by Maurice Y. Michaud (he/him)
According to my mother, when I decided to come forth into this world, I wasn’t interested in messing around. My father and her had been visiting family friends for a leisurely Wednesday night game of cards. Many years later, my mother told me that she felt like she was overstaying her welcome just a bit that evening, but it’s that she felt so comfortable at our friends’ kitchen table, as I had settled in her belly in a much more accommodating position for her tiny five-foot frame. But eventually they did make it back home and were preparing to go to bed around half past midnight on August 19, 1965. Fifty minutes later, before the doctor could arrive from his cottage in Shediac, New Brunswick, I was delivered by nurses at Moncton’s Hôtel Dieu Hospital, now known as the Dumont. An eight-and-a-half pound package.
My father, Robert, was from Rivière-du-Loup, in Québec’s Lower St. Lawrence region, while my mother, Thérèse Laforest, would tell us repeatedly that she was “native of Québec,” as if to emphasize that she had never fully digested her family’s move when she was 11. On the other hand, my two brothers, my sister, and I were born and raised in Acadie. When I lived there, the people I met thought I was Québécois, but now that I have been living in Montréal since 2008, the clients I speak to at work recognize that this is not quite the case. So, whenever I’m asked, I answer that I am Québécois in fact, but that my soul is Acadian. I speak French and English fluently, sometimes switching from one language to the other in mid-sentence without realizing it. But I unequivocally consider myself francophone. I did my primary and secondary studies in French, and although I began university in French, I finished in English, in Halifax, with a bachelor’s degree in public relations.
I remained in Halifax after university. Upon graduation in 1989, I became the managing editor of Atlantis: A Women’s Studies Journal
— the most challenging and rewarding job I have ever had. The negative challenge was having to establish trust and credibility (a 24-year-old guy, even though a gay guy, helping to run a women’s studies journal?). But the far more positive challenges were to find myself working in publishing, editing texts presenting complicated ideas and concepts, and being surrounded by generous and supportive mentors like Deborah. Four years at that wonderful gig were followed by three years at an underwhelming gig as the supervisor the language lab at Mount Saint Vincent University. However, it kept the door open for four years of part-time teaching in print media, which was a treat although woefully underpaid, while I freelanced as an editor.
My teaching years coincided with the emergence of the World Wide Web and, recognizing that this new media was fundamentally text-based, I realigned my freelance work toward developing content-rich websites. I taught myself PHP and MySQL, and soon afterwards developed my own content management system, called TextStyleM, and established a small base of clients in the Maritimes. But as much as I loved what I was doing, there was one tiny little problem: I’m not a very good business person. I found myself having to wear all the hats to run the business and not generating enough revenue to hire someone to help me. Or maybe I was just a control freak and couldn’t let go?
So by late 2005, I sought the advice of my chartered accountant brother to find a way forward. Among the ideas and suggestions he made, he spoke of how people who invest in the stock market need to have a cool head and thresholds, and stick to them. “Keep the stock unless it goes below X or above Y, no questions asked.” Therefore, in my case, I had to have a goal and a deadline by which to reach it, but simultaneously prepare a Plan B on which I could fall back should I reach the deadline before the goal. In other words, I needed to learn if, when, and how to let go.
Fate had it that I engaged Plan B much sooner than expected — well before reaching either the goal or the deadline — namely, a one-year contract with Technology and Operations at RBC Royal Bank as a “conversion officer.” Thus I could bring to them my technical knowledge and teaching experience. A year later, the contract became a permanent position as a client training specialist and, in March 2026, I will be retiring after 20 years of service at RBC. What used to be my day-to-day work became my hobby, although in recent years, my hobby has been occupying as much time as a second full-time job, but without pay.
The first election I truly, consciously remember was the 1979 federal general election. I don’t know why that is, but I can speculate.
I was 13 years old. The only prime minister I had ever known was Pierre Elliott Trudeau. He had, after all, been in that position since 1968 and, as I mentioned, I was born in 1965. Suddenly, the man who had “always been” prime minister was being replaced by a young man who, to me, seemed rather dorky and had the blandest possible name of Joe Clark. (Joe Who?) And there was all this talk about how he would be forming a “minority” government. My young brain was struggling to understand: Did he or didn’t he win? And what’s the thing about these people I’d never heard about, the créditistes, possibly holding the “balance of power”? Was it because of their name... as they would lend Clark some credit? (Remember: I was only 13. I was only beginning to learn about politics but, at the same time, the Canada I had always known was changing all of a sudden.) And what’s that orange party all about? (Little did I know that it would become “my” party when I would grow up.) I was simultaneously confused and fascinated, and my opinion of Clark has long changed since then.
