“Hi I’m Zach. I’m out here canvasing for Catherine Fife, Andrea Horwath, and the NDP. I was wondering if Catherine could count on your support this election…” is now a sentence I’ve said hundreds of times.
Ontario had a provincial election on June 7th. I wasn’t fond of the Progressive Conservative (PC) Party’s leader, one Doug Ford, so I did what I could. I joined the PC party to vote for his much more qualified rival, Christine Elliot. When that failed, I volunteered for Waterloo’s NDP Member of Provincial Parliament (MPP), Catherine Fife.
As a volunteer, I knocked on more than a thousand doors and talked to more than two hundred people. I went out canvassing eight times. According to Google Maps and its creepy tracking, I walked about 24 kilometers while doing this (and have still-sore feet to prove it).
Before I started canvassing, I knew basically nothing about it. I knew I’d be knocking on people’s doors, but beyond that, nadda. Would I be trying to convince them? Handing out signs? Asking for money?
The actual experience turned out to be both scarier and more mundane than I imagined, so I’ve decided to document it for other people who might be interested in canvassing but aren’t sure what it entails.
The first thing you need to know about canvassing by foot is that it can be physically draining. Water was a must, as some of the days I canvassed featured 31ºC (88ºF) temperatures, full sunlight, and 70% humidity. I sweated more canvassing than I did hiking in Death Valley a few weeks before. Death Valley was hotter, but as anyone who has experienced a summer in Ontario can attest, humidity is what really makes heat miserable. From what I’ve heard, even the worst summer heat and humidity still beats canvassing in the winter.
The campaign helpfully supplied sunscreen and water bottles. They didn’t provide anything to carry all the leaflets in though. After the first day, I brought a messenger bag along. It turns out carrying hundreds of leaflets for several hours without resting can leave your arms hurting for a week. I only made that mistake once.
(Plus, as the campaign wore on, we switched to smaller literature. Literally every canvasser I talked to was very, very excited by the switch.)
The second thing you need to know about canvassing is that it’s an emotional rollercoaster. Not because of the people, but because of the lack of people.
Depending on the time of day and the neighbourhood, I spoke to somewhere between one person for every five doors I knocked on and one person for every fifteen doors I knocked on. I’d get myself psyched up, mentally rehearse my speech, double check the house number, walk up to it, press the doorbell… then wait foolishly while nothing happened.
Sometimes I suspected the doorbell was broken. When I was pretty sure it was, I’d knock as well. Sometimes the knocking did indeed result in someone answering the door, but most of the time the house was just empty. I did have one person hide behind some equipment in their kitchen as I walked up to the door. They ignored the doorbell and my soft, confused knock. I saw them checking if the coast was clear as I trudged away from the front step.
The constant build-up of energy, followed by the all-to-common let down and dejected walk back to the sidewalk exhausted me more than talking with people did. More than half of the people we talked to were supporting our candidate or leaning towards her (she won the vote with 51% support, a crushing margin in a system where many candidates win with support just over 40%) so a majority of my conversation were energizing. It’s fun to discover shared purpose with strangers.
I can’t tell you how much I was grateful to all of the strangers I talked to. I know intellectually that some people really dislike the NDP and don’t like anything it stands for, but you wouldn’t know it from telling more than 200 random people whose dinner you just interrupted that you support the NDP. Not one single person said a mean thing to me.
Many were annoyed by the state of politics. Some didn’t like the party’s policies. Some weren’t interested in politics. But everyone heard me out politely. Some quickly asked me to leave, but no one slammed a door in my face. One man did close his door in my face, but not even the most uncharitable person couldn’t call it a slam. Besides, he said bye and made sure I wasn’t going to be hit by the door.
Many people followed up “sorry, I’m voting for the conservatives”, with “but good luck out there”. Several people asked if I needed a break, some shade, some water. Maybe things would have been different if I’d been out for the Liberals (who were deeply unpopular after 15 years governing) or the Conservatives (with their polarizing leader), but as it was I was impressed by the kindness and politeness of my fellow citizens.
(If you see a canvasser on your doorstep and don’t agree with their party’s positions, please be nice to them. They’re doing what they’re doing out of a sincere desire to make the world a better place. Even if you think they’re misguided, you aren’t going to change anything by being nasty to them. On the flip side, if you find yourself canvassing, it will never be in your interest to be nasty to anyone. I learned that someone high up in the campaign started volunteering for the NDP when a Conservative candidate was rude and patronizing to him at the door. “Be nice” was the very first rule of canvassing.)
