Ivison: What really goes on inside the leader's election campaign bus

National Post

25-04-2025

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John Ivison has been on the road with the federal leaders' election campaign tours for his eighth go-round, and offers a behind the scenes look at life with the boys and girls on the bus. Watch the video or read the transcript.
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Every election campaign brings me back to Timothy Crouse's classic account of the George McGovern U.S. presidential bid in 1972, The Boys on the Bus.
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Crouse said that what reporters know best, is not the voters but the tiny community of the press bus and plane, 'a totally abnormal world that combines the incestuousness of New England hamlet, with the giddiness of a mid-ocean gala and the physical rigour of the Long March'.
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This is my eighth general election and it's an accurate description.
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The past week on the Carney Express has involved a lot of hurry up and wait; being shepherded onto buses and planes: arriving like thieves in the night at some unremarkable hotel and leaving as the sun is coming up.
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'Did you enjoy your stay,' I was asked when checking out in Montreal. It was hard to say. We'd only been there for eight hours, six of them asleep.
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The days are a blur. On Sunday, after a rally in Nepean, we flew to Prince Edward Island, landing in the teeth of a cyclone. It was a huge relief not to end up as the eighth paragraph of a PM plane crash story.
Next morning, we flew to Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and fell asleep in Quebec City.
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Once a day, we get a chance to question the candidate for 15 minutes, which forms the basis for the day's news. Not everyone gets a question, so reporters huddle – not so much a conspiracy as colleagues cooperating to ensure everyone's questions are covered.
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Most days, the candidate will take part in a ludicrous photo op requiring him to risk losing a digit on a saw at some factory or other.
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I bumped into Carney while he was having breakfast and he told me as Bank of England governor, he once had to drive a simulator around a racetrack at the Jaguar car factory. 'Has anyone ever made it round,' he asked. 'Lewis Hamilton almost did,' came the reply. The headline of the Governor crashing the economy into a wall wrote itself.
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Carney was much more comfortable playing road hockey with a bunch of 10 year olds, his only concern being that he might take out one of the kids. Elbows were down for the day.
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I've travelled on three campaigns covering Justin Trudeau, four with Stephen Harper; I was in the Rockies with Andrew Scheer and watched Jagmeet Singh longboat on the tarmac in Halifax and found quiet time to write a column on a bench in Kelowna.