A Nation Worth Ranting About Read online

  Harper is now in majority territory, so he doesn’t want to be anywhere near a debate. Don’t forget, he’s threatened to boycott this debate once before, if Elizabeth May was allowed in. Boy, did that backfire. Yes, kids, that man who’s constantly saying he’s the only one strong enough and firm enough to be a world leader is, in fact, afraid of the girl. And not only does he have to deal with the girl, Jack Layton and a desperate separatist, but for the first time since the start of this campaign, he is going to have to come face to face with Stéphane Dion.

  On the surface, that does not seem like a big deal. But remember back to high school, folks. Remember when the nerdy kid finally had enough of being slapped around by the bully and he said, “Okay, I’ll meet you at the lockers.” Everyone showed up for that fight.

  Because this is not a normal political rivalry. This is personal. Never mind that the Tories have spent millions of dollars calling Dion a pathetic loser; lately, they’ve been going after his wife. And don’t forget: on day one of this campaign, Harper wouldn’t even admit that Dion had a real family. People with adopted children are very touchy about that sort of thing. Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised if Dion snaps and takes a smack at him.

  So, never mind democracy; tune in for the promise of bloodshed, and maybe if we’re lucky, a knockout punch. And remember: traditionally, in Canada, the real campaign begins on debate night. So from here on in, anything is possible. And for the first time in a long time, thankfully, nobody can say, “May the best man win.”

  Sitting in as Speaker at the annual Queen’s University Model Parliament, Ottawa.

  Rick: “Before we get going, I know we’re about to debate this bill, but I would like to have each and every one of you practise a few things. The first thing you have to be able to do is nod, no matter what your leader says.”

  THEY DON’T CARE ABOUT STUDENTS

  October 7, 2008

  So here it is, the final stretch before the big vote, and all the political parties are busy courting every special-interest group in the country, no matter how small. If you’ve got one leg, two kids, you work on a farm, then the parties, they have a pitch for you. Unless, of course, you happen to be a student, in which case you’re completely off the radar. There hasn’t been a peep from any of the leaders about education. It wasn’t even mentioned in the debate.

  Now, I’m not saying that any politician would ever come out and say they don’t care about the student vote. When they’re pushed, they can all talk about educational reform and crushing debt until the cows come home, but at the ten-minute mark they all do the same thing. They stop, they lean in like they’re telling you some sort of secret and they say, “You know, it’s a real shame. But students in this country, they just don’t vote.” Which, believe me, is code for “We don’t care about students. We never have and we never will.”

  Now, this is a perfect example of where young people can learn from their elders. And by elders, I mean the elderly. As in senior citizens. Because those folks, they vote. Which is why the old-age home is the natural habitat for any campaigning politician. No exaggeration: of the thirty days since this campaign began, John Baird has spent twenty-six of them in an old-age home. Okay, slight exaggeration.

  I’m not suggesting that students themselves aren’t important to politicians. Oh, you are. After all, you’re the ones that deliver the lawn signs. But past that, you could be on fire for all they care. So my advice to university students is: Never mind your civic responsibility. Seeing as you’re such a low priority in this country, you should show up and vote out of spite, if for no other reason.

  There are a million students in this country. If you actually show up and vote, elections will never be the same again. Education will never be left off the agenda. And all you students out there who are living away from home for the first time? Ignore all those Elections Canada ads that make it seem like you need quantum physics to vote. In this country, you do not need to be registered in advance to vote. Men died on the beaches so you could vote. All you need to do is to show up with some official-looking mail with your address on it, your student card and your ID. Don’t take no for an answer, and democracy is yours.

  And not your fake ID, either. Your real one.

