On Three Years Since My Electoral Defeat

by John Laforet
posted on November 11th, 2009 at 01:51:52 am

My life changed three years ago last night. I was twenty years old sick as a dog, running a high fever, feeling faint but refusing to rest until the day was through.

Close friends were telling me to go home, saying I should have been in bed all weekend. Family knew me better than to even try to suggest that.

‘If I lose by a hundred votes and was laying in bed during the dying hours of the campaign – I could never forgive myself. I just have to make it til polls close – win or lose, I will rest then.’ I said in response.

I was on the doorsteps – targeting town-houses with weak turn out, trying to run up the numbers. These were my kind of voters, lower income, cynical and occasional or non voters. 

My six month campaign with a budget of just five thousand dollars had run out of money two weeks before election day and our GOTV strategy had been hastily planned by the over-tired core team and had gone against all the wisdom I had collected in my years as a political organizer. 

 As the sun set I was reflecting on the campaign coming to an end. Sentimental that should I win or lose tomorrow would be fundamentally different than the day before.

I would either be the youngest City Councillor in Toronto and positioned to make good on my promises, or an unemployed former candidate. Quitting my job to run had stretched my finances to the point I was paying my phone bill on credit and just about out of cash with no employment prospects.

But that didn’t matter yet. Those were problems for the day after. 

The love I felt in my heart for those who believed enough in me to come out and help as I sought to bring my community outspoken, collaborative leadership is something I will never forget. 

I only wish we could have shared our message with more voters together.

The campaign took a toll on me as a person in many ways and was very much an odyssey in finding out who I am, what I care about and what I believed.

I learned it was principles not politics that drove me and people not parties that really mattered. The idea of basic fairness, a sense of right and wrong, of justice and equality drove a principled and progressive platform that I was proud to present myself on. I resolved that I would never become the vision of ‘politician’ many hold in their minds and loved when people would tell me they didn’t see me as a politician, but instead as a guy who wanted to do something, was honest and could be trusted.

I was honoured to be the only union endorsed candidate in the race with the brothers and sisters of Amalgamated Transit Union local 113 (the TTC’s largest union) lined up in my corner, encouraging their members to vote for me, donating to my campaign and providing encouragement as I went along.

My health went through quite a ringer at one point landing me in the emergency room certain I was having a heart attack. It turned out I had an infection of the sack lining my heart and the swelling was causing the stabbing pain and shortness of breath. Being told to rest by a doctor who was unsympathetic to the desire of his patient to meet voters was a bitter pill and advice I could only really follow for a couple of days before getting back to the hustings.

I carry many of the hopes, fears and aspirations of residents with me to this day from the many who opened up to share with me. I was honoured to have their trust and support and for their sake wish I could have lived up to my end of our ‘if you vote for me, I will… 

It was the first municipal election where I had been eligible to vote and I found myself on the ballot, standing up to protect green space from irresponsible development, advocating for systemic reforms and increases support and programming for at risk youth and low income residents, while standing shoulder to shoulder with the workers that literally keep our city moving.

As poll closed I went home to watch the results with my sister and her fiancee awaiting my fate. It was an early night, by the 7th poll reporting it was clear I would be lucky to run third. 

I got in the shower, cleaned up and walked to the unheated, one room campaign office we’d been renting for $75 dollars a week. I had two speeches prepared, but not one for coming forth. I don’t think a single thought was in my head for the fifteen minute walk to where friends and loved ones had assembled.

I walked into a room of mostly sad faces with sprinkles of shock and bits of surprise mixed in. People were deflated but social. 

My first contact in the room was from someone who had been there for me each and everyday both to help and support me as I went through the most intense roller-coaster of my life. She started by telling me that a woman I had met during the campaign and who had campaigned for me each day without fail had called to say she wouldn’t be up because she was too upset, but that tomorrow we had to start planning for four years from now. We’ve lost touch over the wind turbine issue, but I am still grateful for all she did.

I thanked everyone, kept it short and joined those drinking budget beer and shooting the breeze trying to avoid the ‘what happened’ discussions.

When the night was over, I went home musing about what it means to be a forth rate candidate and beginning to feel the sense of personal crisis coming on. My life had been preparing to be or being a candidate for nearly a year. This is who I had been and identified as hundreds of times a day, but it was now over and not even close. What was I going to do with myself?

Sleep seemed like a good start.

When I woke up my Dad told me that he and my future brother in law had been driving around during the night hauling down many of the three hundred lawn signs we had put up during the campaign. I walked into the garage and found my signs battered and beaten by the weather, piled and stacked – each representing a family that believed in me. 

I sat around not sure what to do. Normally I got out of bed, ate, answered email’s and went out to hawk for votes. Not the day after though, that chapter was over, I told myself, perhaps forever. 

I checked my email and voice-mail and found each flooded from supporters, friends and family. 

The generous comments coming in on a job well done and a campaign others were proud of was very touching. Perhaps most touching of all was a book of Churchill’s famous speeches with a hand written note from a dear family friend saying that a lot of people don’t win on their first try, but what matters in winning when it counts.

The campaign voice-mail messages ranged from sad  – “I voted for you, what happened?” – to angry – “you convinced me to vote for the first time in 15 years, why didn’t you win?”

It was then I realized that I had not lost, but me and the 932 other people who cast their ballots for me and those who couldn’t but still believed in our message.

Disappointment turned to guilt and thoughts of those I talked about empowering with my victory and what my defeat would mean for them. I’m young, time is on my side and my life will be OK, but what about the people I met who lived between the cracks in government or were disengaged? The guy who won didn’t care about them. 

