About

The bus to the district hospital leaves Sundarpur at six in the morning. If you miss it, you wait a day. My mother missed it once, in 1998, carrying my youngest brother with a fever that had already lasted three days. He was fine. Many were not. I have spent twenty-two years trying to make that bus irrelevant.

I was not born into politics. My father repaired irrigation pumps and my mother taught grade four at the school two ridges over. What I learned at home was that a promise is a schedule, not a sentiment — a pump is either running by planting season or it is not, and no speech has ever irrigated a field.

I started at the ward water committee in 2009 because the tap in our tole had been dry for eleven months and nobody could tell us who was responsible. It took us fourteen weeks to find the answer, which turned out to be a single unsigned form in a district office. We signed it. Water came back in March. That is the entire theory of my politics: find the form, sign it, tell people it is signed.

As ward chairperson I put the line-item budget on the wall of the ward office in letters large enough to read from the road. Colleagues warned me it would invite complaints. It did — 340 in the first year, each one a citizen who had noticed something we had missed. The queue at the office halved. Complaints are not the failure of a system; they are the only evidence it is being watched.

In the provincial assembly and now in the federal parliament I have carried the same instinct into rooms where it is less welcome. I have voted against my own party's whip twice, both times on procurement transparency, and I would do it again. The Public Accounts Committee is unglamorous work — it is reading tender documents until your eyes ache — and it is where public money is either protected or quietly lost.

What follows on this site is a record and a plan, both with numbers attached. Where I have delivered, the figure is there to be checked against the audit. Where I am asking for your vote, the pledge carries a quantity and a date, so that in five years you can hold this page up and ask me what happened. That is the point of writing it down.