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Week 1 – February 28 to March 6

This project has already changed so many times since I conceived of it and I am sure it will change more still, but it had one rule. That rule was that I would post the first one today, the 10 year anniversary of me filling to run for mayor of Toronto. 

For now this is a podcast about that experience. Below you’ll find that audio, followed by the tweet and radio interview I reference. Below that is the transcript of the audio. 

I’ve shared this pretty limitedly so if you’re reading this, it’s because I trust you so please be kind. That said open to feedback.

Proof I was in fact at a scouting conference that weekend.

Transcript – Because some of us would rather read

I can feel the words stacking up in the back of my throat. The three-sentence version of this  story is sitting right there, just waiting to pour out. I’ve had the same conversation so many times that it would take no effort at all to let that same version spill from my lips.

That version of the story isn’t real, though. It’s not a lie, but it’s a polished version of the truth. With all the hard edges buffed away.

This time, I’m going to tell the long version of the story—or try. The vulnerable version of the story. I’m not sure I’ve ever done that. I certainly haven’t done it all at once or in public. By the time the 2014 election ended, I was burnt out and overwhelmed. I wanted nothing to do with the internet and politics and media and also I had no idea how to do anything else. Not to mention it turned out that I wasn’t done, there was still an audit to be done, tax receipts to send out, and financial disclosure to file. Not to mention I’d see a judge before doing all that. Not that when I finished the election, I knew any of that. Regardless, I was kind of over being the girl that ran for mayor, and yet that was still kind of all I knew how to be. I’d been doing it for so long—8 months feels like a long time when you’re 18. Now it has been exactly 10 years since I filed and I’m finally ready to talk about it, well, I think.

But let’s start at the beginning.

It is ten years to the day today that I filed to run for mayor of Toronto. It was my third try—this time I finally had all the right pieces of paper. I didn’t the first two times. I paid the $200 filing fee with babysitting money. I was smart enough to know that if I did get any traction, I needed not to answer the question of how I paid the filing fee with ‘my parent’s money’. My Twitter archive revealed there was apparently an extended conversation about my name which I had completely forgotten about but isn’t surprising. My parents’ choice to give me five names and call me by the middle one has always been an issue when interacting with bureaucracies. I managed to file on that third try and then I took a selfie outside the Election Services office at the City of Toronto. And did what every self-respecting mayoral candidate would do and posted it to twitter. I didn’t even include a hashtag, just the caption: the face of a mayoral candidate. And it was true. 

After that, I went back to the scouting conference I had ducked out of to file—because of course, I did. Because I felt very cetain that no one would notice that I was running for mayor and I was expected back so it was a no-brainer to return to the conference. I was staying at the Westin on the waterfront with hundreds of other scouts and scouters for a conference that I believe was about leadership—if memory serves. In an amusing turn of events, I ended up leading a walking tour of downtown Toronto for a group of scouts and scouters the following evening, filled with history tidbits and fun facts because I really do love this city. And the evening after that I helped lead a campfire on Toronto island during a truly wicked cold snap. It was so cold we couldn’t take the ferry and had to take TTC busses from Billy Bishop to Snake Island, something I have not even done since. 

Somewhat awkwardly, and I really should’ve predicted this, people did pay attention. I almost immediately had my first media request, Newstalk1010, and John Lorinc looked at my website—shit I wonder if that is how you pronounce his last name— and noticed all of my typos. My attention was fairly divided for the rest of the weekend. 

That first version of my website is no longer live and isn’t immortalized by the Wayback Machine, which in both cases is probably for the best. The spelling was truly egregious and I absolutely should have had at least one person read it before I put it on the internet. My writing is still full of typos but now I ask people to edit things before I share them. 

The tagline on that first version of my website was “Just one girl trying to change the world, starting with her hometown”. Which while not the most effective campaign slogan, remains in many ways true about me. My campaign evolved over time and so did my website to be more like a real campaign—whatever that means—and less like an 18-year-old in her bedroom. But the thing I still like about it is how deeply earnest it is. It’s charming to want to change the world and it’s adorable to refer to a city of millions of people as your ‘hometown’. I do still want to change the world, though I am signifigantly pragmatic about it now, and I no longer lead with that information. I also no longer ever refer to Toronto as my hometown because it turns out people kind of hate that—and fair enough—but I definitely still think about it that way. 

