The Red Review
The Red Review
Presenting the Municipal Socialist Alliance — Danny Drew for Mayor of Guelph
All the people who work on The Red Review live and work on stolen Indigenous lands across Turtle Island. There can be no reconciliation without restitution, which includes Land Back, RCMP off Indigenous land, and seizing the assets of the major resource corporations and returning them to the commons.
Join us this month for a new series, where Emily and Daniel introduce listeners to the Municipal Socialist Alliance (MSA) candidates running for mayor, city councillor, and school board trustee throughout Ontario!
Up next is Danny Drew, the MSA candidate for mayor of Guelph.
Candidate Links:
Danny Drew Website
Danny Drew Twitter
Danny Drew Facebook
Danny Drew Instagram
Community Organizations:
Guelph Neighbourhood Support Coalition
The People and Information Network (PIN)
Royal City Mission
Articles:
'I can't do this': Guelph councillor fails challenge to take transit for 1 week
Emily Steers
Hello everyone, and welcome to The Red Review, a Socialist Action podcast. My name is Emily steers. I use she/her pronouns, and I'm coming to you from the unceded territories of the Neutral, Anishinaabe, and Haudenosaunee peoples, just outside of the Haldeman tract, known as Guelph, Ontario.
Daniel Tarade
Hi comrades. My name is Daniel, I use he/him pronouns. And I'm coming to you from Tkaronto, the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee, the Anishinaabeg, the Chippewa, the Mississaugas of the Credit, and the Huron Wendat. All people in Socialist Action, we all live and work on stolen Indigenous land from across Turtle Island. So we echo the call of land back and Indigenous self-determination. There can be no reconciliation without restitution, and that includes seizing the assets of the major resource corporations and returning them to the commons. We are continuing with our Municipal Socialist Alliance coverage. The podcast has never been more active. This is our fifth interview in our first eight days because the Municipal Socialist Alliance slate is 10 candidates from Toronto to Mississauga to Ottawa and to Guelph, and that's where we're going today, with our one and only mayoral candidate Danny Drew. Danny Drew is a non-binary activist running to be mayor of Guelph. Born and raised in Oshawa, they moved to attend the University of Guelph in 2009, graduated with a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering. Danny worked in a wide range of jobs, always encouraging co-workers to exercise their rights and push for unionization. Currently seeking to win rights for thousands of workers via reclassification, they've supported many striking workers on picket lines. Danny is a steadfast ally of ongoing social justice movements - such as Indigenous land back and Black Lives Matter - actively resisting the rising tide of fascism. Their main focus has always been poverty relief, offering labour, organizing capabilities, and vast quantities of recovered supplies for all those in need. At the onset of the COVID pandemic, Danny co-developed a renter's union as well as help to operate a Food Not Bombs project. In the municipal arena, Danny pledges to fight tooth and nail for every possible concession from Capital and its state. That includes a high-powered harm reduction strategy involving: reformed social housing systems and relations, expanded and improved public transit, increased funding for mental health and drug user support programs, worker co-op and community land trust formation and expansion, and a drastically altered and reduced police force. Danny as part of the Municipal Socialist Alliance commits to expose the propaganda that keeps the bourgeoisie in power and the majority oppressed. In other words, a campaign for Workers' Government to increase class consciousness and spur unionization, mutual aid and local self-organization to enable working people to improve their lives.
Emily Steers
Welcome, Danny!
Danny Drew
Hey there. How's it going?
Daniel Tarade
We're doing great. How are you doing?
Danny Drew
All right, pretty stressed out. But so it goes. So aren't we all.
Emily Steers
Fair enough. Well, that's a fabulous bio. Super exciting, obviously, because I'm in Guelph. I'm so excited that we have an MSA candidate as well as many other really awesome progressives running it here in Guelph. It's so so great to see. Is there anything you want to cover that we didn't manage to mention in your bio?
