“I Know I’m Not Going to Win”: Why People Set Out on Impossible Quests

She knew she wasn’t going to win. In fact, she often introduced herself this way: I’m Liz White, I’m running for office, and I know I’m not going to win. This would be delivered with an apologetic smile, maybe a gentle laugh, as if she were letting you in on a joke. As if to underscore the foolishness of what she was saying. The person she was addressing, standing on their porch or leaning against a scuffed door frame, might tilt their head, like a puppy hearing an unfamiliar command, unsure if what they heard was, in fact, what Liz White had said.

But, yes, it was true. White was under no illusions when it came to success; the riding in which she was campaigning, composed of mostly well-to-do neighbourhoods on the eastern edge of downtown Toronto, would go to the incumbent Liberal—maybe the New Democratic candidate if things broke just the right way. But the Animal Protection Party of Canada, of which White was the long-time leader? It was not going to happen. It had never happened. It would never happen.

Onward. One house, then the next. Up a few steps, knock on the door, back down to the sidewalk, then do it again. She called it her workout: “You get in good shape doing this, let me tell you.” It was just past noon on a gorgeous late-summer day. The park across the street was overrun with dogs and babies, and commuter trains occasionally rumbled down the adjacent rail path, hurtling towards or escaping from the city’s core. Campaign signs clung to fences, grew from flower beds, and peeked through front windows like nosy neighbours. The election was only a few days away, but it wouldn’t matter if it was held the following year or in a decade’s time—the results would be the same.

A snapshot of White on this day, from bottom to top: black walking shoes, a white skirt adorned with a black flower pattern, black sweater over a white collared shirt, a black backpack slung over her shoulders, black-framed glasses, grey hair in a bob. She looked like your favourite high school English teacher.

Her knocking or ringing of the doorbell often went unanswered or ignored, and so she would slip a brochure into the mailbox or place it inside a screen door, where it was likely destined for the blue bin along with the rest of the junk mail. Once in a while, a person might answer, albeit cautiously or irritated—one man said he’d worried White was a Jehovah’s Witness. Who else showed up unannounced at your home at this time of day?

She was always gracious, and grateful, when given the opportunity to explain herself. She kept it brief; her pitch usually lasted less than twenty seconds—I’m Liz White, I’m running for the Animal Protection Party of Canada, and I know I’m not going to win—but, sometimes, a conversation would follow. She was especially happy when a dog came to the door; she seemed more comfortable with pets than people.

“My kind of voter,” White said, bending down to meet a small scritch-hunting mutt named Bunny as the owner looked on approvingly.

“She likes you—she knows you’re on her side,” the woman said, then apologized for already having cast her ballot in advance.

It didn’t matter. White was not going to win. And she was okay with that.

Having reached the end of the street and the last of the houses, White and I retreated to a nearby cafe. We hadn’t seen each other in about a year and a half, so we found a table outside and made small talk for a while, catching up on one another’s lives over the racket of passing streetcars. A wasp flew figure eights around my coffee cup; I had to stop myself from swatting it away, unsure of the party’s views on violence towards insects, even the stinging kind.

I’d first met White more than a dozen years earlier, in the summer of 2008. I was a staff reporter for a Toronto-based national newspaper, only a couple of years out of university and way out of my depth. The Great Recession, coupled with the fact nobody wanted to pay for news, had pushed an already precarious industry to the breaking point, and I figured I had another year or two before I found myself in law school or following in my parents’ footsteps to teacher’s college. I might as well spend what little time I had left writing stories that interested me.

As that year’s federal election approached, I pitched one of my editors the idea of profiling a no-hope candidate—someone running for office who had absolutely zero chance of winning. To me, it was a story about motivation: I was interested in what compelled a person to devote themselves to a goal they knew they’d never accomplish, to knowingly pursue failure. Who does that? What was the point?

I don’t remember why I chose White; maybe it was the fact that she wasn’t the usual Marxist-Leninist or lonely Communist one found on the ballot, or maybe it was the fact that hers was basically a single-issue party, and that issue barely resonated with voters. Sure, people liked animals, but they liked a robust economy even more. I was also living in her riding, so knew full well she had no shot at being competitive, let alone winning. She had a better chance of being eaten by a tiger.

In any case, she agreed to be profiled, and I spent a few days with her in the lead-up to the election, hanging out at the party’s rescue cat–adorned headquarters near the city’s East Chinatown, accompanying her to an all-candidates debate, and following her on the campaign trail.

“Change happens on the edge. I think of myself as change.”

