Belief and Politics
Could imagination help our democracy?
Normally I don’t like to amplify the messages I disagree with, but one message comes at me from so many different sources (including my own ego), that I feel I need to say some variation of it out loud.
You’re not going to win
This powerful belief about winners and losers affects our democracy in many ways but comes simply from stories we tell ourselves or are told by others.
To hear that belief spoken out loud, and generally unquestioned, we need look no further than our news media. Editors and journalists do their own internal evaluation on who has a chance of winning based on a candidate’s campaign budget, fame and opinion polling. The resultant limited reporting of candidates means most people I speak to are shocked to find out there are more than one or two people running for mayor. In 2018 there were 35 mayoral candidates, and many of them had worthwhile ideas and backgrounds completely missed by voters that go only by the front page articles rather than the one or two buried pieces that do mention other names and platforms. This time around, there are 12 mayoral candidates, with likely more to come in the weeks before the registration window closes. Most are dismissed due to their perceived low probability of winning.
Even when there are candidates whose public profile is assessed by the media to warrant more extensive coverage, like Jennifer Keesmaat in 2018, and Gil Penalosa this time, the media assures us repeatedly that they won’t win. One columnist, despite being a clear fan of Penalosa, with three full months left to go until election day, stated unequivocally “Needless to say, he doesn’t have a snowball’s chance”. To which I say, if it’s needless to say, why say it?
Every time the media repeats this story, or we repeat it to ourselves, we lose the opportunity to imagine a different future and to some degree we create a self fulfilling prophecy. Low voter turnout results as people don’t know about or believe in the chances of other candidates who are running. For those who do vote, their belief in who’s going to win affects which box they check on the ballot. And I believe that prospective candidates fail to enter political races because of a risk/reward calculation heavily biased by their own assumption that they won’t win.
So what might it be like if we decided to completely abandon the story of who is going to win during the campaigns?
I’ll illustrate with a personal story. Last week I was canoeing in Temagami, and for the first time in years, I left my cell phone alone for a full five days. It stayed in the car, back on land as we canoed off into the still water. For those five days I connected with the water, the forest, the breeze, the rain, and the abundance of life around me. When my thoughts did wander from the present moment, they were filled with ideas for how to make the city better, fun campaign activities and a myriad of ways to engage residents so that they too could act on their own vision of how to make Toronto better. But when I got back to my phone during the drive back to Toronto, that creative energy was dampened and my enthusiasm temporarily crushed as I checked Twitter and the news and confronted the familiar story of the impossibility of winning.
I am working on my campaign in the next few days - recording podcasts, researching issues like the province’s proposed changes that would create a strong mayor and the state of the city’s budget, answering voter questions and working with my team on business cards, T-shirt designs and my votesarah.ca website. But before settling down to the full time push that will take me to the end of October, I will do one last trip to the wild with my family and our red canoe. And during that time I will imagine a city where we don’t let preconceived notions of who can win affect our democracy. A city where no one feels limited by their chances, and shouts their ideas from the rooftops to all who will listen - whether their audience is the squirrel in their backyard or the editorial board at the Toronto Sun, Star or Moon. A city where we listen to the vision of anyone who has one, so that whoever is elected can collect these ideas together and govern with the best solutions our residents have to offer.
Who’s going to win this fall? Like so many of our mental ruminations, that question doesn’t matter. It will be answered one way or another for us all on October 24. Until then, let there be no limits on what we can imagine, who we share our ideas with, and what we create together.