by NOEMI LOPINTO

I think I am allergic to politics. In 2000, when I ran as a candidate for the NDP, the first week of campaigning gave me a raging case of stomach flu. This time, it's the chills and a throat full of razor blades. But the timing is the same: an election has been called, I am supposed to be running a campaign, and I am too sick to properly doom it.

Paragraph 66(1) of Canadian electoral law states that any wanna-be candidate must get permission from a minimum of 100 members of the electorate before presenting him or herself in their riding. Elections Canada distributes a package of empty pages, and unless you are loaded with cash or have the hypnotic powers of a cult leader, that means going out door to door and begging for signatures the old-fashioned way.

Signing up for the Green Party was fairly easy; they were short a candidate in what is now my riding (Bourassa), probably because it is only slightly south of Nunavut. I was met with, interviewed and accepted with shocking speed. And then I had to go all the way to Bourassa to explain to people why they should sign on the dotted line. For me, embarrassment naturally follows tossing my hat in the political ring because it smacks of two social faux-pas: idealism and arrogance. Idealism is embarrassing because you have to pretend that you think the system works for, rather than against, ordinary people. And arrogance because you are pretending that you, yourself, have the key to social and economic ills. I aimed for harmless and vaguely sexy.

DIY electioneering

But other members of my party are definitely idealists. Three Green Party members, Dylan Maxwell, his friends Rob and David, and his infamous tin can on wheels, were invaluable in carting my sorry ass up to Bourassa to get signatures. Maxwell drove his hybrid diesel/vegetable oil-running Volkswagen, which everyone in the Plateau knows by sound and by smell (popcorn). He rigged the poor thing up with an elaborate system of wires, duct tape and gaping parts, which are sprawled all over the dashboard. We farted up to Bourassa at a respectable 50 km per hour. With us were David, his long brown hair in an elegant bun on top of his head, and Rob, who prefers the shaggy, air-blown look. And then Maxwell himself: six feet of talking hair and hemp, from his hat to his shoes.

My riding consists overwhelmingly of middle-class families. There are few apartment buildings, mostly cute bungalows with nicely tended lawns. But people are rarely as close-minded as one would assume - perhaps my Green Party posse frightened people into signing my form - because we got the signatures. The reactions generally followed the same pattern: friendliness upon approach, suspicion at the mention of politics, relief that it was only the Green Party and finally a signature.

The vision thing

Despite the aura of suburban tranquillity, Bourassa has its own pockets of poverty. Some of the filth and signs of deep economic struggle I saw over people's shoulders as they bent down to sign my nomination form positively begged to be rectified. Once again, I got a notion of politics and their potential, the power of getting to know strangers and their needs. I had a vision of what it could be like if I was elected: like, I could fix things! I could clean up the slums and build homes for people, try to get them better jobs, take care of the kids, make the metro more accessible, plants trees and build communal gardens… I could try to help Gilberte, an octogenarian who had just lost her son to cancer but who reached for her pen and invited me into her dining room as I stood fumbling between apologies and condolences. I could slap her slum landlord with a fine, a whipping or a public egging for failing to fix the elevator to her third floor walk-up.

But soon after these lovely visions came a little tickle in my throat, an ache in my back. I recognized them for what they were: symptoms of an immuno-response, an allergic reaction to the political virus. Within hours I was flat on my back. I guess if Jean Chrétien made me puke, Paul Martin makes me ache all over.