That first interview, which was exactly a week after I filed, is still available on Soundcloud—I’ll link it below, what am I on YouTube?—listening to it again this week I was both impressed and cringed so hard. I’m not sure I really said anything of substance, but I was impressively chill, especially with the live callers. I’m also charmed by the hubris of youth, the confidence is admirable even if nothing else is.

Things really got rolling that following week and then didn’t stop until the election—or at least it fel that way—and really months after election day. Eventually, I started university and I stopped using Twitter. People stopped asking me to write or speak and running for mayor became the best two truths and a lie fact I have ever encountered.

It’s pretty weird even now to have your 15 minutes of fame before you can even drink legally— and before I knew how to drive even though I could’ve legally done that—and it was even weirder in 2014. That time in my life is filled with some very hard moments and some truly hilarious ones. I want to finally process all that happened, or at least try. I’ve downloaded my Twitter archive and scrolled back in my Google results. I’m digging through old emails and excavating memories. I’m going to work my way through the 2014 election week by week. 

I’ve got lots of questions for that 18-year-old and I’ve got questions for other players in that election. I have bigger questions too. What makes a young person exceptional? Who decides that they are exceptional? What makes a good politician? What happens when you find your calling before you find yourself? I’m not sure I will find any of the answers but I’m at least going to look around. 

Next week on my itsy bitsy podcast: what happened before I decided to run? how did I make that decision? my first TV spot, the deep awkwardness of filming b-roll, about those cat eye glasses. 

A lot has happened in the last ten years, some of it amazing and some of it terrible. SO let’s talk about it.

Well, thanks for indulging me.

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Let’s Not Make Voting About Shame

Tomorrow is an election that means that pretty much every kind of media is going to be covered in election coverage and commentary and encouragement to vote. Social media will be full again of encouragement, requests and pleas to people to vote. I have one request as write those posts tomorrow. Don’t use shame.

I get it, you care a whole lot and you want as many people as possible to participate. However voting is one way to be involved in politics, it is not the be all and end all of political involvement. We do not shame those who don’t protest for not caring, we do not shame those who don’t volunteer for a party for not putting in the time, we do not shame those who don’t ever talk about politics for not engaging. So please do not shame those who don’t vote.

By all means encourage those around you. Be excited that you voted. Spread information and make it easy to do so. But understand that some people have made a choice not to vote and respect that. Understand that some people are incredibly disenfranchised and apathetic and respect that. Understand that some people think the system is irreparable and respect that. Not everyone experience this country the way you do and that shapes what participation they feel good about and willing to do. People are not apathetic or disenfranchised out of spite for you, or your political agenda. I am not telling you that you need to like it, but do not make voting something people are shamed into doing. That is not engagement or participation that you should feel good about.

I promise that I will never say you can’t complain about something because you didn’t protest. I will not write articles about how those over 40 don’t have enough conversations about politics. In exchange you need to leave the shame behind, be compassionate, and be respectful of those don’t vote. And whatever you do please do not post “If you don’t vote, you can’t complain”. Just don’t.

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JanesWalkTO Talk

I always change things when I speak but this is what I spoke from when I spoke at the 2015 Janes Walk TO launch party. It was a great party with so many amazing people and I know this weekend is going to be amazingly full of awesome walks! Have a blast Toronto! 

I often get talked about as smart, well-spoken, interested in politics – but there is something else that is implied. It is implied that I am different from other youth. We can argue later about whether or not this is true, but something interesting happens when people see you as different from your peers. People see you as an anomaly. People say things to you that they would never say to your peers.

I hear a lot about how apathetic other young people are, about how other young people are entitled, selfish, technology obsessed – you name it I hear it. But I want to reframe that conversation. I want us to stop seeing young people as apathetic. I want us to stop using old metrics of political involvement to measure a new generation, with new tools. Just because our political involvement does not look like yours does not make it less real.

We need to stop using voting to measure involvement. Voting is one of the ways that people participate in the political process, but it is by no means the only way. Politics is bigger than elections. When we frame politics as elections and involvement as voting that means that we are politically very little of the time. It means we spend maybe ten minutes in a given year involved politically, and that would be sad (if it were even true). We have to recognize the value in the everyday political actions. The political in existing and walking and talking. The political in making things just a little better. Waves are building a little at a time below the surface long before the casual observer can see them.

My favourite definition of politics is this: Politics is the total complex of relations between people living in society.