I especially recall one Sunday spent knocking on doors in an apartment complex in St. James Town, a diverse, vertical neighbourhood in the city’s downtown. She showed up on her bike with a knapsack stuffed full of campaign literature destined to remain unread. Before we went inside the first building, she excitedly recounted how, the previous day, she’d stopped canvassing in order to chase down an injured baby squirrel; after catching it (the ungrateful rodent bit her four times), she stuffed the creature into her bag and took it down to the Humane Society, where she’d once worked. She was hopelessly devoted to the cause.

“It’s just something I have to do,” she once told me. “It’s just something I can’t turn my back on. I just can’t.”

It was easier for people to turn their back on White; I saw a lot of it that day in 2008. The party was still relatively new—this was only her third time running for office—and, unfortunately, it didn’t seem to be garnering much support. It could simply have been that she was canvassing in a low-income neighbourhood, and voters living there had more pressing concerns than the seal hunt and the thorny ethics of testing products on animals. Then again, the party platform could have been pretty much anything. It was one thing to run for an established political party; it was an entirely different matter to run as a fringe candidate. But that’s what it took to bring about change, she said. “It doesn’t happen in the old, staid, dried-up, burnt-out parties. That’s not where change happens. Change happens on the edge.” She didn’t consider herself to be a fringe candidate, she added. “I think of myself as change.”

Change took a long time, as White knew well. She’d been involved in politics since she was a teenager, in the 1960s, when she volunteered for the campaign of a politician running in Willowdale, where she grew up, on Toronto’s northern boundary. Her interests soon expanded beyond her neighbourhood: Later that decade, she joined the protests against the Spadina Expressway, a proposed freeway that threatened to cleave the city in half. She took to the streets alongside a motley group of activists that included the urbanist Jane Jacobs, who’d recently moved to Toronto.

While her activism went back to her childhood, her devotion to animals came later in life. White landed at the Humane Society in the late eighties. She took the job at the insistence of a friend, not out of any particular concern for the plight of animals. It’s not that she was ignorant—years earlier, she’d been given a tour of a slaughterhouse where an uncle worked: “It wasn’t that I wasn’t horrified when I was there,” she told me, “but I didn’t say, ‘Oh my God, I can’t eat meat anymore.’” She admitted that she once considered vegetarians “kooks.” But her time at the Humane Society changed her; she began to understand the threats animals faced, and how it was up to people—people like her—to protect them. Looking back on the person she used to be, she sometimes sounded like a born-again Christian reflecting on her life before finding Jesus: “I don’t know what kind of person I was before.”

Working at the Humane Society was a memorable experience, though perhaps not always a good one. She’d arrived at a tumultuous time in the organization’s history. “It was a wild place to work,” she recalled. “People appeared and disappeared. You’d come in and a desk would be cleared.” Eventually, it was her turn to disappear, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise. “The best thing that ever happened was that I got fired.” She regrouped with some other exiles from the organization, and plotted their next move. “We all sort of gathered and decided that we wanted to do things differently,” she told me. The Animal Alliance of Canada was founded in August 1990, and White became its first director. She was forty years old.

The Humane Society, with its multi-million-dollar budget and finely tuned fundraising machine, it was not. The staff went unpaid for the first several years. “Everybody bit the bullet and did what they had to do,” she said. There were victories, but it often felt like one step forward, two steps back. Still, White and her colleagues were both stubborn and like-minded, a dangerous combination; they shared the same goals, no matter how difficult they’d be to achieve. For most of them, White said, ensuring the welfare of animals was “a passion. You wake up in the morning thinking about it, you go to bed at night thinking about it, you work all day thinking about it. It’s who you are, as opposed to what you do.” But they wanted to do more. After spending more than a decade lobbying and working behind the scenes, it was clear to White that they had to become directly involved in the electoral process in order to achieve their goals.

The Animal Alliance Environment Voters Party of Canada, as it was originally called, became a registered political party on December 10, 2005. It was the first political party in North America that focused on animal rights. White ran in her first election six weeks later—the party’s sole candidate. She received seventy-two votes, 30,802 fewer than the winner. Most people would be discouraged, but not White. She ran again two years later, and was doing so yet again, when I came across her story.

Her life became about the pursuit of what she called “improbable change.” She might have described it as impossible.

I returned to the newsroom and wrote it all down—thousands of words. My article was published a few days before the election, under the headline “Who Are You Calling Fringe?” The subhead read: “Canadians will not wake up to an Animal Alliance Environment Voters government on Wednesday, and Liz White will most assuredly not be our prime minister. That’s not stopping the Toronto-Centre candidate from giving this election everything she’s got.” A photo of White appeared on the front page of the section. I was proud of the profile, and I was also right: she received 187 votes.