  THE FIRST TIME I heard the expression “vote mob” was from a reporter for the Canadian Press. I have few skills, but one of them is that I can blather on at great length on many subjects. That said, as a rule, I have learned to avoid blathering away on subjects I know absolutely nothing about and stick to what I know: politics, and where to get the food in any Canadian town with a population of over six hundred. I’ve learned that if you don’t know the answer, there is no shame in saying, “Honestly? I have no idea what the Toronto Maple Leafs should do heading into the draft deadline, although I’m sure Ron James does, or everyone else in the city, for that matter.”

  So when a journalist called and asked me about my reaction to the “vote mob,” I was happy to plead ignorance. I honestly didn’t know what the reporter was talking about. The reporter thought I was pulling a fast one. “How can you say you don’t know about the vote mob?” she said. “It was your idea.”

  Talking to a member of the media on the record and having them suggest you might have something to do with a mob you’ve never heard of is not an ideal situation. Instantly, I took diplomatic leave of the conversation. “I’m sorry—the flight attendant is telling me I have to turn my phone off. I’ll call back when I land in Iqaluit.”

  When you are someone who appears quite often on television, you sometimes get the blame or credit for things you have had nothing to do with. It goes with the territory. Sometimes people confuse people on TV with other people on TV for no other reason than they are both on TV. I once got an email that said, “Dear Mr. Mercer, I was watching you yesterday at 3:00 on Channel 603, and what you said to that little boy who lost his dog in Hurricane Katrina was truly wonderful. I’m sure he will love the puppy you sent him.” I mentioned it to my sister, and she said, “Oh, I watched that. It was Oprah.”

  So yes, because I am on TV, I have been confused with an African-American woman in her late fifties. I’m not complaining; there are worse people to be confused with. Everyone loves Oprah, and frankly it’s not nearly as upsetting as being confused with Rex Murphy. That hurts.

  Within seconds of hanging up from the reporter, I Googled “vote mob,” and all was revealed.

  “Vote Mob—University of Guelph” was trending on YouTube. It was already a day old, which made me feel a little better; if an actual mob had done anything mobbish, like burn down a faculty building, I assume I would have heard about it by now. But still, I had no idea what this had to do with me.

  When I hit play, the first thing that came up in big, bold letters was the statement “Rick Mercer encouraged young people to vote—Rick, this one is for you.” And that is how I saw my first vote mob.

  I have to tell you, a vote mob is a beautiful sight. I feel about vote mobs the way some people feel about sunsets, or the way Justin Trudeau feels about mirrors. I can stare at them all day. There they were, hundreds of kids at the University of Guelph, saying loud and clear that in the coming election, they would be voting. They were dancing and singing and waving Canadian flags. There was nothing anti-government in the message. There was nothing partisan in the message. The message was simple: we love Canada and we are voting. If you look at the voter turnout among young people in this country, this is a radical message.

  It turns out the vote mob was the brainchild of two brilliant young women from Guelph, Gracen Johnson and Yvonne Su. These are the kind of young people that make you believe everything will be all right with the world. They are whip smart, involved, passionate, articulate and, when it comes to the issue of young people voting, very pissed off.

  Well, at least we had the latter in common.

  A few months previous, I was flying to Ottawa and bumped into a guy I’ve known semi-professionally for many years. He was, for as
long as I’d known him, a political party activist and worker.

  He was heading to Ottawa for a meeting with the central campaign office. This is the kind of meeting that young politicos live for. Being summoned to Ottawa to meet with a campaign director meant he was going to the big time. His years of campaigning all over the country were about to pay off. A federal election was going to be called sooner rather than later, and for a politico of his stripe there was only one place to be: the central campaign headquarters, a spot in the war room. This was like being told to suit up for the playoffs.

  Weeks later, I bumped into our young hero back in Toronto. I asked how that Ottawa meeting went and he told me, “Not well.” In fact, he had just accepted a job in New York and was leaving in a few days. He would be sitting out the election. “They screwed me,” he said. “They had nothing to offer. In fact, they had less than nothing.”

  He didn’t need very much prompting to tell me what happened.

