“Hi, I’m Zach! I’m out here knocking on doors for Tenille Bonoguore, who is running to represent you in Ward 7. Do you have any questions for her, or concerns that you’d like her to know about…” is now a sentence I have said more than possibly any other.

Ontario had municipal elections on October 22^nd. I looked at the bios of my local candidates, emailed all of them to find out more about their platforms, met with two of them, and ultimately decided that I wanted to help Tenille. Soon after that, I had been drafted to help manage canvassing efforts (although my colleague Tanya did more of that work than I did) and I was out knocking on doors again.

I knocked on countless doors and talked to an incredible variety of people. I don’t even know how many times I went out canvassing, but it was lots. More, I think, than the last time I did this.

This blog post outlines the differences (I found) between municipal politics and provincial politics, as well as the difference between volunteering for a campaign and being part of the core campaign team. I hope it can be informative for other people looking to get involved in politics any level.

The first thing I should mention about municipal campaigns is that they are (in many cities; Toronto is one notable exception) much smaller than campaigns for provincial or national government. If you’re volunteering for one, you will probably frequently meet and talk with the candidate. This was a big contrast to my volunteering at the provincial level, where I met the candidate only once (and that was brief), despite regularly canvassing on her behalf.

This, along with the non-partisan nature of many municipal elections means that volunteering at the municipal level is a much better way to get your voice heard. When there’s no party line to toe, your perspective (or a voter’s perspective as relayed by you) can change someone’s mind and lead to a (potential) city councillor voting differently.

Money also goes a lot further in municipal elections. Waterloo had a spending limit of around $12,000 (and I don’t know how many candidates even hit that). This means that donating a couple hundred dollars could make you one of the largest donors to a candidate. I don’t recommend this as a way of influencing policy – I didn’t see anyone act differently because of who donated and I sure as heck didn’t see donors get any sort of special “access”. Trying to get “access” is more or less pointless anyways; municipal boundaries are often small enough that a simple email is all you need to get real, detailed answers right from a candidate (or sitting counsellor).

That said donating is a great way to support a candidate you care about and help them get their message out.

The smaller scale of municipal campaigns also means that any past experience will probably make you the resident expert in something. When you volunteer for a provincial campaign, you’re a small cog in a big machine. When you volunteer municipally, it’s not like that.

Although not all campaigns need your help to the same degree. Incumbents almost never lose races municipally. Only one incumbent (out of 4 who stood for re-election) lost in Waterloo. In Cambridge, no incumbent counsellor lost re-election. Incumbent counsellors are also more likely to have an experienced existing team, potentially limiting the responsibility you could hold. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing! There’s lots to be said for learning skills from more experienced people.

Still, if your main goal is to maximize your contribution towards the election of candidates who you trust, you should focus on open seat races (a seat where there’s no incumbent, due to retirement, scandal, etc.). Second to open seat races might be challengers who are unusually good candidates (e.g. they have extensive community ties and recognition, or other political experience).

(This is speculative. Local conditions may vary. You, or a sitting counsellor you trust might be best positioned to figure out where you can do the most good)

The ease in which you can find yourself in a position of responsibility in a municipal campaign comes with one drawback if you accept it – it can be stressful to be responsible. I don’t want to discourage anyone from getting involved, but I did find even my limited leadership role a source of stress.

From my point of view, three things make being part of a campaign team stressful:

1. It’s a lot of work; the emotion work of listening to people’s concerns can be emotionally draining and the walking physically taxing. This leads to you trying to do admin work when tired and worn-out.
2. The outcome is uncertain. Many people like certainty and the combination of caring about a specific outcome a lot and being unsure if it will come about can wear you down.
3. The buck stops with you. When you’re a simple canvasser, you just need to show up; everything else is taken care of. When people asked me to do things, they wouldn’t get done unless I took care of them.