Canvassing really isn’t about convincing people. We had scripts for that, but as far as I know, most people didn’t use them much. The doorstep really isn’t the best place to try and change someone’s political views and the time we would spend trying to convince people was normally considered better spent knocking on more doors.
Our actual objective was to figure out who our supporters were and who was open to being convinced. After each conversation, we’d jot down a level of support, any alternative parties being considered, and any issues the person cared about. We had specific shorthands for common occurrences, like people who were ineligible to vote, who had moved, or who didn’t want to talk to us (if you tell a canvasser not to bother you, they will stop coming to your house; this is a corollary of “be nice”, as the last thing we want is to annoy someone into helping our opponents). We’d also offer people literature about our platform. If no one was home, we’d leave it in the mailbox. I was told the notes we took could influence future phone calls (e.g. if we said “hospitals”, people might be talked with about healthcare policy) or help Catherine when she went canvassing
We were working from lists provided by Elections Ontario and augmented by the party databases. We knew what people had told past canvassers about their support for the NDP, going all the way back to 2012. These lists were correct about 80-90% of the time. Most often, mistakes were the fault of Elections Ontario; they were particularly bad at telling us when people were actually permanent residents and ineligible to vote. Beyond “not home” and “won’t say”, “ineligible to vote” become my third most common annotation.
Part of our job was to update these lists for the next election. That entailed asking for names, if someone new was living there and verifying phone numbers. I hated verifying phone numbers. I understand the necessity behind it, I really do, but it was far and away the most awkward part of canvassing. Right when every social instinct I had was telling me my interaction with someone was over, I had to ask for a piece of information they probably didn’t want to give me. I’m sure I’ll get used to it – the experienced canvasser who taught me the ropes was particularly adept at asking for numbers – but it was far and away my least favourite part.
Much easier to ask about was advanced polling, signs, and volunteering. These questions only got asked to our strongest supporters, so we knew we were getting a friendly audience. I had three people agree to take signs over my eight days of canvassing, which is less than the experienced canvasser who showed me the ropes got in our first night out. I hope one day to be as good at getting people to show support as he was.
What else? Kids are the best part. I got to watch as a father explained to his little girl that the NDP wasn’t the type of party that had cake. I got to watch a little girl jump up and down with enthusiasm for Catherine. She had seen her at a school visit and thought she was the coolest thing ever. This really struck home the importance of representation in politics to me. Maybe that girl will never lose her admiration and will grow up to seek office herself someday. Would as many girls be able to imagine themselves as MPPs if they only ever saw men in that role?
There were less happy moments. I met a woman who quizzed me in depth on our healthcare platforms before telling me that if that’s what we stood for, we had her vote. Her husband was in the hospital. I saw a notation on a canvassing sheet that said “do not bother – funeral”. I talked with a man who had been turned away at a poll, despite the fact that he was a citizen. I met a mother who relied on the Hydro tax credit to make ends meet.
Their voices were important and I did what I could to make sure they’d be heard, but I can see how people can lose themselves in politics. What is “enough” when someone is hurting in front of you? I like cold equations and cost-benefit analyses. It’s the type of person I am. But when you see someone hurting, all of that flies out of your head and you want to shake the system until someone helps them.
Or at least, I wanted to.
The great political theorist Hannah Arendt once said: “And the first thing I’d like to say, you see, is that going along with the rest—the kind of going along that involves lots of people acting together—produces power. So long as you’re alone, you’re always powerless, however strong you may be. This feeling of power that arises from acting together is absolutely not wrong in itself, it’s a general human feeling. But it’s not good, either. It’s simply neutral. It’s something that’s simply a phenomenon, a general human phenomenon that needs to be described as such. In acting in this way, there’s an extreme feeling of pleasure.”
When I read this, the first time, I skimmed over it. To me, the important thing was what she said next, about “merely functioning” and how thinking is a vehicle to doing good, the concerns that defined her work.
But after my second time canvassing, I read this again and I teared up. “How did she know?”, I wondered.
The answer, of course, is that she participated in politics and knew the joys of acting as a group, of organizing, of working together for a common goal, a common good. And I feel so incredibly privileged that I now know that joy, that “extreme pleasure” too.
For that, I’d like to thank everyone in Catherine Fife’s campaign and everyone in Waterloo who put up with me on their doorstep. Thank you, all of you, for being part of what makes politics and representative democracy work.