Thank you — you are great!

Sorry for the long delay in composing my thank you letter to everyone.

There are three reasons for this delay.  One is that I have just been busy every single second since the end of the campaign packing up the office and talking to the steady stream of supporters and well-wishers.  Second is that I am still digesting the result, which I honestly don’t understand so I’m finding hard to comment on.  And third is that the level of support has simply been so overwhelming and wonderful that I can’t begin to imagine how I would thank everyone enough.

But I do want to say what I’ve maintained ever since I joined the Green Party.  Everything about both the 2011 General Election and about this by-election reaffirms my sense that political fortunes these days have everything to do with the teamwork of the parties involved and the political spin that’s generated in the media around it.  It’s not about me, it’s about all of us working together, and I am so proud to have had such a strong, diverse and talented group of supporters.  It’s for that reason that both in 2011 and in this by-election, I would have loved to see much better results, not for me, but as a reflection of the much larger and better organized campaigns we have run.  You all deserved better in both these elections.  And we obviously need to strategize so that the effort we all put in is maximized in the future.

Thank you.  Thank you from the bottom of my heart for the most energetic, enthusiastic and cheerful campaign I have ever been privileged enough to be involved with.  Thank you for standing by me, thank you for supporting me, and thanks for the helpful suggestions throughout on how I could improve my debate performance and public speaking.  I have grown a lot during this campaign and we have all grown as a team.  To those who came to help from other ridings, I look forward to working together again on campaigns across the city and beyond. One day, I may be helping on your campaigns and bringing along the Toronto-Danforth team to help out.  We can all grow together, that’s part of the plan.

The day after the 2011 general election, I was weeping into the shredder as I thought about what a disappointment this must be to my team.  This year, I celebrated our hard work on election night with some 50 supporters and walked away, not with a crushing disappointment but with a strong determination to rebuild.  I will be asking our EDA to be appointed as a community outreach organizer, and expect to call each and every one of our identified supporters, asking them for their ideas on how to grow the party and encouraging them to get involved.  Please join our team.

A lot of people have asked me to run again in 2015.  I’m not yet sure what my situation will be at that time.  I want to work to make sure, like this time, that we have our choice of several great contestants, and I will recommend to the EDA that a new candidate not be chosen until 2014 to give us time to grow and attract strong options.

I do want to leave off with one thought, and that is that you should never mistake the low results with a rejection of the Green Party.  Most of you who worked on this campaign must be aware of that, but it’s especially clear to me.  When I became the nominated candidate in 2009 and started going door-to-door, about a third of the people who answered their door did not know the Green Party existed and the majority of the remainder thought of us as strictly the environment party.  That is not the sense I get today.  We are known, recognized and loved, with the majority of people wishing that strategic considerations did not keep them from casting a Green vote.  On election day and the days following, I met literally hundreds of people on the street who sought me out, asking me to run again because they wanted to vote for me but felt they could not this time.  We have gained a dozen new volunteers and three new Green Party members since the election from the ranks of people who looked at the results and decided that they were done with strategic voting.  A swing to the Green Party could be very, very quick in this riding, which I believe is more fundamentally Green than anything else in its heart.

Thank you again.  It was a privilege working with all of you.  As Jim Harris said on the evening of the election, it is clear to all of us on the ground that the party continues to grow.  And like a pile of sand which will eventually create a cascade, an avalanche of sand, we cannot predict which grain of sand will cause it, but we can see it coming.  Let’s hope that it comes soon enough to have a big, bold impact for our children, for Toronto-Danforth, for Canada and for the planet.

With love, Adriana

— Adriana Mugnatto-Hamu on 2012 Mar 25 in Elections, Shameless fawning