Danny Drew
No, I think I think the intro pretty well covers the main points of my run. I could talk infinitely about the various causative and strategical purposes of my run. But I'm not gonna get necessarily into that right now. Because we're just in the intro.
Daniel Tarade
I want to say, Danny, the way I found out about you, the way a lot of the MSA candidates in Toronto found out about you was an article that was shared in one of our group chats that just had "non-binary communists running for mayor of Guelph." And immediately that was enough descriptions like, okay, maybe reach out to this person. So I want to hear from your perspective as someone that was running a campaign initially as an individual. What about the Municipal Socialist Alliance, when we reached out, you thought, okay, maybe it's worthwhile joining up with these people.
Danny Drew
What grabbed me was actually the depth and specificity of the analysis I could see in the policy platforms you're putting forward. Actually, I like swiped a lot of them for my PDF version of my platform, the download, because you clearly put a lot of research into it. That was what initially grabbed me. I eventually started talking more to Barry and such after he reached out.
Emily Steers
Awesome.
Daniel Tarade
That's awesome.
Emily Steers
And so if you'd like to go into a little bit more depth, so let's talk about your platform for the city of Guelph.
Danny Drew
Yeah, sure. Anything in particular you'd like to hear about?
Emily Steers
Well, you mentioned in your bio, you described wanting to increase worker power, unionization, mutual aid, all of these amazing things that I can attest our city is in absolutely desperate need in, particularly desperate need of municipal assistance. You know, there are amazing organizations like The Bench and Chalmers who are doing a lot of work but without a lot of political support.
Danny Drew
Basically, there are as you're kind of indicating towards, there are a shitload of helpers in town. There's so many people that just individually like they might, they'll bring a pair or a pack of socks to maybe ... as you referred to The Bench just to help a few people out or like groups of like two or three, maybe distribute a few bits of clothing here and there. But this is great. But it's an incredible waste of energy and time and money. Because these people, there's a concept called overhead cost where like, if you're even if you're just starting an organization of a couple people, just to help feed people, there's going to be a lot of like setup and whatnot you have to do. Let's think about like cooking a meal for someone. If you're cooking a meal for yourself, you still have to turn the oven on and get it up to heat. The oven will still use just as much energy as if you were cooking for 10 people as if you're looking for just one - well, a little bit more, but that's what this overhead cost is. It's the amount of energy it cost to get going, to start it. So with all of these like, well, I would almost venture to say like 1000s of people who help people in Guelph, there's an unthinkable amount of energy and capacity used, wasted in redoing these things that have already been done by others. It would be impossible to just start from scratch. But I would like to implement something like for example, the Guelph Neighborhood Support Coalition. their purpose, ostensibly is to, well, do what I'm kind of what I'm talking about here is: connecting all the various helpers, small orgs, larger orgs, larger institutions together, so they can share resources and organizational capacity and skills. But they are not doing it for one reason or another. It's probably a matter of funding and personnel or whatever. There's also something I learned about through PIN (People Information Network) that apparently they have something like that, but no one knows about it. There needs to be some sort of overarching structure or connective tissue - make sure all of these things can work together well and not waste energy. For example, of one more small example. There's Royal City Mission. They do all kinds of great work for helping with poverty relief. They have, just on the regular, mountains of bread. They can't get through it all. And then down the street Hope House, they are constantly out of bread. These two people are aiming at the same goal, poverty relief, but they're not talking to one another. And they're hundreds of meters away.
Emily Steers
Yeah, we need a consolidation of all of these different networks.
