Want to win? Knock on doors, take names
By Ivan Morgan
I personally won’t vote for a person who doesn’t knock on my door. Maybe I’m not home at the time, maybe it’s a volunteer and not the candidate, but I want what is known in the business as voter contact.
I wrote about door-to-door campaigning during the recent Conception Bay East-Bell Island byelection. Now there’s one in Waterford Valley – Tom Osbourne’s old stomping grounds.
In fact, the byelection is happening because Tom recently threw in the towel after 28 years. If you are a budding politician, a hopeful as they call them, I recommend a careful study of Tom Osbourne’s political career.
What a career. He was minister of many portfolios, both in the Tory and the Liberal governments. Hell, he was Minister of Health for both, surviving a health scandal (not of his making) with the Tories and then back in that chair years later with the Liberals. He left the Tories over Kathy Dunderdale’s leadership, then sat as an Independent only to join Dwight Ball’s Liberals when they formed government. He was Speaker. He sat in the House from 1996 to 2024, one of the very few provincial politicians you can say actually earned his pension.
Why all these boring statistics? Because Tom Osbourne was the greatest constituency politician I ever knew. Inside the political world he was legendary. He knew where his bread was buttered.
None of those boring statistics I listed would have happened if he didn’t keep getting elected. The key to success in politics is getting elected and re-elected. Sounds simple but I have campaigned for people who had no stomach for knocking on doors. Too busy. Too lazy. Too important. That’s what the volunteers are for. The vast majority of them lost.
Osbourne had a profound understanding of that. The people of his district (they changed the name and boundaries of his actual district a few times) didn’t give a fig what party he was a member of. They voted for him. They liked him and he liked them. In the long run politics is a people business, and he looked after his people.
When I worked on Ryan Cleary’s federal campaign in 2008 in what was then called St. John’s South-Mount Pearl, I got a front row seat. Then Premier Danny Williams had started an ABC campaign (Anything but Conservative) to send a hard message to Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper. He instructed his MHAs to help other parties – any other party – beat the federal Conservative candidates. Tom helped Ryan, campaigning with him in that part of the federal riding that was his provincial district. Boy did that help! I wanted the younger NDP volunteers to watch and learn from Osbourne – see how it was really done. Getting elected wasn’t just high-mindedness and ideology; it took care, dedication, organization and good old-fashioned footwork, all of which Osbourne had in spades.
I can see Osbourne on a Fall evening working a downtown street. He knew their names. He knew their problems and how he’d helped them.
When I was a young fellow, the Progressive Conservative MHA for my parent’s district, St. John’s North, was a savoury farmer named John Carter. He used to joke that savoury was his summer crop, and politics his winter crop. I can see him now, a big man walking slowly down Elizabeth Avenue alone on a fall evening, wearing a blue double-breasted blazer, shirt and tie, gray flannel pants, black lace up Oxfords, with a load of pamphlets under his arm. It was simpler times, he made it to every door. That was his campaign style. He served 18 years, elected five times. A respectable career.
I was going to go on a rant this week (again) about the Minister of Finance’s suspiciously timed fiscal update, as clueless and out-of-touch as the last one. If she and the ruling Liberals think that helps their candidate, they clearly never understood Osbourne, his career, or his constituents.
Many voters in Waterford Valley will be facing a challenge this time. For the first time in 28 years, many of them are going to have to figure out who to vote for.
Ivan Morgan can be reached at ivan.morgan@gmail.com