Well, I spent a little time at the campaign office today. Sandeep is working his butt off hitting the streets every day, even when the temperature is enough to kill an ox.We were approached by a number of constituents who wanted to help us with certain ethnic communities in the riding, which is wonderful. Much to the shame of those of us who fit into what might be called the visual majority, people with a heritage from the other side of the Pacific tend to be the only ones who participate to the fullest possible extent in their democracy. It's our shame, but it's no loss. Democracy belongs to those who live as though they value it.That's one of the interesting things about the race in Edmonton-Manning. Both the liberal and conservative candidate are of East Indian heritage.Anyway, what these volunteers mean for me is a data management challenge. We need to go through our voter data and find information on people who might fit certain ethnicities or language categories, and identify them so that we can give their names specifically to volunteers with those languages or cultural backgrounds. I don't have to do that grunt work myself, thank goodness, but I did have to create a database system that would allow people more knowledgeable than myself to do it more quickly.Just to give you an idea what "more quickly" means, going through all of the voters in our list and sorting them in a single category will take one volunteer 5 hours. In an entire morning on the doors you may not identify more than a couple of dozen supporters and get a few sign locations. But unless you've got something else you can do with your time, that's what you do. You walk until your feet are killing you, and then you walk another half hour or so.What makes it worth it? Well, first of all, everyone knows what's at stake in the election. One vote can mean one seat. One seat can mean the difference between majority or minority, between government and opposition. And the difference between government and opposition means the difference between a secure future for Albertans or a government that seems intent on wasting as much of Alberta's potential as they can before their grandkids get a chance at enjoying it.There are also moments that make you think anything is possible. In every campaign, there is what's called a LUNCH system. LUNCH is an acronym that stands for Liberal, Undecided, NDP, Conservative, and Hostile. As you do your door-knocking, you write down the one-letter codes to indicate the person's voting preference. Hostile means you're not sure how they're going to vote, but they sure don't like you. Today, while doing data entry, our office manager saw one record that had been marked as H. Then, the H was scratched out, and a U was written. Then, the U was scratched out and an L was written. What happened?The person got to know Sandeep.When you've got a candidate like that, you've always got a fighting chance, and you have to fight.