Daniel Tarade
It's something I often think about with our campaign, because we are trying to build something from the grassroots up. The idea being, you know, even if you have a candidate running for something, they're more a representative of the movement that's being built rather than an individual. And in that way, hopefully, as we, you know, rise up and take power, that those things are coming in with us and behind us, as opposed to something let's say like the Bernie Sanders campaign in the United States where they raised 10s of millions of dollars, and just imagine what the anarchists and the radicals in your community could do with even a small fraction of that actual material wealth. Because the people in Toronto I see doing amazing work are doing it with essentially zero money, entirely volunteer, entirely grassroots collective, and they've made a big impact. Yet, if you started giving them the legitimate tools available to establishment politicians, that's when you're starting to talk about building of a movement, of a revolutionary movement that can actually challenge entrenched power, rather than Bernie Sanders. I'm not sure exactly what he's accomplished. So if you have some thoughts on this, and maybe some of the establishment politicians that have come before you in Guelph that you might want to put on blast. I don't know what Guelph's like, go for it.
Emily Steers
Yeah, please tell us more about Guelph because so far we've been hearing from a lot of Toronto and Mississauga folks, and not a lot of people know about our humble little city.
Danny Drew
Yeah. fair point. Well, since I'll be speaking, maybe on matters of poverty relief, and politicians, maybe I'll start off there. Guelph is, in a lot of ways. It's just, it's an illusion. It's got a reputation as being a green city. It's got a reputation of being this high cultural center. It's got a reputation as being kind and diverse. It's none of these things. Basically, it's incredibly white, incredibly, like full of incredibly privileged people who couldn't give a shit about, you know, a homeless person on the street. It's less than 10 years ago, for example, yeah, like the arts and culture scene was bigger, better. But the establishments over the years especially the most, like most recent incumbent, who's been in there for the last eight, is just an absolutely hollowing out the city. There's nothing left. It's completely drained of colour and life.
Emily Steers
Can attest as an arts worker in Guelph. It's, it's been really, really difficult. And there are places that are fighting really, really hard and clinging on tooth and nail to be these art spaces and you know, push green development and all of these things, but it's hard to tout yourself as a green city when most of the major roads don't even have bike lanes.
Danny Drew
We have a borderline non-functional transit system. I was just talking to a bus driver the other day about that because we were talking about — there were there were just some really silly event downtown where hundreds of people will arrive to swarm the streets. That's not a problem. I'm not complaining about that. But all of them fucking drove like, they drove downtown. We have buses, it's just they're a punishment to ride, you know.
Daniel Tarade
Yeah.
Danny Drew
They barely work.
Daniel Tarade
I know that feeling well, too.
Emily Steers
It's a very inefficiently laid out transit system.
Danny Drew
And it's just doesn't have enough funding to — even if we kept the current routes and everything as they were, if we just had like, you know, an extra bus on every route, it'd be a little more functional. But nonetheless, or, you know, ran for a few extra hours at night so the people who - well when the students weren't here - so the people working shift work or night shifts could actually get home and wouldn't have to shell out for a car.
Daniel Tarade
Yeah. No, there's a lot of really ridiculous gaps in the system. The subway in Toronto stops running between two and six, but there are tons of people that finish their shifts at that time, right. So a lot of people are, are falling through the cracks. I want to ask from the very beginning, you've identified as a communist in this mayoral campaign.
Danny Drew
Yeah.
Daniel Tarade
What's the reaction been? I'm curious.
Danny Drew
Well, I'm actually surprised. I was, um, knock on wood, but I was expecting even potentially violence. Because I mean, there are fascists in town. This is known, but I haven't seen anything. Like there seems to be really — from what I've heard, people either are saying hell yes, a communist, or I don't give a shit that they're a communist because they got good policies lined up. It's very strange and very unexpected.
Daniel Tarade
Yeah. And isn't that a scary sight for the bourgeoisie to think that the power they have of invoking fear with just the word is starting to disappear?
Danny Drew
That was actually one of the minor reasons I wanted to like run was just to widen people's political horizons. But apparently, that work has already been done to some degree, because no one's scared of me. Well, except for the bourgeoisie of course.
Emily Steers
And I also want to say, it's been really, really exciting to see a lot of the NDP membership locally, really coming out swinging in support of you.