Now there were two further factors that probably made this more stressful for me than the average volunteer. First, I was working around my blogging French practice. If I was exhausted from campaigning and didn’t work on them, I’d beat myself up about it. People who respond to exhaustion in healthier ways (hint: any other way) wouldn’t have this stressor.

Second, one of the other candidates may have been engaging in underhanded tactics. As a young idealist, I took this rather hard and wasted a lot of energy being angry about it.

Now, I want to be clear that me being such a ball of stress wasn’t the fault of the campaign or anyone else in it.

I read an article a few months ago (that I’m now no longer able to find) about a campaign run and almost entirely staffed by women in California. The women who worked on it talked about how supportive the environment was and how useful it was to have things like “what are times you need off for childcare?” and “please let us know if you feel like you’re taking on too much” asked explicitly at the start.

Tenille’s campaign wasn’t run entirely by women, but it was pretty close (there was only myself and her husband on the core team). And just like the campaign I read about in California, Tenille and Zivy (our campaign manager) did an excellent job checking in with everyone and doing their best to make sure no one took on too much. If I pushed myself past the point I should have, it wasn’t for lack of them trying to create a campaign that didn’t encourage that.

I don’t want to get all gender essentialist here, but working on this campaign made me genuinely believe that women might bring something important and different to the political process. Previously, I’d wanted to see gender balance in elected representatives for basic fairness reasons. Now I find myself even more committed to it.

I think there were two things that made the stress all worth it. The first was getting Tenille elected. I was continually floored by just how good she will be as a counsellor. She knows so much about how Waterloo’s weird two-level government works, has been very involved in the community, and has a journalist’s instinct for hard questions. The second upside is all the other people I met.

There’s this branch of decision theory called functional decision theory that claims the key component of decision making is the algorithm that people use to make decisions. Functional decision theory holds that you can coordinate with someone without talking to them, as long as you can make an accurate guess as to what their decision-making algorithm will be.

This is relevant to campaigning, because you can coordinate with other cool people with similar beliefs to all end in the same room. All you have to do is figure out what candidate they’ll volunteer for and get on her campaign team. Then you’ll all show up in that candidate’s living room, drink coffee, and figure out how to get her elected.

(This can also be a general piece of advice; if you want to meet people you’ll find cool, go do whatever you think a 10% cooler version of you would do. Being part of a core campaign team works so well for this because you’ll spend a lot of time with the other members and be in a social context that provides lots of stuff for you all to talk about. This beats being a canvassing volunteer, where you’ll only see the same people intermittently and have less of a context that encourages mingling.)

Most of the people I met through the campaign are in a rather different stage of life than I am; they aren’t all young techies like most of my other friends. Many of them had kids. Some of them even had jobs outside of tech! Despite the fact that our lives looked rather different, I found I really liked them. They were universally kind, thoughtful, and willing to listen to other perspectives.

(It is rare that I get to hear multiple people talk about why that had kids, what they expected to get out of it, and how they were surprised, but it turns out I really enjoy it when I do. Knowing people at other stages of life is great because you can get advice about your stage of life.)

We had a potluck and reunion a month after the campaign was over and I found myself giddy afterwards; it wasn’t just the stress of the campaign that made me like them. They’re just cool people.

The social scientist Jonathon Haidt wrote in The Righteous Mind that many of the experiences people highlight as the most meaningful in their life happen in the context of some shared struggle. Whatever the depredations, working together for some important cause feels good. In my last post on canvassing, I also quoted Hannah Arendt, who talked about the “extreme pleasure” of working in a group. She was right. Haidt is right as well. Canvassing, volunteering, trying to get someone elected – these are all things that you will look back on and feel proud about.

It’s for these reasons – and because politics needs good, dedicated, decent people – that I recommend becoming involved at any and all levels of government. You don’t have to run yourself. There are plenty of excellent candidates out there who need help, money, and time. If you’re new to politics, consider volunteering to knock on doors. If you’re an old hand, consider taking on a leadership role.

You might change the world. And you might make amazing friends.

“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 7^th. 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.