Tragedy in the Commons by Alison Loat Read Free Book Online

out spontaneously and then faded, and then erupted again elsewhere in the convention centre. Within the hour, Hermanson took the stage a second time to announce the results. Solberg and Mandeville were tied at 456 votes apiece.
    Third ballot, two candidates. Now Solberg could see that people were leaving. The rumour went around that they were the distant folks, the folks who had long car rides out of town—or Brooks? Were Solberg’s supporters going home? By the time the third round of voting started, Solberg was exhausted. The ballots disappeared to be counted by Hermanson and his crew, and the place waited. So much was at stake. Solberg thought about his friends, and how much work everyone had put into getting him the nomination. He wanted to win for their sake.
    For the third time, Hermanson came out to announce the results. By this time it was almost midnight. Hermanson leaned into the microphone. What did he say, exactly? Solberg couldn’t remember. He remembered only the results—Mandeville 485, Solberg 487.
    Solberg 487 . Pandemonium! People pushed Solberg onstage amid a thousand handshakes. “It was utter relief, and joy at the same time,” Solberg said. He gave a mostly incoherent acceptance speech. He was stunned. To win by two votes! He congratulated the other candidates—he could remember doing that.
    The buses had made the difference. Yes, some delegates had left before the third ballot, but those turned out to be the Medicine Hat people, people who had their own cars, who could drive home at will. Solberg hadn’t planned it this way, but the Brooks contingent was trapped in the Cypress Centre Auditorium that evening because the buses they’d arrived on weren’t leaving until the ballots yielded a winner.
    Solberg went on to take Medicine Hat in the upcoming federal election with 54 percent of the votes, a margin of 14,000. He would run again, and again, winning five consecutive federal elections; in his last run for office, he took 80 percent of the vote. He spent fifteen years as an MP, and three of those as a Cabinet minister for Stephen Harper, before retiring from politics in 2008. And in the years after his victory, when he was in his riding, strangers would come up to him and say: “I was at that nomination meeting. I was there, and I voted for you. It was my vote that helped put you over.”
    They remembered the exciting night in 1992 when Monte Solberg became the Reform Party candidate for Medicine Hat, Alberta. “People would tell me it was the most exciting thing they’d ever been a part of,” Solberg would say later. “It really was a chance to participate in democracy. Those opportunities don’t come along very often. In a lot of parties, nominations are protected, and it’s hard to unseat the incumbent, and there’s lots of things that work against real democracy breaking out. It was all about the excitement of being able to choose a new candidate—and to be a part of the democratic process.”
    OPEN AND TRANSPARENT nominations really can engage people in the democratic process, as the story of Solberg’s nominationshows. In fact, they exemplify the way many Canadians believe nomination battles work—ideally, an open call for candidates, who then compete for support among the riding’s party members in an election that is overseen by a leadership that takes pains to minimize any bias or perception of favouritism. Idealistic politicos envision the process as being coordinated by the local riding association, which is both the local representation of a political party and the organization charged with identifying, selecting and supporting candidates.
    Unfortunately, few nominations take place as Monte Solberg’s did. Time and again during the exit interviews we conducted, without prompting, MPs complained about the nomination processes. We’d initially asked how they got into politics merely to break the ice, and to give them an opportunity to talk about their early lives.