Danny Drew
Yeah, even James Parr was like — and offered up to help volunteer for whatever purposes we need. It's great to see like even the quote unquote, progressives, you know, like, rad libs are coming out.
Emily Steers
Yeah.
Daniel Tarade
Like you're saying, you're, you're trying to stretch, you know, to use that phrase, Overton window, and you're positioning yourself as the change candidate. And so what is the biggest change that is the first domino that needs to fall in what's going to be a long struggle against capitalism? What do you think is the most ripe for the picking or a scab that you can just kind of pick at, of the system, and you can start getting it to bleed a little bit and get the, get the people descending on it.
Danny Drew
Well, in general, just like what's being called by libs the affordability crisis. Like I think the primary part of that is housing though. Like that's what I've been harping on a lot during — like in my rhetoric for the campaign. It's just, the 30% vacancy tax is what I'm calling for. Like minimum. I'd go for it, I'd go for 100%, 1000% if anyone would let me through you know. Like, it doesn't matter. These people should not have those fucking houses you know, but I digress though. Like it doesn't really matter if you can't afford food if you've already frozen to death you know?
Daniel Tarade
Yeah
Danny Drew
And there are. In Guelph, it's particularly ripe because we have an incredible quantity of vacant housing. Far more than enough for every homeless person. Like that would be a drop in the bucket compared to all the vacant houses we have. We can house them all in like, in the vacant houses I've found in like a kilometer radius. It's ridiculous.
Daniel Tarade
I think that's the reality. I mean, in Toronto as well, we have way more vacant units than people without a steady place to live. And again, that is a contradiction of the system. The fact that it's not a scarcity, it's an artificial scarcity.
These beautiful condos, I mean, not my opinion, but beautiful condos going up just completely empty. You know, it's ugh.
Emily Steers
Yeah, exactly. So what was the spark for you that made you decide, Okay, it's time, I'm going to run for mayor. Because that's not always a direction that people want to go in when they have issues they want to raise. What was your precipitating moment?
Danny Drew
I guess like the crystal that started the snowflake, there's a lot of different levels that I could answer the question now but just the very first thing was when — actually, Emily, you might be aware that I used to run that, like just out on my front lawn, I had the free stuff table. Like it was like a little kind of stuff exchange, free things library.
Emily Steers
Yeah yeah yeah.
Danny Drew
And that was during the pandemic. That was like god — not even just for getting stuff to people that need it, like but even just for building and maintaining a sense of community and interpersonal connection, that was a godsend. And the city took it away. Illegally, mind you. Like they haven't responded to my request for an appeal. By the letter of their own law, they made an illegal decision. So they took that away. And so I'm like, fuck this. I want to — at first, my decision to run as mayor was because there were already a lot of good council candidates going forward. So I was like, ah, screw it. I'll run for mayor or yell at Cam. Like it was kind of going to be more of a - just a protest run. But then like a bunch of support came out of the woodwork, like. Especially like Susan Watson, for example. Just local great person to actually support me and so once I realized this. I would have help. People had my back and actually like, they wanted change, really wanted change. Like hey, why don't I take this seriously?
Emily Steers
And we do have a whole bunch of paper candidates for mayor, basically, who aren't campaigning at all. And I think, I think the response you're getting, and what I've been hearing from people, has has been so overwhelmingly positive. There's been so much excitement. And I think that just goes to show the level of frustration a lot of people have with our current mayor, Cam Guthrie, and the way things have been run and a lot of the frustrations people have with city council generally.
Danny Drew
Actually, I mean, just a short little — like, yesterday, I was talking to some old, to some older fella, has a house and everything. He was like an anti-bike lane crank. And, and yet, nonetheless, at the end of this conversation, I secured his vote. Like, he's just so sick of Cam that despite me actively wanting to expand the bike lanes and stuff, he's like, Yeah, you got my vote.
Emily Steers
Woo hoo!
Danny Drew
People are real sick.
