Bob Rae MP for Toronto Centre

A door to door campaign is a wonderful journey - one of our volunteers said to me yesterday "you're either a campaign person or you're not, you either love knocking on doors or you don't". My first door to door experience was in Davenport riding in 1968. We had a volunteer named Billy Maloney who worked from morning to night, just knocking on doors, meeting people, getting a feel for the mood, reporting back on what he found, listening, schmoozing, and giving quiet advice to the candidate. It was the year of Trudeaumania so the only real advice was "watch out for the tidal wave, make sure you catch it", which of course we did.

Fast forward to Toronto Centre 2008. Harder to find people at home, a riding of many apartments, but most important a place of incredible diversity. Two all candidate meetings this week - last night the Conservative Party handed out their Karl Rove attack leaflets on Stephane Dion, I guess the ones they were going to use in the general election that isn't happening.

So the Big Lie is that Stephen Harper is Tough on Crime and Stephane Dion is "soft on crime". My Conservative opponent backed up this propaganda with a mental picture of a country literally awash in drugs and guns (so he wants to outlaw the first but not the second). He talks about murders happening "under a Liberal administration", as if this all magically stopped in 2006. The debate last night drove home the simple point that the Conservatives are Republicans by another name, both in substance and in style. They will say anything about their opponents, and stop at nothing to get elected.

I was asked yesterday about the difference between politics a few years ago and now. It's definitely more of a blood sport, and it's more about the 24/7 news cycle than anything else - somehow that beast must be fed even if nothing's happening.