the campaign trail

Apparently another candidate, Liberal Laura Shutiak, has launched a blog. I'll link to her with the idea that perhaps other bloggers will link to me. It serves the interest of Albertans to be as informed as possible about their candidates. I don't know if Laura's blog is terribly informative, since so far it seems to be more about her personal experiences that what she thinks about rent controls, tax policies, encouraging innovation, the Heritage Fund, nuclear energy, or what you.

But it is ungracious to be critical and it may be interest to you all to hear some personal anecdotes from me on occasion as well.

This is my first campaign and door-knocking is truly an "all over the map" experience. You get people who
- peek at you through the dining room window and won't come to the door.
- don't speak English but invite you in anyway (fortunately, my French was good enough to keep a conversation going, albeit basic)
- try and hold a conversation through the glass
- make up some story to get rid of you
- tell me they are not going to consider anything but the PCs because they are "hard core, ex-military, do it all on my own" "conservatives" ???
- express surprise that there is an election coming
- say it is against their religion to vote
- ask me what I'm going to do about their back pain, if elected
- suggest we tax the oil sands companies according to the water they use (interesting idea, actually!)
- run into a competing candidate and hear him say he's simply with the party he is because one has to have a party to become MLA (full marks for non-partisanship, I suppose!)
- give you an enthusiastic, bubbly welcome and wish you all the best

Surprisingly, I have yet to hear someone tell me they are voting NDP or for Ray Martin. This in a riding where Ray Martin took 50% of the vote. I'm not sure what to make of that. Perhaps it's just where I've been so far. Or perhaps these are the people who give me the brush-off before we ever really get to talking.

If I had to generalize, I'd say the newer the building and / or the younger the person at the door, the better the reception I get. It IS a pain in the buttinski to not run for a party that doesn't have much money and can't help me out a whole lot financially. I have no brochure to give them, so if they don't have a computer (which seems to be rather often) what are they supposed to do? I should have some brochures by next week, however. People DO seem to appreciate I'm the candidate himself and not a campaign worker.