Daniel Tarade
That is funny. Danny, I just want to loop back really quickly, because I picked up on a thing that kind of connected with some sentiments here. So you had a table where you would exchange free stuff within your yard and city bylaw officers came and shut that down?
Danny Drew
Yes, that's right.
Daniel Tarade
Wow. So that I'm — I wouldn't be surprised if you heard what was happening in Toronto with Khaleel Seivright, who was making tiny shelters. And he was sued by the city and shut down because, again, was just literally creating shelters so people wouldn't freeze to death in the winter. And it seems as capitalism continues to decay, for some people, the impulse is okay, we're just going to take care of ourselves. And yet what breaks the back of that camel then is when the city's like, No, you can't even take care of yourself.
Danny Drew
Yeah, exactly.
Daniel Tarade
And that seems to be an impulse for people. It's like, well, then the whole system has to go. Is that something you resonate with? And is that something you're picking up with in your campaign?
Danny Drew
I think so. Yeah. Because just — exactly, we're not able to help ourselves even because everything's too expensive. We're not allowed to help each other. We're not allowed to exist on our own. So yeah, eat shit system. Time to burn.
Daniel Tarade
Yeah. Time to burn. I love it. Have you been getting into debates at all?
Danny Drew
There are no public debates this year actually. So I mean, I've meant to go to all of them. I had to miss two sadly due to just like, some personal stuff come up in my life, like death in the family, etc. But I went to one, Chamber of Commerce — Cam kicked my ass. He ran circles around me. It's my first one ever, but I did get some good hits in. I have two more coming up next week that I really, I'm really looking forward to. One is the social justice — well loosely, it's a Social Justice Coalition debate over at the United Church on Dublin. And there's another one at Bishop Max. I'm going to hopefully radicalize a bunch of kids.
Emily Steers
Heck yeah!
Daniel Tarade
Awesome. I love it. No, and just the opportunity to be able to get this though. And you're right, it's a skill to develop. However far you get this time, it's, it's just building that base for the eventual breakthrough.
Emily Steers
And also letting the establishment know, there is a radical undercurrent. There are people who are desperate for change, who are not getting their needs met. And you can't cover with well, you know, we're just going to take the center approach and —
Danny Drew
We tried that!
Emily Steers
— everyone can just kind of eat shit and die, we're getting our own. No, people are unhappy, and they're gonna let you know.
Daniel Tarade
And so Danny, at this point, you know, it's about three weeks until election day. What's, what's been the biggest thing that you've gotten out there? What have you been the most proud of, you know, talk about yourself. Give yourself some props, because it's a big undertaking you've taken on.
Danny Drew
I guess, I was talking to — I was briefly speaking to an incumbent counselor yesterday who recognized me just from, I guess, because I look recognizable. Yeah, they had mentioned that — I didn't know this, apparently, most mayoral candidates prep two years in advance. I did like a month in advance. So I'm just, what I'm proud — I guess in general proud of like me and my tiny little team's ability to have done anything at all with such - so, so little time, so little experience, you know. Because I mean, I can't go anywhere. It's it's actually pretty stressful. I can't go anywhere. I can't even go get a beer without someone saying, oh look, it's the fucking mayor, I'm voting for you. I'm like, Oh, my God, please. One moment. One night off. But yeah, just to have accomplished so much in so little time is I think something to be proud of. It kind of feels like — I'm not sure if y'all read on Guerilla Warfare by Che, but it kind of feels like a bit of like electoral political guerrilla warfare —
Emily Steers
Absolutely.
Danny Drew
— tiny little mobile team just like running circles around a giant political monster.
Daniel Tarade
I love it.
Emily Steers
Absolutely. So whatever the outcome is, although we're all hoping for a huge communist upset win, what would you like to see more of at city council with all of these amazing progressive candidates who are running for councilor positions? What are you hoping to see more of in the aftermath of October 24?
