My initial political experience

Told this story to someone the other day, and they almost bust a gut... told me I had to post it. (it could also have been the fact that we were discussing a stressful issue, so my little story broke the tension a bit)

I learned a lot about politics very early on... it was Grade 5, actually. In the school of hard knocks. There's a bit of irony in telling the story right now... it took place in a faith-based school. ;-)

We did a unit on the Canadian Parliamentary system. In order to get a real feel for how things work, our teacher divided the class up into three or four "Parties", and we held a two week long election campaign... posters plastering the walls, speeches, the whole bit. Each team organized themselves, selected a leader, a campaign team, a Party name, and a platform... dealing with whatever they wanted, but related to school life.

Somehow, and to this day I don't know how, but my team decided to pick me for their leader. So, we planned our campaign, picked our Party name, made our posters, and wrote our campaign speech. The campaign went negative too... someone defaced my posters too! Put horns and a beard on me... irony is, I have a beard just like that now that I'm all grown up!

Well, I skipped all that background info when I told the story last night, so I'll skip to the good part...

I learned the importance of policy platforms and public perception very early on. From the looks of things, based on our internal polling, I was cruising to victory. Then, on the day of the election, we gave our speeches. And thanks to my campaign team, with one single sentence, I alienated my entire core consituancy... the Grade 4 boys. I said, "And because it causes fights at recess, our party will get rid of all the wood used to build forts." I had protested having that line in the speech, but my campaign team was adamant that it was a good policy... so, I stuck with it, instead of trusting my gut.

Like I said, last night was stressful... a story like that just kills in those kinds of situations. It also makes for good conversation when a fiasco like the John Tory campaign is in the public eye.

Oh, the lessons of testing major policy initives before announcing them to the public! I learned that one back in Grade 5... too bad Mr. Tory's team only figured that one out in the heat of an election campaign. Too bad for all of us here in Ontario too... it may have saddled us with another four years of Dalton McGuinty & Co.