#586 - Our Mayoral Losers are all good men - they have a Purpose

The Role of the Loser

On resilience, and the importance of personal choice

Our political system treats the person who finishes second as if they never existed. The results come in, the winner is thanked, and the rest go quiet. Their voters go quiet with them. The work they did, the questions they raised, and the people they listened to for months have no place in the system once the count ends.

That isn't an accident. Winner-take-all contests are built to produce one winner and discard everything else. Ranked ballots would have given supporters of losing candidates some say, and Ontario removed that option for municipal elections. Federal electoral reform was promised in 2015 and dropped in 2017. The system rewards those it has already rewarded, so it has little reason to change.

The system won't make room for the loser, so the loser has to decide what the role is.

Some do come back. Catherine McKenney finished second for mayor in 2022 with 119,241 votes and said afterward they planned to be done with politics. Then an opening appeared, and they won a seat at Queen's Park. That's one way to answer defeat. But it took a party, a name, and a vacant seat, and most losing candidates have none of those. Resilience mattered, but so did luck.

The more important point is that losing doesn't have to end the work. A campaign produces research, relationships, and a record of what was asked and not answered. None of that depends on holding office. Journalism, watchdog work, delegations to committee, and plain persistence keep an issue alive in a way nobody can vote out. Some of the best accountability in a city comes from people who don't hold a seat and have nothing to lose by saying what is true.

This is my last run, win or lose.

The part that matters most is choice. Most people who lose don't choose when they leave. The voters choose for them, and the exit is simply imposed. I'm choosing mine. Having decided that ahead of time changes the question I ask. It is no longer "What happens to me if I lose?" It is "What did this campaign leave behind, and what do I do with it?"

That's a question every candidate can ask, and every voter who backed a losing candidate can ask it too. Your vote wasn't wasted because the person you supported didn't win. It counted as a statement of what you wanted the conversation to be about. The loser's job, and the supporter's job, is to keep that conversation going, because nobody else is required to.

Resilience isn't pretending the loss didn't hurt. It's deciding, in advance and on your own terms, that the work continues in another form. The system may have no role for the loser, but that doesn't mean the loser has to disappear.

Peter Karwacki, Ward 13 (Rideau-Rockcliffe)