Danny Drew
I want to — I hope someone puts forward [a] motion to abolish the closed council sessions because that's a little fucked up i you ask me. If it's the case — for example, they might give the answer, a straw man here, but what if they give the answer Oh, well, we don't want companies responding to certain fiduciary matters — they might be able to, what do you say like, affect the market via these decisions that are still being decided or discussed. Well, there's a contradiction of capital for you. We're not allowed to have open political discussion because capitalists might take advantage of that and fuck us over? Anyway yeah, so in short, I'd like to see council be a little more transparent, but people have been saying that for fucking years. It's not going to happen unless the absolute best slate of candidates get in.
Emily Steers
What else would be some progressive policy that you could see happening at the city level?
Danny Drew
Well, put up the fucking library. Stop yelling about it. It's planned for. It's budgeted for. Just put it up. We're wasting time. We could talk about other shit, you know?
Emily Steers
Oh, yes. Oh, my God, the library.
Danny Drew
I'd like to obviously improve transit. Like I'd like to— I'd like to see them put the timeline forward on inter- and intra-regional transit. We're like a decade behind if not more on that. Like Durham Region is a shithole. I come from Oshawa, and like they've had inter-regional transit since before I left town. Christ, this place is backwards.
Emily Steers
It is embarrassing.
Danny Drew
I would like to — I mean, this is a little bit further in the future, I'd like to see some more like not white straight people in the council. And apparently we're going to be — like Guelph is taking a lot of immigrants in these days. So we're going to be actually a little more diverse - won't be so horrifically white going forwards, but yeah that's for the next election.
Daniel Tarade
And we talked about this was the last person we interviewed. But I don't know what Guelph is like in terms of the class character of it's city council, but do you have any renters on city council, any people that take public transit on city council?
Danny Drew
I think outgoing James Gordon, I think. He's by no means like a renter. But I think he took the bus and such, biked around just on principle.
Emily Steers
There was that experiment a couple of years ago, where people raised a challenge to city councilors to take the bus exclusively. Not use their car, but take the bus exclusively for two weeks. And all of them failed. And they all said, Well, I just I couldn't get to important meetings on time and I couldn't fulfill my duties. I couldn't fulfill my duties as a councilor and take public transit.
Daniel Tarade
Wild.
Emily Steers
And I was like, Is that not the most screaming indictment of how awful our transit system is.
Danny Drew
They're saying that they can't fulfill the duties of a part-time position via the bus. And this is what, this is what they, ugh. Ridiculous.
Daniel Tarade
And that's what a campaign like yours can also hopefully try and reveal those contradictions. The fact that this system, even under the ideal conditions, whatever you try and imagine, fundamentally, there's a small number of people that are making money off of the majority of people, and there's no way a system in which those small people making all the money, who also have way more power because of all the money they have, for that to work for the masses of people. It's just fundamentally impossible. So trying to make that clear to people and to also incite in them the desire to take power for themselves seems like it's the ultimate task.
Danny Drew
Absolutely. Oh yeah. One of the things — it's not in all about rhetoric because I've been trying to say so many different things, I couldn't say everything everywhere, but as I made a point in, I think it was like Guelph Today article because I knew the most people would be reading that one, I made a point to be very open about like, I'm only able to do this as I told them because my fucking dad died, and I got a lot of money. Well not a lot. Me and my brothers split the house money, so we got a little bit of money. I don't have to work right now. That's the only reason that I'm able to do this is because I'm fucking unemployed and have a shitload of money right now. I can - I can just do this.
Daniel Tarade
Yeah.
Danny Drew
It's not accessible to anyone unless you're you know already at homeowner. For example, I was talking to an incumbent councilor yesterday. They're married. Both of them are working in a professional style job. They make a decent buck. They have the means to do this. Like they have someone — because they're a couple, they can they have someone who can just clean the house, do laundry while you're out canvassing. Do you have a fucking dirty my bed is right now? I haven't washed the sheets in weeks. It's gross. I don't like it. And that's with not having a job and having the money to do this. This system is clearly inaccessible to anyone but the the privileged and I wanted to make that clear as part of my campaign.
