The ‘Big Push’ This Weekend

These campaigns are won and lost on the ground. Despite what people say about evolving on-line campaigning, there is still no substitute for knocking on as many doors as possible and stuffing every mailbox with thoughtful campaign literature. Social media, like campaign literature, has to be about the content, not the medium. We pride ourselves on the use of complete sentences, for starters.

The number of people who say they base their vote on who comes to their door still astounds me, but more importantly if you want to do the job effectively you really do need to have listened to a good sample of the people you want to represent. And you need to meet them on their terms, which usually involves a great deal of walking or running up front walks.

So that’s what we’ve done since July, and this past weekend we went back to basics and visited every doorstep with a final piece of literature and knocked a good number of doors to put them right in peoples’ hands. Also, last week we sent something to all apartments that Canada Post can serve.

How? Dozens of people from across the city and across the conventional political spectrum came together and offered more than 400 hours of volunteer time this weekend alone. (It helped that we had waffles from Eva Sweet and sandwiches and muffins from Elm Cafe.)

I cannot say thank you enough to each of them for their support, and to all the others who’ve supported my campaign in one way or another. I don’t think there’s much more that we could have done.