The Current - Why run when you can't win? Longshot candidates explain why

Episode Date: April 9, 2025

They're sometimes called "paper candidates" or even "sacrificial lambs:" federal election candidates who enter so-called "unwinnable" races. In her 2021 documentary The Longshots, Joan Webber spoke with former candidates from previous elections, to hear what it’s like to be the horse no one’s betting on.

When they predict we'll fall, we rise to the challenge. When they say we're not a country, we stand on guard. This land taught us to be brave and caring, to protect our values, to leave no one behind. Canada is on the line, and it's time to vote as though our country depends on it, because like never before, it does. I'm Jonathan Pedneau, co-leader of the Green Party of Canada.

This election, each vote makes a difference. Authorized by the Registeredleader of the Green Party of Canada, this election, each vote makes a difference. Authorized by the Registered Agent of the Green Party of Canada. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current Podcast. Here's a question for you. Have you ever given much thought to the folks who run in federal election campaigns despite knowing that they haven't got a snowball's chance in hell of actually winning in the seat that they are running in. Well today we're going to mull

on just that very question. Who are those people? Why do they put their name forward? The CBC's Joan Weber spoke with candidates from elections past and brings us their stories in her documentary, The Long Shots. I think I would have been described as one of the most long shotty of the long shot kind of candidates or whatever you want to call it. My name is Kyle Warwick. I ran for the Liberal Party of Canada. I ran in Skeena-Bulkley Valley in the 2011 election. I was 22. At that time, I would have been in the fourth year at UBC.

So I was studying political science. I was involved with the young liberals as well as in the student government. I was coming to what I thought would be the end of my undergraduate time at UBC. I forget the exact person it was but when whoever it was, someone from the party called me up and said you know do you want to do this I thought they meant like do you know any people that would be like candidates that we could we could get I didn't think they were asking me to actually do it. It had crossed my mind you know maybe when I was like 40 something or whatever that I might I might do something like that at that point. But certainly not in 2011.

I had no intention of running in 2015. I had never actively taken part in politics outside of covering political campaigns. My name is Yvon Vatney. At that time, well, I had left broadcasting, went back into media consulting. The Conservative Party had named a candidate for the writing. The person that they had chosen wasn't taking it very seriously. He was not really running for the Conservative Party. CBC's Thomas Daigle broke the story. He joins me live with more. What's the latest, Thomas?

We've just a little earlier this morning, Suhanna received an email from the Conservative Party. In fact, one line email, this individual has resigned as the Conservative Party candidate. Talking here about Chris Lloyd, who up until today was the candidate for the Conservative Party in the writing of Papineau, up against Justin Trudeau, the leader of the Liberal Party. He was sort of made fun of the electoral process. That may be what he was looking at. Did the Conservatives ask him, is your campaign essentially a joke? And to what extent were they aware of this big art project in large numbers?

Well I guess they were running out of time. That's one of the reasons. They contacted me and they said, well, would you be interested? And the thing is, I knew that it was a lost cause because when somebody runs in a writing like Pepino against Justin Trudeau, I consider that we're mostly lamp post candidates. So basically that means that

you know we're there, our electoral signs are up everywhere, but we don't really make that big of a difference. However, I always ask myself, why do people go through this? My name is Petris Getuba. I was an entrepreneur running an accounting business. Currently, I'm in Kenya visiting, and you know, when they ask me how is Canada, I tell them it's election time.

And most of the times I share with my friends or people are here that I actually ran for politics in Canada. I tell them Canada is home for me. I produced my picture to show them that I ran for elections in 2015. Some of them don't believe until they see the pictures themselves. I was with other immigrant friends and around dinner, we were having a dinner and I was prevailed upon as the person that could and should offer myself to stand. And it was agreed, the Liberal Party, and I ran in the Edmonton St. Albert riding. Essentially as immigrants, when you come in,

you are invisible most of the times. You do everything, you learn the Canadian system, you acclimatize, you get employment, you pay your taxes, you run a business. And yet, in various spaces, you are not represented. And politics is one of the spaces where we don't see people whom we can identify with. My name is Matt Bergener. I'm commonly known as Matt Masters. I'm a musician. So I ran as Matt Masters Bergener in the 2015 federal election in the writing of Calgary

Heritage for the NDP. I'm from Calgary. My mom was a politician. My mom was a conservative MLA for eight years. And so I've grown up around that community because it's what my, it's the work my parents did. I was sitting in a pub in Calgary, the Ship and Anchor, when I got a phone call asking if I wanted to consider

running against Stephen Arbor, which was like an unexpected phone call. And so I thought about it for a second. My wife and I kind of looked at each other, kind of laughed at the ridiculousness of it, you know? But yeah, I was like, okay, I'm ready for that. I see the opportunity here. Well, I mean, obviously the one everyone says is the paper candidate, you know, that kind of notion that it's just a throwaway.

