Despite the title, and despite something past 100 volunteer hours, I do not really feel like Matthew Miller’s campaign manager, and after some thought about the role at the municipal level I have come to the view that it might not be fair for anyone to be called the campaign manager in a local election. My own grandmother was the campaign manager for a mayor and for two provincial party leaders, so I have a family reference point for what the role can look like at scale. When a candidate for city council is out there seeking advice, seeking feedback, seeking donations, meeting people at community events, knocking on doors, and putting their face on lawn signs and online communities and the side of a flyer that gets stuffed through every mail slot in the district, the reality is that they are the campaign’s core and the top of its management. There is no layer above them making decisions about who they are or what they stand for. There is no consultant class organizing the ground game. There is, at most, a friend with a laptop and a long resume worth of experience to draw on, which in this case is me. That is not to say a candidate goes at it alone, look no further than Matthew’s own photographers, political advisors, social media manager, etc. Successful municipal campaigns consist of more roles than I had realized before this year.

At a provincial or federal level a campaign manager is genuinely managing people, sometimes on payroll, with schedules and travel logistics and a war room full of polling, and that is a job with the substance the title implies. At the municipal level, unless the manager happens to be a retiree or a student between terms with all of their days free, the role is closer to a coordinator with a specialization or two, media, policy research, functional process, whatever the candidate is least equipped to do on top of the actual campaigning. In my case that has meant business cards, photo editing, keeping up with the news, a website that reflects who Matthew actually is rather than who a template assumes a candidate should be, some policy research on the questions Nanaimo will have to answer over the next decade, and a general willingness to catch whatever falls out of the sky on any given weekend. My day job at the PHSA already runs on the same generalist logic, jack of all trades with pin-hole depths where they matter most, and the past week at work has been one of the harder ones I can remember thanks to being called into action on those pin-hole issues, which is why it has felt good to spend the weekend on something with clearer edges, like updating the business cards and building version two of Matthew’s website with new photos and a platform that has finally settled into what his voters actually want him to stand for.

There is no problem with coming into a campaign early, with a lot of research already in the bank, and with a strong grasp of the issues you expect to run on. The bad version of that same preparation is when you refuse to let the doorstep introductions, the community meetings, and the actual conversations with voters change your mind about which issues matter, and Matthew has never once made that mistake. The issues he is running on today are not the ones I would have predicted from this winter’s research, they are the ones the people of this city keep bringing up, and he has listened, and he has adjusted, and the platform he is heading into the fall with is stronger for it.

Which is a long winded way of saying that in a municipal race the person on the ballot is doing the actual work, and the words next to their name matter less than who they are, so let me talk about who Matthew really is:

Matthew is running on a healthcare worker’s perspective on Nanaimo City Council, built around three priorities within the next council’s authority: primary healthcare access, an improved transit network, and expanded childcare hours. You can read the full platform at his campaign site, and I would encourage you to. He is not running to be flashy, he is not running as a lightning rod, he is not running to project virtue rather than deliver on it, and he is not running on any of the aesthetic modes that have overtaken so much of local government elsewhere in this country. He is running because he has spent his career watching healthcare and social infrastructure fail people at the exact intersections where a competent municipal government could have helped, and he wants to be one of the people at the table when the next set of decisions about those intersections gets made. He is pragmatic in a way that has become genuinely rare in politics at any level, and pragmatism, when it is real, is a form of respect for the people you are trying to help.

The reason I am willing to put my name alongside his, volunteer so many hours, and spend my weekends on this campaign, is that I have known Matthew for years, and I have travelled with him for years, and I have watched him at close range under the kinds of conditions where character reveals itself. We have hiked across the country together on dozens of adventures, and in all of that time, across all of those trips, across all of the small commitments and larger ones that a shared trip requires, neither of us has ever failed to follow through with the other.

The root of it is integrity, the boring, unglamorous discipline of doing what you said you would do, on the day you said you would do it, at the standard you agreed to do it at, even when something more interesting comes up, even when the weather turns, even when there is a small honourable-looking exit available if you wanted to take one. Integrity is a compounding practice more than a personality trait, and every commitment kept makes the next one easier to keep, because you are not spending energy on renegotiation or excuse manufacturing or the quiet corrosive work of explaining to yourself why this particular breach does not really count. When two people have both been running that practice for years, in each other’s presence, on trips where the failure modes are real, missed ferries and closed roads and exhausted daylight in country you do not know, you develop a specific kind of trust that is not the same as care or admiration or shared taste, though those things are also present. It is the trust that when this person says a thing, the thing will happen, and that is the ground on which everything else stands, and it is the ground I am standing on when I say that if you live in Nanaimo and you vote on October 17, you should vote for Matthew Miller.

I have watched him build things and finish them, take on commitments that would have given most people a reason to bow out and bow in instead, and grow steadily since I advised him, some years ago, to expand his endeavours outside of his career. He has continued to explore his options for making not just a name for himself but actually standing up for what he believes in, and he is now leading the charge towards solutions this city genuinely needs. There are few people I have met who are more tenacious, more driven, and more willing to meet their commitments than Matthew Miller, and I am proud, without any irony, to be his campaign manager, whatever that title actually means when the person on the ballot is doing the real work.