Dispatches from the frontlines of the 2025 election

The joy of campaigning - "night lunch", fire poles and 25 hour days

This is my eighth general election campaign and probably my last.

Each one brings me back to Timothy Crouse’s classic account of the George McGovern U.S. presidential bid in 1972, The Boys on the Bus.

Crouse said that what reporters know best, is not the voters but the tiny community of the press bus and plane, “a totally abnormal world that combines the incestuousness of New England hamlet, with the giddiness of a mid-ocean gala and the physical rigour of the Long March”.

It’s an accurate description. Journalists are shepherded onto buses and planes to take their designated spots.

Meals are served at your desk on the bus or in mid-air at odd times - a phenomenon we used to call “night-lunch”.

We’d often arrive in the dark at some unremarkable hotel, and be handed a room key. After a night of fractured sleep, we’d be driven to a location with a tangential relationship to the story of the day. Fly Straight is named after the advice offered by the Toronto Star’s Jim Travers. We once arrived at a farm for an agricultural announcement to be greeted by an aroma that can only be described as shit. Jim lifted his great proboscis and pronounced that “it smells like politics”.

Prior to the candidate’s appearance, we’d be fed a campaign nothing-burger news release that purported to turn base metal into gold or cure an incurable disease.

After a month of this coddling, you could scarcely find the bathroom on your own and would recoil at being asked to pay for food.

Exposure to normal voters and fresh air was strictly circumscribed. Access to too much alcohol and fried chicken was unbounded.

At the end of the 2004 campaign, I woke up in the Maritimes with the Paul Martin campaign. We travelled to Chester, NS, where Martin dipped his toe in the Atlantic. We then headed to Vancouver, with stops in Gatineau, Toronto and Winnipeg. We had our end of tour dinner at 2am on the West Coast, while Martin dipped his toes in the Pacific, and then we all hopped back on the plane to fly to Montreal. Reporters were left trying to figure out whether they could claim overtime for a 25-hour day.

On the last day of the 2011 campaign, we left London, Ont., heading for a rally at Abbotsford airport in B.C., convinced that we had filed our last copy for the day because of the time difference. The bubbly was uncorked somewhere over the Great Lakes and, on arrival, we were shown to the airport fire hall, where we were all filmed sliding down the station fire pole and turning on the fire truck siren. The hi-jinks came to a crashing stop just before the evening rally when word came down that Osama bin Laden had been killed by U.S. Special Forces. Suddenly, we were back on duty again.

So why do we do it, besides it being terrific fun?

The business case is that there really is no substitute for watching the pretenders for the job of prime minister up close, as they deal with the inevitable slings and arrows of an election.

The Conservatives were ahead mid-way through the 2004 campaign when an over-caffinated staffer in the war room issued a press release with the headline: “Paul Martin Supports Child Pornography”. Stephen Harper ordered the headline to be changed but refused to apologize for something that was clearly beyond the pale. “If they want to make the election campaign about that over the next 10 days, I’d love that fight,” he told reporters in Drummondville, Que.

They did and he lost, in part because voters deemed he was too raw to be prime minister. By 2006, he was less angry, better prepared and more pragmatic.

Watching Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff campaign as Liberal leaders in 2008 and 2011, it was obvious that it just wasn’t them and that they were living in bubbles of their own self-narrative. One Liberal told me that Ignatieff collapsed exhausted in the green room, after working a room full of supporters, only to be told by Justin Trudeau that he had to feed off the energy of the crowd. Trudeau is a natural at the performative side of politics but it was not instinctive for Ignatieff.

Then there are the times when real news breaks out, such as the anti-Trudeau rallies that erupted in Nobleton and Bolton, Ont., that forced the cancellation of a campaign event in late August, 2021. The frenzied contempt for the Liberal leader was epitomized by the woman with a baby on her hip, flipping the bird at him. In Bolton, the media riser stood between the baying crowd and the stage that Trudeau was set to appear on. The zombie army of the undead would have had to go through us to get to him, and would have been glad to do so. Thankfully, the RCMP decided they were outnumbered and we’d all better get the hell out of there.

There have been no such concerns this week with the nice folks from the NDP. But I noticed that Jagmeet Singh was cutting a dejected figure, at least compared to the animated campaigner from the 2021 election, when he pulled out a longboard on the tarmac at Halifax Airport and performed hand-stands on the wharf at Dartmouth. His team said he was “under the weather” but I think there was a resignation, if not acceptance, that his time in politics is drawing to a close and there are big changes coming in his life. He’d scarcely be human if he wasn’t preoccupied by his own future.

Being on the ground has other advantages. On Sunday evening, the NDP held what they call a whistlestop in the Toronto riding office of the candidate for Spadina-Harbourfront, Norm Di Pasquale. I thought the mood was muted, which is probably not surprising given half of the party’s voters from 2021 have deserted them for the Liberals. This is a riding the NDP held under Olivia Chow, now the mayor of Toronto, but it would surprise me if it turns orange on April 28th. The same applies to Toronto Danforth, where we ventured on Monday morning. This was Jack Layton’s old riding and the NDP have a good candidate in Claire Hacksel. I haven’t seen riding level polling but it just didn’t feel as if the campaign team or the candidates really believe they will win. It’s not scientific but there’s a whiff of pheromones around winning campaigns; they tend to strut like stray cats.

The debates have temporarily suspended the giddiness of the mid-ocean gala but the Long March will resume over the Easter weekend.
I’m joining the Liberals and will send on dispatches from the frontlines next week.