Daniel Tarade
Absolutely, absolutely. You know, the MSA, we talk about we're an electoral Alliance. Yet our goal isn't electoralism for its own sake. The idea isn't to just copy the system and somehow, like, sneak our way in there and subterfuge our way to a revolution. Our ultimate line is we're an electoral alliance, but our primary goal is revolution. But this is a tactic.
Danny Drew
Yeah, it's a tactic Lenin would support. You know, it's like we have to take part of the electoral politics because that's what people believe in right now. We have to show them how stupid it is so that they can see the necessity of the revolutionary party.
Daniel Tarade
Yeah, it's a big part of [it], and it's one of the only ways we can get our ideas out there to a reasonable number of people. And so it's a big platform but you know, ultimately —
Danny Drew
It's free. Exactly, free publicity.
Daniel Tarade
Free publicity. Any massive media coverage we can rip from the hands of the media moguls, we'll take it, but we obviously are trying to build outside of the system as much as possible, so we can challenge directly the system. So any opportunities, any collaborations, any groups that you've connected with in Guelph where you can see how going into this campaign is going to lead to the grassroots being stronger coming out of it?
Danny Drew
That was part of the intent behind running because like, Well, I mean, things are actually looking like, it's not quite so certain that I'll lose at this point. But part of the reason was just like knowing I would lose, I just wanted to activate a bunch of people. Some of the best activists I know are just like, you know, completely beatdown, hopeless. So I was hoping to get people either reactivated or new people activated, knowing there's somewhere out there, they can go to actually try to enact their will as a class. So after this, like, regardless, if I'm the mayor, fuck it, I just have to be the mayor. But if I'm not, then we're going to be doing a bit of organizing, you know.
Daniel Tarade
Awesome.
Emily Steers
And I love that one of your platform points is consolidating all of these different networks in Guelph and helping build out these networks and connecting these different nodes on this spider's web of mutual aid that we're trying to build.
Danny Drew
Yeah, I wanted — I couldn't say it outright, because it's like back in the early Soviet Union days. They would have like, they had a state laundry. You could just have everyone do your laundry. It's not exactly the same thing. But to partially centralize for the efficiency gains these sort of efforts is just, it's shown time and time again to be [the] clear path, but I just couldn't say like, Hey, look, the Soviet Union did it and it worked real well — let's do this.
Emily Steers
Well, never know, as you've found out, people are getting less and less afraid of the word communist.
Danny Drew
Next time, yeah. next election. I'll just, heh.
Emily Steers
So wrapping things up. Let's imagine the whole Guelph electorate is listening to this podcast. — wouldn't that be great — what would you like to say to the electorate of Guelph? Go.
Danny Drew
We're, we're running out of time. We can't wait until times get better. There will not be a better time than now to get started. We have to take power. We have to put power back into our hands. Life's hard now, I know. There's no time for anything. Who could imagine having time to build an organization, to have built a revolution, take the power from the system. But it's only going to get harder from here. I'm going to try to like make things a little easier, give people a little more breathing room. But anyone with the energy to build anything at all, or help anyone else at all, needs to — they need to do that now. There's no time to waste.
Daniel Tarade
I like that. They say the best time to plant a tree was 100 years ago. The second best time is today. The best time to join the revolution. Sure, maybe it was a decade ago, but the second best time is now.
Danny Drew
Exactly.
Emily Steers
Amazing. I am so heartened and so thrilled with the energy and the support that you're getting. It's so so wonderful to see. And I'm incredibly excited for how this campaign is going to play out. So I'll be seeing you out on the streets on the campaign trail. And to the rest of our comrades, stay safe. Stay active. Don't forget to vote, and we will see you very soon.