She knew she wasn’t going to win. In fact, she often introduced herself this way: I’m Liz White, I’m running for office, and I know I’m not going to win. This would be delivered with an apologetic smile, maybe a gentle laugh, as if she were letting you in on a joke. As if to underscore the foolishness of what she was saying. The person she was addressing, standing on their porch or leaning against a scuffed door frame, might tilt their head, like a puppy hearing an unfamiliar command, unsure if what they heard was, in fact, what Liz White had said.

But, yes, it was true. White was under no illusions when it came to success; the riding in which she was campaigning, composed of mostly well-to-do neighbourhoods on the eastern edge of downtown Toronto, would go to the incumbent Liberal—maybe the New Democratic candidate if things broke just the right way. But the Animal Protection Party of Canada, of which White was the long-time leader? It was not going to happen. It had never happened. It would never happen.

Onward. One house, then the next. Up a few steps, knock on the door, back down to the sidewalk, then do it again. She called it her workout: “You get in good shape doing this, let me tell you.” It was just past noon on a gorgeous late-summer day. The park across the street was overrun with dogs and babies, and commuter trains occasionally rumbled down the adjacent rail path, hurtling towards or escaping from the city’s core. Campaign signs clung to fences, grew from flower beds, and peeked through front windows like nosy neighbours. The election was only a few days away, but it wouldn’t matter if it was held the following year or in a decade’s time—the results would be the same.

A snapshot of White on this day, from bottom to top: black walking shoes, a white skirt adorned with a black flower pattern, black sweater over a white collared shirt, a black backpack slung over her shoulders, black-framed glasses, grey hair in a bob. She looked like your favourite high school English teacher.

Her knocking or ringing of the doorbell often went unanswered or ignored, and so she would slip a brochure into the mailbox or place it inside a screen door, where it was likely destined for the blue bin along with the rest of the junk mail. Once in a while, a person might answer, albeit cautiously or irritated—one man said he’d worried White was a Jehovah’s Witness. Who else showed up unannounced at your home at this time of day?

She was always gracious, and grateful, when given the opportunity to explain herself. She kept it brief; her pitch usually lasted less than twenty seconds—I’m Liz White, I’m running for the Animal Protection Party of Canada, and I know I’m not going to win—but, sometimes, a conversation would follow. She was especially happy when a dog came to the door; she seemed more comfortable with pets than people.

“My kind of voter,” White said, bending down to meet a small scritch-hunting mutt named Bunny as the owner looked on approvingly.

“She likes you—she knows you’re on her side,” the woman said, then apologized for already having cast her ballot in advance.

It didn’t matter. White was not going to win. And she was okay with that.

Having reached the end of the street and the last of the houses, White and I retreated to a nearby cafe. We hadn’t seen each other in about a year and a half, so we found a table outside and made small talk for a while, catching up on one another’s lives over the racket of passing streetcars. A wasp flew figure eights around my coffee cup; I had to stop myself from swatting it away, unsure of the party’s views on violence towards insects, even the stinging kind.

I’d first met White more than a dozen years earlier, in the summer of 2008. I was a staff reporter for a Toronto-based national newspaper, only a couple of years out of university and way out of my depth. The Great Recession, coupled with the fact nobody wanted to pay for news, had pushed an already precarious industry to the breaking point, and I figured I had another year or two before I found myself in law school or following in my parents’ footsteps to teacher’s college. I might as well spend what little time I had left writing stories that interested me.

As that year’s federal election approached, I pitched one of my editors the idea of profiling a no-hope candidate—someone running for office who had absolutely zero........

© The Walrus