few hours after my conversation with Tony McQuail, I received an email from him titled “links on nonviolent defence and farmers for climate solutions.” The email contained a variety of resources, from a TED talk in Boulder to an open-source eBook on Social Defence. It was indeed very interesting, but more for what came after rather than the message itself. McQuail’s email signature, which runs for 9 lines of text and has 2 custom graphics, instantly reminded me of the online forums and listservs I had found when I first went on the internet in the early aughts.
Though initially daunting to enter, once someone found their way in, they would discover the kind of community that the early Internet promised before the digital commons was encircled by a few giant corporations. These were collectively formed spaces, with codes of conduct and even mechanisms like upvotes or post counts, that designated particular members as elders to be respected and listened to. The people that populated those virtual spaces – moderators and power-posters alike – were always bursting to share their knowledge and philosophies with others.
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Tony McQuail’s route to electoral politics was a circuitous one, winding from Quaker schooling in Pennsylvania, draft counselling around the Vietnam War, to getting his degree in Environmental Studies and starting the Meeting Place Organic Farm in Lucknow, ON, where his daughter now runs the day-to-day.
As a young farmer in 1979 battered by inflation and escalating interest rates, McQuail looked at the two major parties: “So the Liberals were defending [the interest rates] while the Tories were saying how bad it was for farmers and small businesses, but then they changed places in 1979, and it was like they had left their speeches behind on the desks, because now it was the Conservatives saying how we had to have high interest rates, and the Liberals saying how terrible was — and this was in a matter of days. From my perspective, it was robbery.”
The next year, McQuail called some friends he knew that were New Democrats and offered to help, “thinking we’d be cranking a mimeograph machine and handing out some leaflets.” Instead, local activist and educator Paul Carroll asked him if he’d like to be the candidate. “I said I’d have to know a lot more, and (Paul) was out with the policy book and two Canadian histories the next day.”
In his first campaign, he pulled 11% of the vote and he was hooked: “the people I worked with were people whose values I shared, who were concerned about their community and the long-term interests of society.”
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Since that 1980 campaign, Tony McQuail has run as the NDP’s candidate in Huron-Bruce six more times: provincially in 1981, federally in 1988 and 1993, provincially again in 1999, then finally back to federal for 2008 and 2019. He also ran and won three consecutive terms as an independent candidate for the Huron County Board of Education in the mid-80s – and across all his campaigns, the highest number of votes he earned was around 7,500.
I asked him what it felt like to know that he was likely to receive many more votes than ever before, and how it has felt to have his message heard on a national platform. “The whole reason I decided to run was that there are things we need to be talking about that I wasn’t hearing from our leadership up to this point… I was feeling a bit of despair, because I felt like for the last 45 years I’ve been watching the decision makers, the 1%, the elite, taking us down a road to ecological destruction and social collapse… I was either going to give up, lie down and die, or try and do something.”
Are there still issues that he feels like the other leadership candidates aren’t talking about? “I don’t think they’re prepared to speak as strongly about what we’ve done to the environment, that growth has become a cancer on the environment and on society. I think there’s still reluctance to say that, because our whole culture has been conditioned to believe that growth is some kind of panacea… as a farmer, I see the world from ground level. I see the world very differently than somebody who’s in an urban environment, and a lot differently than somebody who’s in the corner office of a corporate tower.”
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The signature issue of the Tony McQuail campaign is a proposal for a “green-progressive alliance” between the New Democratic Party and the Green Party of Canada. This has been framed by some as a proposal for a true merger, but according to McQuail, “we don’t have time to do a merger of the parties.”
Instead, McQuail’s general idea is for the NDP to sit down with the other small parties — not just the Greens, but the Bloc Quebecois and some others as well — to try and hash out a “green progressive platform that we all buy into”. Once in place, “it would go to the riding associations to work together and decide who will be the candidate to represent this platform.”
When asked about which candidates would have to step back from running, McQuail delegated the task to local members of the involved parties. “I don’t think it’s stepping back, I think it’s stepping together… what I would hope to see and what I would invite people to consider doing is to get all the members of both the Green and NDP together for a discussion, and listen to the different candidates. Everyone’s vote counts equally, and pick one person to represent that green progressive platform in an election.”