When folks would ask me what I was going go do next, I would say ‘I’m going to move to Costa Rica and grow coffee and oranges. I will drink the coffee and eat the oranges and sell what is left for everything else I need.’

When I was met with a look of surprise I would respond that I thought it was a silly question and deserved a silly answer and remind how young I was and what a great opportunity it had been. 

One friend suggested elected politics may not be in the cards for me, but subsistence farming in a country where I don’t speak the language probably wasn’t either.

Many know I did not move to Costa Rica and while I did try to grow my own coffee before during and after the campaign for almost three years, I did not intend it for commercial distribution. 

Instead I lucked my way into a great opportunity to be the Field Manager of a well respected national research firm and got to travel to different provinces and lead focus groups on the future of democracy in Canada in addition to many other projects. But professionalism required me to silence my public, political voice. I got itchy like this and during the Democratic primary in the United States announced to my employers that I would like to take the week and a half after new years off in addition to the days in between Christmas and New Years to travel to Iowa and New Hampshire to join the John Edwards for President campaign.

After some resistance and parternalesque concern I was given the time off. Christmas night, after family dinner I boarded a Greyhound bus at 1am with Dubuque Iowa as my ultimate destination. Two days later I arrived and got to work. Edwards came second to Obama in the Iowa Caucus, the most profound and touching deliberative democracy I have ever seen.

Fourteen hours and three planes later I arrived in New Hampshire with a ‘I felt the momentum in Iowa’ message. Edwards lost by a lot and I got on the next bus heading for the Canadian border.

It was clear to me however over-tired and disappointed I was that maintaining the quality of life I enjoyed in Toronto through a job that requires my lack of participation was not worth having.

So I moved out of my nice apartment, resigned from my great job and sought employment that work allow me to live my life as an active citizen.

Materialistically I am and have been decidedly worse off since, but it has been good for the soul and my sense of worth as a person.

My new found freedom led to laforet.ca being born, my first step in reclaiming my voice. Since then I’ve stood up for low income residents of my community, spoken out against government inaction on poverty alleviation, gun violence and most recently have found myself standing publicly on principle with my neighbours in Guildwood and now across twenty-six counties in Ontario as president of Wind Concerns Ontario.

I regularly look back and appreciate the wisdom of Ward 43 voters for putting me middle of the pack. It demonstrated my candidacy wasn’t dead on arrival, but a clear decision that it wasn’t my time to win.

They instead opted for a bland continuation of the status quo with an underwhelming 38% of the vote to the victor.

I am thankful for the life experiences I have been afforded since and the opportunities to serve my community through volunteer work and  advocacy that has since flowed.

Since my defeat I have found other ways to be involved and to shape and influence policy from the outside. I have never been more committed to my community, it’s future and the lives of residents or frankly as effective as I have been after running and losing.

While the outcome was far from what was desired and impossible to have predicted the day I filed my nomination papers, the experience has made me proud of who I am today and the work I do to help others.

Finally – I would like to end by sincerely thanking David Soknacki for getting me to think about myself as a candidate and a leader, not just a political organizer for local partisans.

I was a 19 year old Queen’s Park intern when he challenged me to run against him – a budget chief who won 83% of the vote in 2003 and acclaimed in 2000. He withdrew from single candidate challenge in a two person race – four months into the campaign entirely focused on his record and me not being him, opting to retire instead of finishing what he’d started.

If he had not refused to hold public meetings and engage citizens honestly on what I felt was the most important issue facing Guildwood, I may never have run.

His ‘if you think I am doing a bad job, throw down your hundred bucks and run’ are famous last words for a man who decided to retire from public life a year after his challenge and four months into a campaign entirely focused on his failures as a representative. 

In many ways Soknacki’s call for me to put my money where my mouth is, and ageist ridicule determined how is political career would end, and what would spark my first attempt to seek to change how politicians serve and represent their constitutients. 

It made me vow to myself that should I have the responsibility of representing my community given to me that I would never utter the phrase ‘one day you may sit in a chair like mine, then you would understand (why demolishing heritage buildings and privatizing 7.5 acres of parkland made more sense than preservation and maintaining green space as public space).

Tonight I write this as someone who has gone back and forth on what I will do in 2010 over the last three years and mindful of many peoples views on the merits for and against. I write tonight also as someone who is at peace with the decisions I’ve made in the past and am at peace with the work I am doing now and will continue to do in the future.

As I’ve demonstrated since losing, it is ultimately what is best for residents that drives my political decisions. It is for that reason I painted an epic sized target on my chest in standing up to Toronto Hydro, the Ontario Liberal Party, and the wind industry in general. It is for that reason when Tamil Canadians were experiencing some of the most hateful, racist language I’ve heard spoken in Toronto – I joined protesters on the Gardiner, made my way to the front and stood face to shield with riot police and told the story that was playing out around me. It’s the same reason I have been outspoken on issues of social justice in our City and why without even thinking twice I vigorously defended the right of free speech against it’s coordinated and deliberate attack from Dalton McGuinty.

None of this could be described as ‘good politics’ by anyone, but all felt/feel like the right thing to do and once worrying one stops about political expediency, the virtues of participation rise to the surface and direct one’s energy and actions.

 As I mark the third year anniversary of my defeat, I have to say on the whole it has been a very liberating experience, not one I would ever want to repeat, but one that I appreciate having experienced once.

Tags: 2006 Toronto Election, Scarborough East, Toronto Municipal Election, Ward 43