  “They offered me youth outreach,” he informed me. The way he said it—“They offered me youth outreach”—reminded me of an actor saying “I didn’t get the part” after a third callback for the lead role that eventually went to someone who was sleeping with the producer.

  Now, this entire exchange confused me. From where I was standing, being in charge of youth outreach seemed to be a good gig. And this guy, having come up through campus politics, was obviously well qualified. When I said, “Youth outreach? Come on, that’s good,” he looked at me like I was perhaps the stupidest person in his time zone. How could I have gotten this far in life and understand so little?

  And once again, for the umpteenth time, I got a lesson in how politics really works from the people who actually practise the art, as opposed to people like me who blather about it.

  “Youth outreach isn’t real,” he said. “If you’re in charge of youth outreach, you are lucky to get a BlackBerry and a desk, let alone a staff or an organization. In fact, the job of youth outreach is first and foremost to fill a slot so the party can say, ‘We have someone in charge of youth outreach,’ on the off chance someone from the media asks the question, which they won’t.”

  Apparently, youth outreach is where ambitious young party workers go to die. He explained to me, in no uncertain terms, that young people don’t vote, they won’t be part of any national discussion during the election, and nobody in the central campaign has any interest in that happening. The dude making coffee at election headquarters will be more influential than whatever poor sucker ends up running youth outreach.

  Oh. My bad.

  Now, don’t get me wrong—I know very well that all political parties rely heavily on youth, but they rely on actual young people who volunteer for the party. These bodies do the heavy lifting, they make phone calls, they deliver lawn signs and, most importantly, they show up and bang thunder sticks together like demented monkeys for a local candidate who can barely string a sentence together. Political parties love the young in the same way that major clothing manufacturers love the Chinese—because they represent free labour. Past that, they can go pound sand.

  Political parties know, or they have decided, that any energy spent on encouraging young people to vote is a waste of time and resources. They believe that young people won’t vote, and sadly, the numbers back them up.

  And so I ranted. I figured, “Okay, young people don’t vote—fine, they have their reasons.” But nobody, no matter how complacent they are, likes to be taken advantage of, and that is exactly what every modern political party in Canada was doing with young people.

  So I ranted.

  And according to YouTube, the kids at the University of Guelph were either listening, or they were the exception to the rule. They weren’t just voting, they were organizing.

  And so I watched my first vote mob on YouTube, and it turns out I wasn’t the only one. The number of views continued to ramp up; suddenly, the video was being shared on Facebook pages across the country and Twitter was on fire with the hash tag #votemob.

  And then a wonderful thing happened: it began to spread.

  At the University of Guelph, as at most universities across the country, it was exam time. Gracen Johnson and Yvonne Su holed up in one of their bedrooms and studied for their finals, planned Guelph’s second vote mob and Skyped with students across Canada who were reaching out to them for advice.

  The University of Victoria, then McMaster and Memorial University in Newfoundland and Labrador all started posting vote mobs. Every province and territory was represented. Over forty-five individual vote mobs took place within days.

  Of course, the mainstream media began to pay attention, and that begat more vote mobs. Suddenly, parties were being asked what they were doing to reach out to young voters and encourage young people to vote. Their answers were uniformly pathetic. Politicians were the last to figure out what was happening, and many of them were confused. John Baird said he found the entire thing disconcerting.

  Michael Taube, Stephen Harper’s former speechwriter, was apoplectic that students across the country were assembling and threatening to actually vote. In a special column for the Ottawa Citizen, he wrote: “A few weeks ago, there was no such thing as a ‘vote mob.’ But an idea hiding in a deep, dark corridor of comedian Rick Mercer’s brain has, quite by accident, unleashed this holy terror onto unsuspecting Canadians.

  “Do you really think,” he wrote, admonishing the kids in the videos, “that any of the major leaders honestly cares that some 18-25-year-olds who wouldn’t ordinarily vote have suddenly been convinced by a comedian’s rant on TV?”