Yeah, I mean, that doesn't sit super well with me because even if you're gonna lose, one still contests miracles happen, you know, and like what if the person you're running against has an incredible gaffe, you know, like it's just like you keep running the race, you know, you look at there's some old speed skating video out there of everyone falling down in the fourth place version gets the gold medal, they were losing in every way until everyone fell down and they won. The other point of it is campaigns and elections aren't just about winning, that's the other thing. And so you can use a campaign to do a variety of things. Winning is obviously the goal. it's not the only goal though.

My basic thought was that at a minimum even in the least winnable seats for any given major party at a minimum you're looking at let's conservatively say a thousand people who would want to vote for that party. for that party and effectively they're disenfranchised if they can't do that. So I think, I think it does a disservice if you don't have someone there doing what they can, giving their best shot. And I think if you have an opportunity to sort of make that process work and provide people a real option to vote in the way they want to do, then yeah, you should, I think it's a good idea to do that as well as you can in the admittedly not ideal circumstances that, you know, that it arose in. The main reason I agreed to run for the conservatives at that point was that I believe that Stephen Harper was the best candidate to be prime minister.

Also I was interested in finding out what running in a campaign was like, the work that was involved. Patino was a writing I was brought up in, so I know the writing really well. And I found people very receptive. In fact, I was very surprised because I thought that, you thought that people would just say, well, I'm a liberal

or I'm an NDP and I don't care to talk to anybody from the conservative party. And I didn't find that. I'm a friendly person, but I found it very difficult at first. And I said to myself, well, it's getting out of your comfort zone. From where I stand, there are many reasons why people considered that my candidature was a long shot. First, it's inexperience, lack of name recognition, lack ofluence in the sense that you need a lot of money for a campaign. I am a black woman. I am a recent immigrant. You know, there was a large community where I never was aware of where a lot of immigrants

live. immigrants live, especially those who came as refugees from Africa in the 90s. And I must say, I didn't like the way they lived. I felt that poverty was very, very pronounced. And in the process of campaigning, I made that my issue. Somebody warned me I shouldn't do that because Canadians don't like being made to feel like they're unfair to a certain demographic group. But I felt that the people were given those public housing,

those public housing, they have minimum maintenance and the people still live in that. We didn't have a campaign office. We worked out of a garage. We couldn't compete as a boots on the ground campaign. We just didn't have that. We don't have the bodies. We had no volunteers, you know. But I think what I recognized was the opportunity, you know, to have a media spotlight, because I've worked my life in media. I know what to do with a camera, a microphone. So I started building a team that was based in media, that was also based in the arts,

because that's my community. It was a bit of a one-off chance for most of us. When do you get to campaign against a prime minister with a candidate who's willing to do crazy stuff. West of 14th street and south of the reservoir the by-law says you can still ride a horse in the city. So most of the city obviously is not fit for horseback riding but there are parts of the southwest corner of Calgary which are also not fit for horseback riding but legally you can totally ride a horse down the street in certain neighborhoods. One time while Harper was on a jaunt out with Rob Ford I believe it was in Toronto you know not doing anything for the community I hopped on a

horse that morning and rode around talking to neighbors you know and of course a bunch of TV cameras showed up. Me running is a first-time candidate in Calgary Confederation where I actually lived. There's no news story there. Man in cowboy hat runs against Prime Minister is the news story. Once we had the attention of the media, then we could talk about our issues. Much of that campaign period would have been during my final exam time frame, and so it was still a bit of a difficulty in terms of being able to get up to the writing as quickly as I ideally would have hoped to do. So the writing is approximately the Northwestern quarter

of British Columbia. I'd been through there, going up to the Yukon, where I'd worked one summer. I think I was realistically aware that the local member of parliament, Nathan Cullen, was broadly quite popular, quite well-regarded, had been elected several previous times, and frankly had a very good understanding of the writing quite well regarded, had been elected several previous times and you know

frankly had a very good understanding of the writing and when I went to the all candidates meetings you know when I was door knocking when I was putting up signs virtually everyone was I mean most people were not voting for me frankly but almost everyone was supportive said you know it's important to you know be part of the process we appreciate your putting your your name out there some people did take the signs and put them up on their yard I think substantially the people at a very minimum the people in each city that I stayed with agreed to take my signs.