I was curious to know if McQuail had ever considered running for the Green Party of Canada. After all, that party formed in 1984, just four years after his first run for the NDP, and the party claims to share many of the same core tenets as McQuail’s own — not just environmental policy, but also policies around non-violence and social justice. He acknowledged that they had approached him in the 80s “to help form a Green riding association”, and that “I’ve seen the Greens become a lot more socially progressive over the years”, but insisted that “until we have a proportional electoral system, I am not interested.”
“When they first got in, they were so focused on environmental stuff, and they were focused on economic levers to move things towards a greener system, and I’ve always felt that you aren’t going to get green policies unless you have social policies that make the change less threatening. Change is worrisome… You’ve got to look after the people who live downwind from the smokestacks if you’re going to close the smokestacks.” In McQuail’s interview with the Tyee, he went further, calling the Greens “the secondary green party”. He said that them being in the picture “added additional confusion and vote-splitting, which then leads over time to people voting strategically.” I was reminded once again of my time on internet forums, and how factional conflicts and flame wars often led to these nascent communities faltering. In 2019, I had spent time volunteering with the Green Party, specifically the leadership campaign of Dr Amita Kuttner, and one of the things that struck me the most from that experience was how much more clearly the partisan lines were drawn between Greens and New Democrats on the west coast.
I asked McQuail if he could sympathize with a Green partisan who looks at the track record of elected NDP governments in BC or Alberta and says that the NDP doesn’t satisfy their requirements to be considered a “green” party. “Yeah, and I can be very frustrated at British Columbia New Democrats failing to really get behind proportional representation. I think that was a huge mistake, and a huge oversight on our part.”
It struck me as a challenge that the places where there would be the most resistance to this collaboration are the places where both the Greens and New Democrats are competitive under the current system – where they have both experienced success and been in direct conflict. If the collaboration only happened in the ridings where it was easy, wouldn’t its mathematical impact be minimal?
The realpolitik nature of this question seemed to irk McQuail a bit. “Depends on how people see the state of the world, and how they see building a future that works for everybody, including the environment and ordinary people. If people who claim they’re concerned about the environment and their fellow human beings aren’t able to work together to deal with that, then I might as well not have wasted my time running, and just stayed home and had a fun time with my horses.”
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The more I tried to look into the details, the more I had to accept that Tony McQuail’s vision is too sweeping to be pinned down by pollsters, pundits or policy. He frames his campaign around a singular and holistic goal: “to meet the basic needs of all Canadians — water, food, shelter, clothing, healthcare, and education — while building a caring, compassionate society that works for the 99%.”
It would be hard to doubt the sincerity of his belief. “I was part of a family that was working to implement and live Quaker ideals. As Quakers, we don’t have a creed, we believe in an ongoing revelation… but we do have a set of testimonies, known as the SPICES — simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equality and stewardship.” It’s clear that these testimonies carry through his politics, whether it is criticizing US militarism — the issue that brought him to Canada in the first place — or his disdain of the ultra-wealthy, who he views as “white collar crooks”.
It is also why he believes that grassroots collaboration is possible — he practices it himself. Not only does he have a longstanding personal relationship with Ontario Green Party leader Mike Schreiner, he drove his local Green candidate to Kitchener Centre MP Mike Morrice’s first nomination meeting. “I don’t feel any of us are serving the general public in Canada by staying partisan and isolated and refusing to recognize that the system we have doesn’t serve our potential constituency well at all.”
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In the TED talk McQuail sent me, Erica Chenoweth talked about how the success of non-violent civil resistance movements hinges on this idea of overcoming isolation. Isolation and community are opposite forces. When you know your neighbours, the social contract between you gets stronger. I also saw it happen on those early forums, where genuine bonds grew between people who initially shared little more than an internet connection.
I’ve been vacillating back and forth between optimism and pessimism since our conversation. It’s hard because I have seen the same sparks of potential, but have also seen them snuffed out. The communities we try and make — both organic and digital ones — are valuable, but fragile. If Tony McQuail’s vision came to fruition, the world would certainly be a better place — but every time I step back into the systems that we live in today, I struggle to share in his belief. When I listened to him speak, I felt nostalgic for a future that hasn’t yet come true.
Editor’s Note: This article appears in a series of interviews with NDP candidates by The Leveller.