Everything is political. The personal is political. Tonight we are celebrating the political involvement that is walking in your city. But here are hundred of other things you can do to be political that are not voting. Everything from volunteering on a campaign to blogging, organizing, protesting, rioting, guerrilla gardening and just talking to your neighbours. For some, just existing is a political act.

In Samara’s report on political involvement beyond the ballot box, Canadians aged 18-34 are as involved – and in some cases slightly more involved – than those over 35… except when it comes to electoral politics. We volunteer three percentage points more (at 58%) to those over 35’s 55% but what is even more interesting is that that gap doubles when it comes to donating money. More young people donate money to political and social causes.

Unsurprisingly, our engagement online is just about double those over 35 – but where things get real juicy is offline discussion. There is a lot of rhetoric about how the so called “older generation” spend more time engaging face to face. 51% of us aged 18-34 have discussed a political issue over the phone or face to face, compared to just 36% of those over 35. We are also more likely to have written a letter to the editor and to have given a political speech in public. But my absolute favourite statistic out of the whole report is about organising. Out of those 35 and over, only 9% have organised a public event or meeting. People aged 18-35? 20%. More than double. Just slightly more, but after taking all this endless abuse in the popular culture for being a lazy, selfish, tech-obsessed millennial I will take every fraction of a point, thank you.

I think what is interesting about these statistics is that overall we are not any more un-involved than anyone else, in fact we are slightly more involved than some populations, yet we are seen as apathetic because of our lower rates of formal engagement in electoral politics. Words are important. They are our way of describing our reality, so which words we pick and what meaning we assign to them is critical. There are words that have been reclaimed and words that we used to use without thought that have now taken on meaning. Those words changed as we changed our reality, and I’d argue they helped change it. So talking about youth as apathetic, especially when in fact we are incredibly involved, is not only incorrect but I’d argue it is beginning to create a reality where that is true.

Many people, including youth, don’t vote for legitimate reasons. And I know one of those people who come out every election “all if you don’t vote you can’t complain” is all what the heck is this youth talking about. But let’s talk about some what ifs:

 

What if you didn’t have an address?

What if no politician running had ever spent time in your community?

What if you didn’t speak the language the election was happening in?

What if you were away from home at school?

What if you had no photo ID with your address on it?

What if no one in your family voted?

What if no one ever explained how?

What if you couldn’t get the time off from your low-wage hourly job, or couldn’t afford to take the time?

 

Many or all of these people might give you a very different answer if you asked why they didn’t vote but there are always layers there. Few people don’t because they honestly don’t care.  And there are always the invisible things, the forces of oppression at work in society whose effects are often hard to see and quantify but are of course there and affect people’s voting habits.

So here it is: I want you to stop telling young people to vote. Right now. I don’t want you to lecture or preach or demand any young person vote. I want you to set an example. I want you to ask young people for their opinions, and really listen when they answer. I want you to advocate for our future security and wellness with your work today AND I want to encourage you to start inviting us to the table now, so we can help in making these decisions before it’s too late and we’re stuck with the transit priorities of a generation that sees owning a car as a mark of adulthood and the environmental outlook of the same people that are putting a nickel in their own pocket for every litre of gasoline that’s sold. Inviting millennials to the table is not a concession it is not a kind thing you can do for us. Not having us at the table is wrong. To not include the perspective of any large stakeholder in a decision making process is wrong. Millennials are a huge stakeholder.

We must see youth as stakeholders because we will live with these choices the longest. When Joe Oliver says Stephen Harper’s granddaughter can deal with something he is downloading that problem onto my children who ::spoiler:: don’t exist yet.

I can talk about how including young people will improve decision or how different perspectives make things more productive but honestly, that isn’t the point. The point is, for young people to participate in politics it has to feel as though there is something we can do. Especially this generation. When I ask young people about electoral politics, they often have no idea or don’t care. The candidates are rarely speaking to us or about our issues. But when I ask about issues, young people are passionate. Ask a high school student how they feel about public transit, education, the environment, even childcare and I can pretty much guarantee they have an opinion. And they are often also involved in their community in other ways. We are volunteering, and donating. We are signing petitions and protesting. Young people care. Young people are politically involved.

It’s time to redefine politics. Redefine it with our feet and our hands and the words we use, and we can put it back into the hands of all the people – regardless of their bank balance, age, postal code or, yes – even their polling station.

Thank you