Steps, voters, and responsibilities

With apologies for not blogging for so long, here are some initial thoughts on Queenie’s first Canadian election experience:

Steps – one of the reasons why I like Halifax is because it is built on a number of hills. I love the sight of blocks and blocks of timber-framed houses weaving around the city, built against and around its hillsides. Of course this means they all have steps up to the front door.

I don’t think my knees will ever recover from three weeks of going up and down steps. Steep steps. Narrow steps. Steps without handrails. Snowy steps. Slippery steps. Steps that trip me up and send me and my poll chart flying in opposite directions.

It was like canvassing Killiney Hill over and over and over and over again.

Voters – voters are the same the world over. They’ll tell you anything to get you off their doorstep. Nova Scotia’s voters sent the same eleven MPs back to Ottowa and bucked the national trend of punishing the Liberals, increasing the NDP vote, giving the Conservatives a go at power, withdrawing some support from the Bloc, and ignoring the Greens (although they did ignore the Greens here too, but that’s another hilarious story I must relate some day).

Queenie is interested in why this happened. Is it the Maritime myth of a people proud of their independence from those bastards in Upper Canada? Is it fear of change? Is it voter apathy? Is it huge levels of satisfaction with the incumbents? Is it the fact that many young working class voters are in Alberta or Ontario? Is it the old Celtic tribalism rearing its ugly head?

What?

It’ll be years before I figure it out of course. In the meantime, Queenie hopes that this trip against the trend will go unnoticed by the Conservatives as they divvy up the money around the provinces.

Responsibilities - Queenie has inherited two goldfish. Their previous mommy, MacKenzie, has gone to live in Alberta with her mommy and daddy and sister. So now they live with me. It was a last minute decision, the aquatic version of a crisis pregnancy. Will I, won’t I? Oh go on, it can’t be that bad. So now they live in a smallish aquarium in my bedroom.

I have named them Peter and Alexa; it being the middle of an election when they arrived, and the fish being orange, which is of course the colour of the NDP.

I named them randomly, but in actual fact, their names suit their personalities perfectly. Alexa is bright orange and is in total charge of the aquarium, as befits a fish who bears the name of one of Canada’s most successful and popular politicians. The human Alexa romped home this time with a 10,000 vote majority.

When I trickle the food into the aquarium, Alexa gets right to it, elbowing Peter out of the way with her tail and getting all the big flakes with a kind of sweeper system she has going at the top of the water.

Peter is a little smaller, a paler golden colour and a little more reticent. I worry about him incessantly. But he swims around the bottom of the aquarium and sucks up all the smaller flakes as they fall to the bottom of the bowl, so I hope he’s getting enough.

When there’s no food left in the water, Alexa sucks up the stones at the bottom of the aquarium and divests them of the crumbs that are left. This is quite a noisy task, and is generally undertaken when I am trying to sleep. It irritates me and makes me feel incredibly guilty at the same time – am I not feeding my pets enough? I’m sure I am, but the nagging feeling is always there.

Normally when I come home in the evening and turn the light on in the bedroom, Alexa and Peter put their mouths up to the side of the aquarium and wiggle their bodies excitedly, like a pair of dogs. It’s amazing how happy it makes me, even though I know they are fish and it’s the food they’re after, not their new mommy.

But the day after I arrived home from Amherst, the pair of them turned their backs to me and wiggled their tails at me. I was devastated. I don’t care that they’re probably so stupid they got their directions mixed up. They were ignoring their mommy as far as I was concerned.

So, yeah, responsibilities – when you work on an election campaign and you lose, you feel a huge sense of responsibility to your candidate. Because loss is devastating in politics.

Imagine being interviewed by thousands and thousands of people for a job you really, really want. Imagine that those people have very little interest in your curriculum vitae, but prefer to base their decision on all kinds of factors that are not relevant (or indeed legal) in the modern workplace – the way you look, where you’re from, what other people (on tv, newspapers) have said about you. Imagine you know who else is up for the position, and that they are telling everyone why they shouldn’t hire you. Or trying to expose some secret you may have, or something you did in your past, or just bad-mouthing you to everyone.

(Which reminds me, I hope who ever ‘outed’ Queenie’s former colleague Cllr. Malcolm Byrne gets outed him/herself as the nasty little scumbag s/he is. Malcolm’s politics are not Queenie’s, but they agree on one thing - his personal life is his own business. And boo hiss to the Irish media for making it into a national story. They’re saying the Shinners did it… hmmm… I wonder… Queenie would be looking closer to home.)

The upside of this HR insanity is that you are allowed to have hundreds of people who give up their time and their money to help you get the job. And they all get very involved in your bid. Some more involved than others of course. So they are all very upset if you don’t win either.

So I have spent a large part of this week wondering what more I could have done. Not much, I think. But still.

I’ll compensate by feeding Peter till he glows as brightly as Alexa.

Now I must go and have some breakfast, and think about what else to tell you all…