THE HARD TRUTH ABOUT DEMOCRACY

David Parker, April 13 2025

In the 2021 Canadian Election, I was the campaign manager for the riding of Oakville. The riding has since been split into two, but at the time, there was only one. Kerry Colburne was the candidate, and Justin Trudeau had called a snap election to secure a mandate to manage COVID-19. I had been completely pushed out of Erin O’Toole’s inner circle—in fact, the reason I took on the role was because I desperately needed money, and campaign management was the only real skill set I had at the time. So, my two employees and I accepted a contract to run the Get Out the Vote (GOTV) effort—and eventually the entire campaign—for Kerry Colburne, the Conservative candidate in Oakville.

It was a long shot from the beginning. We were up against one of Trudeau’s star candidates, Anita Anand, who was Minister of Public Procurement at the time. She was later appointed Minister of National Defence and has remained in Cabinet ever since. We had very few volunteers, a weak Electoral District Association, and Kerry had only been nominated a few weeks before the writ dropped.

I’ve been on losing campaigns—many of them—but the 2021 federal election was one of the most depressing experiences of my political career. We didn’t even have a proper campaign office; instead, we ran the entire operation out of Kerry’s living room. Volunteers were scarce—they almost always are in local campaigns, especially in the age of keyboard warriors. One of those volunteers, interestingly enough, is now the Conservative candidate in Oakville West. He faithfully came out multiple times a week to door-knock for hours in the oppressive humidity of a Southern Ontario summer. It was during this campaign that I began developing the model that would later become Take Back Alberta—although, at the time, it was a complete flop.

I’ve worked on a lot of campaigns. I’ve seen some, like David Piccini’s first victory during the rise of Doug Ford, that were well-staffed, well-run, and executed with precision. “Piccini,” as we called him, was one of the best candidates I’ve ever worked with. He knew how to get volunteers, he knew what it took to win, and he was more than willing to put in the work. We knocked on every door in the riding, achieved one of the highest GOTV results in the province, and ran a nearly flawless campaign. Yet even with all of that, we only shifted the result by 3–4%. Ground game matters—but just like in real war, the men in the trenches are often dependent on the decisions made at the top. And, in many cases, even the top is just reacting to the chaos of events as they unfold.

My political career has largely been focused on ground game, and any real success I’ve had has been in areas where it matters most—internal party politics. In general elections, ground game only goes so far. Why is so much dependent on the central campaign? That, frankly, is the core problem with Canadian politics.

As I mentioned in a previous post, Canadians are some of the most politically apathetic people in the free world—perhaps even more apathetic than citizens in many authoritarian countries. A local campaign would be thrilled to see 20–30 regular volunteers. I would have been ecstatic just to have 10–12 volunteers a day in that Oakville campaign. Volunteers are the lifeblood of politics, and most political parties in Canada are critically short on them. The best candidates are the ones who can convince others to show up and help.

A good local campaign manager is someone who knows the people in the community and can rally them into the effort. I was not a good campaign manager. I didn’t know anyone in Oakville—except an ex-girlfriend who had no interest in talking to me. So I was left trying to recruit volunteers while also managing the logistics of the entire campaign, all with very limited resources. That’s the reality for most people working on the ground in Canada right now.

I can assure you: despite the tens of thousands of people showing up at rallies for Pierre across Canada, very few of those people are willing to go door-knocking, make phone calls, or put up signs. Only a tiny fraction of party members actually volunteer during elections. There are ridings across Canada with thousands of Conservative Party members—many in highly competitive areas—yet I promise you, 95% of campaigns are desperate for help.

Volunteerism is dying in Canada. People don’t want to do things unless they see a direct personal benefit. Even Pierre’s rallies provide that—they make people feel good, like they’re at a rock concert, surrounded by others who believe the same things they do. It’s a massive exercise in confirmation bias fused with a social gathering. I know—I’ve been in those rooms. It feels electric to be surrounded by people who think like you do. That’s why Trump does it.

We had nothing like that in Oakville. Our biggest volunteer push came in the days leading up to the election—during advance polls and on Election Day. I think we maxed out at 30 active volunteers across a riding with over 100,000 eligible voters. Most days, there were one or two teams of four people door-knocking. That means our volunteer-to-voter ratio was about 10,000 to one. Two of our “regulars” weren’t even volunteers—they were my employees.

Kerry Colburne ended up losing the election by 3,707 votes. That’s a 6.1% margin, factoring in turnout. To the average person, 3,707 votes might sound like a lot. But the truth is, it isn’t. If we’d had 150–200 volunteers, we could have easily swung 1,900 votes. That would have changed the result in Oakville. The problem, of course, is that almost no campaign ever comes close to having that many volunteers. People are too busy, they don’t think they can make a difference, or they simply don’t care about politics.

That is the message of Take Back Alberta. It is my message to the people of Alberta specifically—but it applies even more deeply to all Canadians. You’ve been deceived into believing that politics is like the weather: that no individual can change it, and that there’s no point in getting involved. This has resulted in an anemic volunteer base across all parties—but especially among conservatives. Simply showing up already makes you one in 10,000. Our politics are the way they are because almost no one is willing to do the work.

This isn’t just a story about Oakville. It’s about what happens when democracy stops being citizen-led and becomes driven by centralized campaigns and personality cults. The more we rely on party headquarters and charismatic leaders to do the work, the weaker our politics becomes. Real democracy is built from the ground up—not managed from the top down. When we trade engagement for applause, we lose the very soul of the system.

If you want to see change, stop waiting for politicians to do it for you. Start showing up. Start getting involved. You won’t win every battle, but you’ll learn more than you ever expected. I’ve learned far more from my failures than from my successes. It was the crucible of that local campaign in Oakville that revealed the fundamental truth I’m trying to convey here.

We don’t need more money in politics. The perfect policy platform won’t save this country. No one is coming to rescue us. If this country is going to be fixed, it won’t be because of a leader—it will be because of you.