But as we all know now, that government fell by December 1979, and Trudeau, who had been persuaded not to resign as Liberal leader, rebecame prime minister in February 1980 until his famous walk in the snow on February 29, 1984. By the time the 1984 general election came around — the first in which I could vote — I was in my second gap year (by choice) between high school and university, and living in Halifax where I was working in an electronic news clipping agency — a type of business that no longer exists in the age of the Internet, which reminds me of Bruce McLaughlin whose riding in which he had been elected disappeared when the town of Pine Point closed down. One of the agency’s clients was the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, so my job required me to pay especially close attention to the campaign that led to Brian Mulroney’s massive landslide victory. But while I was being paid (poorly) to pay attention to politics, no one had to twist my arm. Like when I was 13, I continued to be fascinated — a fascination that lives on to this day.
Odd or unexpected election results kept happening after that, which only made my fascination more keen. I had returned to Moncton in 1985, only to return to Halifax in 1987 when I had decided to reorient my university studies from translation to public relations. My move had occurred just six weeks before the New Brunswick general election, when the Liberal Party won every seat in the legislature. How can THAT happen? But I remember thinking of a popular pop band at the time, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and referring to that election as “Frankie Goes to Fredericton.” Then, in Manitoba the following April, the Liberal Party went from an almost defunct party to forming the official opposition in a Progressive Conservative minority government. That seemed to attract more media attention than the fact that the PCs had toppled the NDP. There were many interviews with Sharon Carstairs, who at the time spoke with a remarkably shrill voice. Meanwhile, much further west, British Columbia’s political landscape struck me as extremely odd. How could the people over there so easily swing from the Social Credit and the rather peculiar Bill Vander Zalm to the NDP?
Then came 1993. The federal Liberal Party, led by Jean Chrétien, not only decimated the two other mainstream parties to form a majority government, but also found itself facing an opposition comprising a Québec sovereignist party and a very conservative Western party. At that point, I simply couldn’t stop watching. I felt an overwhelming need to understand what on earth (or in Canada) was going on! So 1993 was the year when I really started to stare at the numbers and scratch my head. It is when I started to wonder why there was such a gap between each party’s vote percentage and seat percentage. Was this a new phenomenon, caused by having more political parties in the landscape? Or was this just “how things work” in all countries where governments are democratically elected?
I’m not adverse to going to a library, but although the history of electoral systems and past election results had me very intrigued, I didn’t need to know about these things for my paid work. However, by 2005, it was possible to do some good research online from home, or at least find good leads before going to a library. So that is indirectly when PoliCan began, although I never dreamed at the time that it would become the encyclopedia that it is today.
As for me running for office? Forget it! Just like I admitted above that I’m not a good businessman, I would be an even more lousy politician. I’m way too protective of my private life and way too introverted to even contemplate that possibility!
But there’s more to it than that. I think the gift and the curse of being an introvert who spends so much time thinking things through is not that I’m indecisive as much as that I can see so many different perspectives at once, including those I don’t agree with, but can’t always see the ground on which compromise could be built. To me, compromise is neither a dirty word nor a sign of weakness, and I firmly believe that good politics should be the practice of the art of compromise. That’s the antithesis of toeing a party line, and for that reason, I know not only that I would be a lousy politician, but also that I would be extremely unhappy trying to be one.
And then, my close friends would also point to how I would need to keep in check what we half jokingly, half seriously refer to as my need to “rescue” people. Where I would want to be close to my constituents, I would probably get overwhelmed by bureaucracies in no time in my attempts to help them. As a result, I would quickly become a very ineffective politician.
However, I believe that in addition to continuing to exercise my civic duty by voting at every election, all the research and work I have done (and continue to do) to put PoliCan together is my best way to contribute to the evolution of the electoral process in Canada and Québec. As any historian would say, it’s important to look back to understand how we got to where we are and determine where we should be going next. As a result of my work, I believe that where we should be going next is towards a proportional electoral system. For their part, statisticians would agree that a survey is far easier to conduct than a census, and PoliCan is a census of our electoral history. Just like I didn’t mess around with the business of being born, I didn’t mess around with only doing a survey.
So I call myself Maurice, and I am the creator of PoliCan.