When they predict we'll fall, we rise to the challenge. When they say we're not a country, we stand on guard. This land taught us to be brave and caring, to protect our values, to leave no one behind. Canada is on the line, and it's time to vote as though our country depends on it, because like never before, it does. I'm Jonathan Pedneau, co-leader of the Green Party of Canada. This election, each vote makes a difference.

Authorized by the registered agent of the Green Party of Canada. In the fall of 2001, while Americans were still grappling with the horror of September 11th, envelopes started showing up at media outlets and government buildings, filled with a white lethal powder, anthrax. But what's strange is if you ask

people now what happened with that story, almost no one knows. It's like the whole thing just disappeared. Who mailed those letters? Do you know? From Wolf Entertainment, USG Audio, and CBC Podcasts, this is Aftermath, the hunt for the anthrax killer. Available now. When it came to the debates, I had to go out and sort of improvise. I didn't get any help, and I tried to answer them as honestly as possible. The regional paper, they asked all of the candidates to write a column every week. They would come up with questions at large.

So basically, I would send a question to Ottawa and say, well, you want me to write something. And they said, no, no, we'll look after it. They would send me, I'd look at it, make minor changes to it, but that was it. What I found disillusioning about that is the fact that we were left to ourselves to do a lot of the stuff where it came to meeting the locals and doing the debates, and when it came to putting something down on paper, they wanted to make sure that they had a uniform approach to what was being said. As much as people say that Alberta is a redneck country, I didn't experience any racism.

Because people would listen, but you could see that they had doubts that you knew you really could be an effective representative to them. This lady asked me, how long have you been in Canada? I said I've been here for 20 years. And she looked at me and she said, and so you think you are ready? I said, sure, all you need to do is listen to me and you would judge whether I'm ready or not.

And she walked away. I see that as petty prejudice really because of ignorance. Of all of our work, one particular ad stood out. It was a video ad we made that featured me holding a bunch of signs and dropping them. It kind of looked like Bob Dylan, one of his first music videos. So it was a minute long advertisement that started in black and white and featured myself standing there with a bunch of these Send Harper message signs. And on each of them, it was a word bubble. There was a message inside. And as the video progressed, I dropped all

the signs and it was a pretty negative message. So the message was, there's no way we can win. This city is conservative. I refuse to believe we can make a difference. And it looked like I'd given up. But then suddenly the video stopped and the motion went backwards. And as the sign started coming into my hand and the message read backwards, it spelled out a different story. And as the signs came up into my hands, it read, there's no way I believe the city is so conservative,

we can make a difference. And so it turned the message from being a negative one to a positive one. And so it got called brilliant by all the newspapers and it got us like a million views between my YouTube page and our Facebook page. And that brought us to the national attention. So some people did ask me about my age and my experience. And to me it was a reasonable question, right? If you're asking about my experience and my ability to, you know, effectively implement the things in the platform that I'm running on saying that

I'm going to do, I think that's a reasonable question. I'm sure there were some people who asked it in a way that was more critical or more negative or whatnot After one of the debates within the writing the Central but Gazette reported they said the winner is going to be either Michael Cooper was new or is a incumbent and then there was a comment The surprising candidate is the liberal candidate. She seems to have a good head on my shoulders. And then they said, but she doesn't have a chance

and we hope she doesn't go away. I was mentioned as a by the way. My feeling is that if you're in a riding where the party really has an opportunity to get somebody elected, they will put more money in the writing, they will send in a team of people to help the candidate, but in a writing that is basically a lost cause, they sort of feel, well, you know, how much damage can this guy do?

I had $4,000 for my collection signs, and I had a couple of my friends who put in some money to help me pay for some of the bills, you know, like renting a truck to put them up on Limpost and things like that. No, I did not feel supported by the party. They didn't think I could win and so didn't really care to invest too much in helping me. I understand their position, but also it was like, what's the message you're sending? Right. I'm here volunteering my time.

I had a son born, my boy was born in July, and the election was in October. So I was like on the campaign trail in the first few months of my baby's life. So you want to talk about the commitment I'm offering. The entire time I was up there, I stayed with families that were supporting the party. So I never stayed in a hotel or Airbnb or something like that. I wouldn't have expected, you know, a massive influx of, you know, $100,000 for, you know, a riding where I was a long shot. So under the expectations that I had and that I think were reasonable, I was quite happy. And good evening to those of you in British Columbia who have joined us at this point.

