puff of
white smoke to announce a new pope.
After what seemed like days, the count was
finished. A lot of work probably
for what was a foregone conclusion - the football player with a love for the
thoroughbreds won handily. My guy
and Mr. Hair/Smile both finished well up the track. In the end the football player became Premier of
Alberta and I'm guessing the six duly elected bozos from Stony Plain
immediately sat down by their phones to await the reward that would surely
come.
In the meantime, it took me two laundries
and two showers to get rid of the tobacco smell. My career in politics was over. And I still quiver when I hear the political cliche, "a smoke-filled room".
Robert Alan Davidson
March, 2018
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