Still, she continued to run, election after election, year after year, in different ridings across the city. Her life, or at least the second half of it, became about the pursuit of what she called “improbable change.” She might have described it as impossible.

In the end, I didn’t leave journalism—improbably, I managed to survive multiple waves of layoffs before jumping to a larger, more financially secure newspaper. And even as I wrote hundreds more stories, I never forgot her story.

And the morning after each election, I’d dutifully look up the results in whichever riding White had run. The vote totals she mustered—215, 233, 159—did not come close to the amount of work she had put in, countless hours for a vote total easily counted. But she was not discouraged. “Change is really hard for most people,” she once told me. “It’s like a ship going through the water, and you’re trying to get it to turn around and go in the opposite direction. It’s a huge effort to make that happen.” She’d be working towards this change for the rest of her life, this she knew. “I’m going to die at my desk,” she said. And so, onward.

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There are other people out there who have devoted their lives to things that might never happen. People, like White, who are pursuing goals that seem impossible to achieve, or goals they know will never be reached in their lifetime. They are living to see a day that will likely never come.

Think about it like this:

When you open a book, you know how many pages it contains.

When you sit down to watch a movie, you’re aware that it will eventually end.

When you listen to a song, you expect a final note to sound.

When you are waiting at the starting line before beginning a race, you know its length—not only the actual distance but roughly how long it will take to finish. But there are people—artists and astronomers, fortune hunters and physicists—who are running a race they know they might never finish. In some cases, they are unsure where the finish line is located. In some cases, they are unable to say whether there even is a finish line.

In other cases, to strain the metaphor further (although it’s one I heard several times over the years), they are running a relay race—presently gripping the baton but ready to hand it off to the next person, who might never cross the finish line either but hand it off to someone else, again and again and again, into the distant future.

And yet, when the starting gun sounded, they all took off.

My interest is not scientific but human. What makes someone strive for something—in many cases the thing they want more than anything else—knowing they’ll only be disappointed in the end? Why would someone devote their life to a dream they know will be impossible, or at least very unlikely, to achieve?

I’ve long been interested in exploring the strange ways people spend their lives. You only live once, so how we choose to fill our precious days—what to do with your time on earth until the sand runs out—is one of the most interesting questions there is to answer. Why become a doctor, why become a chef, why become a boxer? Why become an unelectable politician? What does it mean to spend a lifetime straddling the line between perseverance and delusion, between tenacity and obsession? Who devotes their future to a future that will probably never come?

I thought I’d try to find out.

This led to hundreds of interviews and more than 100,000 kilometres of travel across several continents, from the deserts of Arizona to the forests of Norway, from a possibly civilization-saving space mission launched on the edge of the Pacific Ocean to a remarkable gathering of rocket scientists who want to take the human race beyond the stars. It became a chronicle of my abiding interest, as a journalist, in people who have displayed incredible devotion. Who have refused to quit. Or who are starting an adventure others will one day finish.

I’ve thought a lot about a conversation I had at the outset of this project. One of the first people I spoke to was Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, the American organization that leads the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. I’m captivated by the idea of life outside our solar system, and have often told people that my own hope is to live long enough to reach the day it’s confirmed that we are not alone in the universe. But mine is a childhood fascination; Shostak had devoted most of the eight decades he’d spent on the planet to something he might never witness. And yet, he told me, he had no regrets. What he did was part of something far larger, far greater, than a single life could contain. He knew doctors who had spent their careers researching a cure for cancer. Did the fact that there was still no cure mean they had wasted their lives? Of course not.

“It’s like building cathedrals in the Middle Ages,” he said, the first utterance of an analogy I heard many times over the years. “It might take four, six, ten generations to finish the darn thing. You might think there isn’t much incentive to get started because you’ll never see the completed project.”

I wanted to document the people who start, finish be damned.

The election to select members for the forty-fourth Canadian Parliament was held on September 20, 2021. The next morning, I went online to check the results of my riding. White received 183 votes. It might be a breach of journalistic ethics to admit this, but I was one of them. Standing in the polling station, looking at her name on the ballot, it was the least I could do. It brought her one step closer to a finish line she would never cross. And when I spoke to her next, there was no point even asking if she planned to run again. I already knew the answer. Onward.

Excerpted from Live to See the Day: Impossible Goals, Unimaginable Futures, and the Pursuit of Things That May Never Be by Mark Medley. Copyright © 2026 Mark Medley. Published by McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.