The more startling turn in this election was that orange wave, one that NDP leader Jack Layton has surfed straight into Stornoway. I was aware that a number of fairly prominent people in political history in Canada had kind of gotten into politics often in somewhat unexpected circumstances. Maybe not quite to the degree that my situation would have been or a number of the students at McGill for instance would have been. At least one just 19 years old. And then there's Ruth-Ellen Brosseau, the Ottawa waitress who apparently ran at least

part of her campaign in Quebec from a holiday spot in Las Vegas. It's a diverse group. In an ideal scenario, I did hope to get the deposit back, which I think would have been a 10% of the vote margin, but that wasn't possible. I will admit to being blinded by the light and thinking there was a glimmer of hope. I can say that with a big smile on my face. I drove down a few roads where I was like, Oh my gosh, look at all these signs for me. Wow. We had a, we had a great day of fundraising. Yes. My, my, uh, naivety. I totally thought for a moment, maybe we'll win.

But then like, I was wrong, like dramatically wrong. But that's okay. That's okay. But right now, we're anticipating our first numbers, the first glimpse of the shape of your next government. Keep your eye on the bar. It was terrific. At one point, early in the evening, right off the bat, the polls had just closed and the CBC had Trudeau trailing me.

Well, in Peppino writing, we've got Yvonne Vatney of the Conservative Party with two votes and Justin Trudeau with one vote. So that was my claim to fame. Don't jump to any conclusions based on those very early results. And after that, I don't think I ever made the airwaves again. We had a meal together and we started to start watching the tallying of the votes. Initially we were, Beatriz it was Michael,riz, it was Michael, it was Beatriz, Michael. And so it was very, very strong. But towards the end, I could see that I was, I was not going to beat him. I think, I think closer to the moment,

it was more and more clear that I wasn't going to be winning. But it was just a group, you know, there was like a dozen of us hard cores that kind of sat around table and watched the results come in. It was good to see that a lot of people supported me and I came in second. And in that riding, no liberal candidate had acquired 13,000 plus. Finally, I ended up with, I 22 or 23 hundred votes and I was quite proud to have managed to do that. A mutual friend, at one point I was at a cocktail and he said, well I hadn't seen him in a while

and he said, oh I'm in Pap Peppino writing and I voted for you. And I looked at him and I said, oh, you're the one. My big media campaign, which was so successful, it got me a solid third place out of four. You know, there's more to politics than just media. There's more to politics than just videos, but it is a TV show. You know, it's an interesting one.

For me, my goal was to, you know, it's an interesting one. For me, my goal was to, you know, certainly, you know, do as well as I could come in third, which I narrowly succeeded in doing. Mine was to step out, be visible, be a role model, and be a trailblazer. When I see a lot of people throwing in the ring from my community, I know that it comes from the fact that I stood. I was brave enough to stand. There was one elderly gentleman, and I went to see him during the campaign, and he still calls me every July 1st and at Christmas time to wish me and my family the best. And he keeps, every time he calls he says, are you going to run again? And I keep saying no, but he keeps calling.

Makes it worthwhile. I think after I'd spoken at, I think it was a Gurdwara in Prince Rupert, and then I went to the subway and I was ordering a sandwich and this person making the sandwich had a really in-depth and really just generally excellent discussion with me about a whole bundle of issues and it really stuck out to me, I think, first of all because in ordinary life, like you sort of go to a subway and you order the sandwich and you kind of know, like you could almost write the whole dialogue of what that interaction looks like before you even set foot in there

Being a candidate you had a sort of a privileged position to talk to people about pretty serious issues in their lives that you know ordinarily it's unlikely they would open up to a Person that they'd only met briefly, you know The kind of issues they might talk about with closer friends or family or whatnot Immigrants are encouraged to learn the Canadian way and it's good. It's a good way to do because Canada is great but the dominant community never gets a chance to learn from us so we have never have an opportunity to impart what we are to them because really we bring a rich everything.

I know that when I came to Edmonton there were no plantains by way of food, but now they're everywhere and so it can go beyond food. When we don't welcome immigrants into other spaces of Canadian existence, we miss out on what they could bring to enrich the totality. So the danger is that we can grow in silos. And that is not desirable because Canada is a good place to be. What are you prepared to do is kind of the question

that everyone you know, everyone gets asked whether it's in this generation talking about, you know, vaccinations or whether it's our grandparents talking about going to war. What are you prepared to do is the question. Nobody was expecting me to win. Nobody was expecting me to win. So there was no pressure to win because nobody expected me to win. But was expecting me to win. So there was no pressure to win because nobody expected me to win. But nobody expected me to do anything either. And I expected me to do something. We didn't stop Harper, but we helped get rid of him.

And that was a part of my goal. And I think that my work helped. So in that respect, did I win? Yeah, I totally won. Did the guy I voted for get in? Maybe not. The guy I didn't want in is not in. So maybe I didn't lose. The documentary is produced by Joan Weber. She is with the CBC's audio documentary unit. It first aired during the 2021 federal election. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.