This week, Frances Bula, a good friend and former colleague, took a brave step and announced she plans to run for Vancouver city council in the upcoming October election. With that announcement, she traded a 40-plus-year journalism career for the snake pit of politics.

She’s seeking office for all the right reasons. Bula loves cities and has been thinking and writing about best and worst practices for running them for decades. She knows what makes them work, understands what makes them slide. 

She loved journalism as much as the cities she wrote about, believing in its power to inform and influence politicians to do better. Now, she is hoping to have a more direct level of impact. 

I think and hope her chances of a win are strong. But if, for some strange reason, the odds don’t go her way, she will have given up a lot. It’s hard — if not impossible — to go back to the world of reporting, where most media outlets demand a level of objectivity from their writers. So, apart from the odd opinion piece, Bula’s decision really does spell the end of her journalism career. 

Cynics will disagree, but I think the vast majority of politicians, especially those like Bula at the municipal level, enter politics because they have ideas about how to make our lives better. It’s certainly not to get rich — city councillors in Vancouver earn about $100,000 a year. It’s more than the average person makes, but nonetheless doesn’t go too far in a city so expensive.

To get the job, candidates must start by swallowing their discomfort and hitting their friends up for campaign donations. Once elected, they are expected to toe their party’s line, sit through interminable public hearings usually held at night and attend endless rubber chicken luncheons. Egad. You couldn’t pay me.

But the biggest sacrifice of all in this age of social media is the loss of privacy — or even worse, the incessant nasty trolling from people with differing political views. Take, for example,  Coun. Sean Orr, who was wrongly accused by Mayor Ken Sim of distributing illegal drugs on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside on Christmas Day. 

It's amazing anyone runs for office. The biggest sacrifice aspiring politicians make in this social media age is the incessant nasty trolling from people with differing political views.

Orr wasn’t even in Vancouver that day and says he has never handed out drugs to anyone. Sim made the comments at a news conference with Chinese-speaking journalists and probably thought they would never hit the English media. When word got out, he apologized to Orr, admitting he had not verified the statement. 

But Orr insists the damage to his reputation was already done, and is suing for defamation. It’s one thing to be trolled by total strangers. It’s quite another to feel you've been defamed by another member of council, even one from an opposing party.

Extreme scrutiny, criticism and belittlement of people we elect to office, especially if they are women, has become all too common. Catherine McKenna, a former federal environment minister, was subjected to reams of abuse from total strangers. When she stepped away from politics, she knew people would think she was scared off by sexism and the vitriol from climate deniers, she wrote in an essay for The Walrus. McKenna said the biggest reason she left was because she felt she accomplished what she set out to do. But she said there was “no question that the volume of hate toward me was jarring and upsetting.”

“It hurt that some people who had never met me, who had no idea what I was like, not only hated me but, let’s not mince words, wanted to hurt or even kill me or my kids.”

There are other chilling examples as well. Multiple fires have been set at the offices of Manitoba’s Families Minister Nahanni Fontaine and Housing Minister Bernadette Smith and a homemade bomb exploded and blew open the door of BC Infrastructure Minister Bowin Ma’s office.

Online harassment and abuse contributed to the decision by New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern and Scotland’s Nicola Sturgeon to quit politics. And in the US, where politics has become deeply polarized, the threats have been backed up with lethal violence, or close to it.

In 2011, Democratic congresswoman Gabby Giffords was shot in the head in a mass shooting at a Tucson, Ariz. political event where six people were killed and 12 others injured. Last summer, Melissa Hortman, Minnesota’s State Representative, and her husband were shot and killed in a politically motivated assassination. The accused gunman is also charged with stalking and shooting another Democratic politician, Minnesota State Senator John Hoffman and his family.

Thankfully, it hasn’t gone that far here in Canada. But politics is not for the faint of heart, even when politicians are not being harassed. Imagine the emotional toll on the two contenders for the federal riding of Terrebonne, where only one vote separated Liberal candidate Tatiana Auguste and the Bloc Québécois's Nathalie Sinclair-Desgagné. 

A judicial recount determined the seat was won by Auguste. But her win was annulled by the Supreme Court of Canada after it was determined an Elections Canada error led one mail-in ballot for Sinclair-Desgagné to be wrongfully discarded. A byelection has now been called for April 13 and the two women will have to muster the energy to campaign again. That takes gumption. 

Politicians are human and they give up a lot to serve us. As a journalist, Bula has shouldered more than her share of criticism for stories and columns she has written, a barrage that is bound to escalate if she is elected to council. That alone would be enough to deter most from running.

If it had dissuaded Bula, Vancouver would miss out on the thoughtfulness and expertise she could bring to our city. Whether or not we agree with their politics, political candidates deserve our thanks for putting their hands up to do a job most of us wouldn’t want.

© National Observer