Long one, don't read if you aren't interested. This is a post about a 13 year old Canadian lit novel.

Context

Terry Fallis did an undergrad in engineering and got involved in student politics. Shortly afterward he got involved in Chretien's liberals as a staffer and worked at a high level in federal politics for some time. He moonlighted in the PR and political campaign world for some time until he decided to write a novel in 2007 called The Best Laid Plans. This context is necessary because much of it was directly put into the two protagonists.

Back in 2009, I was super into Canadian politics and parliament in highschool and this was around the time I got my own ipod. I remember reading it and skipping through a lot of the cringier romance subplots and then never thinking about it again until 2021. No idea why, but I had a few long days at work so I put it in for myself to chuckle or get enraged at thinking about how much has changed in the past decade and a half

The Novel

The Best Laid Plans describes itself as a satirical novel about serious ideas. The author is quite clunky, the phrase "I was about as handy as the Venus de Milo" appears a few times, and if this was a fanfic the author would be derided for a ridiculous mary sue self-insert character - not a total surprise as this was the author's first outing in novel form and it was an example of self-publishing done online. It is not a hard read and goes down like a warm bath.

It also a remarkable insight into both the lib mind and Liberal mind, especially of the the late 90s through the 00s up to, essentially, their banishment into the political wilderness of third party status in 2011 (thanks Jack Layton) although it still echoes in the Liberals current formation after 2015. The author uncritically and ironically describes why the Liberal party was best as: "The PCs believed less government is best, the NDP believed more government is best, I believed better government is best" and several times insights on balancing budgets and extols the benefits of financial stewardship from a party in the thick of the sponsorship scandal.

The Plot - Spoilers if you care

We are introduced to our main protagonist, an expy of the author who instead of getting an engineering degree winded up with a PhD in English which he finished on the campaign trail for the Liberal party. The author's age is undescribed but context and their length of service as a staffer would put them somewhere around mid 30s. The author's ends up leaving federal politics because his girlfriend sucked off the Liberal's whip and he decided to just get a job as a professor at the UofO (which is handed to him in under 3 months). He meets the other protagonist, a Scottish Engineering prof with a love for English and the English language whose main character trait is tediously correcting grammar - this is considered endearing by the author and main pov character.

The pov character felt that he owed it to the Liberal party (after his girlfriend cheated on him, mind) to find a secure a candidate for the fictional riding of Cumberland-Prescott based on a real riding that actually exists in the Ottawa valley. Cumberland-Prescott is described as a Tory stronghold which as been Tory since confederation - the actual location it is based on is anything but and has mainly been a Liberal riding for most of its history. The previous candidate they used to have run and lose every election is one 80 year old with parkinsons (the author mentions it every time she shares a scene with another character or another character speaks of her) who is now done with that shit and won't run again. By a happenstance, the two protagonists meet as the Scottish prof is the pov character's landlord. The POV character is able to finagle the Scottish prof into this ritual humiliation by agreeing to take over his hated class of "English for Engineers" - which, fair, I can see STEM freshmen being kind of shitty to teach if you really love English lit, lol.

The Scot prof ignores the campaign, they don't phone bank, they don't put up lawn signs or make media appearances or give interviews. Instead he gets two Anarchists to do door-to-door knocking in their full punk gear, these Anarchists are super pumped to do this because they just hate the Tories - a perfect presage of the unironic "Anarcho"-Bidenists that emerged in 2020. The campaign is set to fail until the previously popular Tory candidate gets caught wearing BDSM gear and having his homemade sex tapes leaked because of an electrical fire. He nearly wins, regardless, and "spoiled vote" wins something like 40K votes compared to 3.6K for the Liberals and about the same for the NDP (who actually campaigned) and Tories. The Liberals win by a few hundred votes.