  Taube’s tongue was not in his cheek—but it’s clear where his head was as he ended his column with a plea to maintain the status quo: “If vote mobs are ever considered to be a viable method of increasing political participation, I would much rather keep the numbers as low as they are.”

  Yes, a former speechwriter for Stephen Harper was telling the world that politics in Canada would be better served if young people simply stayed home.

  As voting day got closer, another problem presented itself to the organizers of the Guelph mobs. Students who wanted to vote were leaving university and heading back to their home ridings because the school year was over. Thousands of students all over the country who wanted to vote were in flux, stuck between the riding they lived in to attend school and the ridings their parents lived in. Many students were leaving to go to summer jobs in areas where they weren’t qualified to vote. The simple solution, the organizers believed, consisted of advance ballots on campus. The argument being, there are advance polls in senior citizens’ homes and neighbourhoods all over Canada, so why not on campus?

  Elections Canada set one up, and their workers were nearly overwhelmed by the number of students that actually showed up. Students lined up by the hundreds.

  When news of the huge turnout made it to the various political campaigns—or one in particular—panic hit. The communications director for the Conservative Party candidate, a young man by the name of Michael Sona, ran up and down the line, declaring loudly that the Elections Canada polling station was illegal. He then attempted, according to numerous eyewitnesses, to do something unheard of in Canada: take the ballot box.

  It has been suggested that while officials at Elections Canada certainly reminded Sona that interfering with a person’s right to vote was a serious offence in Canada, some students in line used more colourful language to convince him that he wouldn’t be going anywhere with the ballot box. Sona left and the voting continued.

  For Sona, it was a good day at the office. Not only did his willingness to disrupt a polling station land him on the front pages of newspapers all across the country, it caught the attention of the people running the Conservative campaign. That boy has moxie! He is their kind of people. After the election, he would travel to Ottawa, where he would go to work as a political staffer for the parliamentary secretary to the Minister of National Defence. He was headed for the big time. Sadly, his career came
to an end when he resigned over his alleged involvement in the robocall/voter-suppression scandal that began in, you guessed it, Guelph.

  I attended only one vote mob during the election. It turned out to be the nation’s largest, and it took place in London, Ontario. Thousands of people, not just university students, showed up to wave flags, announce they were voting and encourage others to follow suit. It was the most fun I’ve ever had. The video is one of my favourite YouTube videos to this day.

  I think the vote mobs were the most exciting thing that happened during that election. I loved every single one of them that I watched online. And I was never so proud as when writers like Michael Taube blamed me for the entire thing. It felt good knowing someone that close to the Prime Minister was that pissed off at me.

  But the vote mobs started in Guelph with Gracen Johnson and Yvonne Su. Many months later, I was looking at the timeline of the entire adventure, and I realized my rant about young people voting aired just two days before that first vote mob. I called Gracen and suggested that while I knew she and Yvonne were geniuses, two days seemed a little tight. She would only say that she appreciated the rant.

  Sometimes a guy rants at the right time. And sometimes if you are on TV, you get the credit or the blame for something you had nothing to do with. I am proud to accept both in this instance.

  But more than anything, I look forward to voting for Gracen and Yvonne someday, and if I’m not eligible I’ll show up and knock on some doors.

  LET’S SEE WHAT THEY’RE UP TO

  October 14, 2008

  At the risk of sounding like an out-of-touch elite weirdo, I confess I have on occasion walked into a theatre, bought a ticket, sat down and watched a play. And my favourite moment is when the lights go dark and the audience goes quiet. Because at that moment, anything is possible.

  I feel the same way about election night. Tonight, the House of Commons is an empty stage. And I can’t help but think that maybe, just maybe, this time, this Parliament will get it right, and be brilliant. Now, I’ve never seen that happen in my lifetime. The difference being, of course, that in the theatre, the people on stage are actually trying, and there’s nowhere to hide. Whereas in the House of Commons, nobody—other than the few people sitting in the gallery—can see what the MPs are doing.