The second half of the novel is set in parliament as the author gets to set up what he imagines to be the perfect MP. In his wild fantasies, the now-MP former Scottish professor gets to shut down a local shoe factory so that developing countries can make shoes and have it be retooled for the knowledge economy by building wireless routers, he gets to shut down a gravel operation on the banks of the Ottawa river for environmental concerns, he gets to vote for the newly elected minority Tory Government (in the author's fantasy, the Tories still win the most house seats, lol) throne speech and he gets to serve on one of the dumbest committees of House procedures where you send annoying backbenchers you want to die - it's a real committee and it is actually used for the purpose described.

The scottish engineering prof builds a hovercraft (a hobby shared by the author) which comes into play as he uses it to get to Parliament for a key budget vote that ends up defeating the government 3 months into its mandate.

Throughout, that 80 year old with parkinsons has a grand daughter that is described as mid 20s from context of her being in a Master's program and a lover of, not a joke, Senate reform. Not because she wants the Senate to be elected or abolished, she actually wants it to be appointed and not actually change. A view shared by the pov character and author. It was always pretty cringey because it is obviously the author's ideal woman and the age difference always struck me as a little weird - why not have someone much closer to your own age in your fantasy novel? Why pick someone with that much of a power dynamic, she's a student at a uni your the prof at, she's mid 20s and your mid 30s, you employ her grandmother as a staffer, etc.

The main character also is incredibly self-effacing and self-mocking but in that weird proto-soy way. I dunno, it makes my skin crawl. It reminds me too much of Buttigeig or Beto or Justin Trudeau. Also, there are way too many fart jokes that are given paragraphs of description, from sound, to what food caused it, to initial smell and lingering smell.

The Lib Mind

Rereading this is a fascinating peak into what a lib really thinks of politics and the world. But it reaches out from 2007 into the same issues we see today.

The author is very clearly one of the Laurentian watershed elites that loves technocrats and degree holders even if they do stupid, stupid shit. It's this same set that runs both of the major parties, most major businesses, most NGOs. The Laurentian watershed elite crowd must be defeated and ground to dust for Upper and Lower Canada to have a chance imo (the martimes just has to deal with the Irvings, the west with petit boug).

Politics isn't an arena where you defeat your enemy and follow through on your programs and agenda. It's bipartisan, procedure and rules based, one where you have a "fair" competition between Liberal and Conservative (the nutty NDPers are seen rarely as an ally and more as a liability to the reasonable level headed Liberals). There's a focus on incrementalism and aesthetic issues, like the environment is a concern but only because it's polluting a particular river and nothing to do with the GHG being dumped into the atmosphere - perhaps there was a subconscious recognition that creating the conditions where we coudl fight climate change would mean an end to extractive capitalism and a radical end to that.

The Scot Prof turned unlikely MP is considered a paragon because he follows through on house procedures and traditions - something as abstract as Victorian westminster parliament tradition of not having notes or paper in the House is worthy of note by the author mutliple times. All the main characters are described as "smart" in fact, the Scot Prof's main demographic is the university staff prior to the end of the Tory campaign.

I also think it's so strange that failure was seen as inevitable and that you could only win a Tory riding by sheer dumb luck of them being exposed for weird sex acts. And, even, better the NDP's campaigning didn't even garner them a few hundred more votes to win the riding with, lol.

In particular, I'm struck by one of the novels final vignettes. The government is proposing tax cuts and the Scottish prof decides to have a constituency meeting in the hope that he can explain why he wants to vote against it (hint: it's because all the economists and newspapers were saying it was bad). The people of his riding are mad about it and throw tomatoes and shit. This is bad reaction or the people not liking this MP is never resolved. instead it lingers like one of his farts over the last couple chapters.

Recommendation

Read it if you want, I doubt there's much of interest unless you're a masochist like me. I muttered "what a fucking freak" or "how the fuck would that work" listening to it a few times. It's weird hearing ads on it, the ads are from this era but the recording was done 14 years ago. The author left in a few audio mistakes, he trips over his words a couple times in one chapter and the interstitial music cuts over his reading on an early chapter (and he just never fixed it after 14 years still).