David Soknacki decides to shake some hands before the debate that starts in 45 minutes in a ballroom at the Hilton. He introduces himself to a man sitting at a table near the stage. The man turns out to be lawyer Paul Zed, the former Liberal MP and former chief of staff to Michael Ignatieff.

“You enjoying this?” Zed asks pleasantly.

Small talk. Zed is making small talk. Soknacki, a businessman and former city councillor, is running for mayor. For anybody running for anything, there is only one possible answer to Zed’s question.

“I wouldn’t say that,” Soknacki says.

Zed is visibly taken aback.

“You’re — not enjoying this?”

Soknacki’s rare honesty — about taxes, about the police budget, about himself — has helped him win the fervent support of the small number of people who support him. His response is perfectly understandable. Why, right now, should he be enjoying this? It’s hard to have fun when you’ve spent “much” more than $100,000 of your own money on an exhausting campaign for eight months and are still stuck at 3 per cent in the polls, 25 points behind a global laughingstock, even though your policy proposals have been praised and imitated.

It’s also hard to go from 3 per cent to 33 per cent if you’re not kind of the guy willing to pretend you are having fun.

Karen Stintz, who was polling about where Soknacki is polling, dropped out of the race in August. Soknacki could pull the plug at any moment. On Thursday, he joked three times about the “death watch” surrounding his candidacy.

But he campaigned with passion — and with a smile.

Debate prep. Starbucks, Hilton Toronto

10:30 a.m.: Soknacki, a 59-year-old wearing a blue pinstriped suit and a red tie, arrives at a busy Starbucks for a pre-debate meeting with his campaign manager, Brian Kelcey, and his press secretary, Supriya Dwivedi.

The Starbucks is located in the same hotel where the debate is being held. The hotel has a parking garage. Soknacki is rich. As usual, he parked his BMW in the Green P lot at city hall five minutes away.

“It’s much less expensive,” he says.

10: 32 a.m.: Soknacki shows off the donation cheques that have just arrived at his house in the Scarborough Bluffs. “Every time there’s a new death watch article,” he says, “we get more money and more volunteers.”

10:36 a.m.: The debate is being held by the board of trade. Kelcey, speaking at a brisk pace, rattles off economic facts he wants Soknacki to have at his disposal. Soknacki takes notes. No coffee for the candidate: he brought his own bottle of water.

10:46 a.m.: Kelcey relays a tidbit from the campaign’s analysis of its email system: reporters who usually ignore their news releases pay more attention when the releases are about Ford. He tells Soknacki that the feedback is good when he is “taking on Ford directly.”

“There’s some room for you to be the anti-Ford guy,” he says.

10:55 a.m.: Kelcey reminds Soknacki to talk about his own relevant experience: he founded and owns Ecom Food Industries, a flavour extraction company. “Your firm has clients in 30 countries,” Kelcey says. “The last thing you did before the campaign was a trip to Frankfurt, Seoul...”

“...Manila and Kuala Lumpur,” Soknacki finishes.

10:57 a.m.: Dwivedi says she has to go find the straw-drawing for candidate speaking order. Soknacki makes one of his Dad Jokes.

“The straw-drawing place,” he says. “Look for a little sign: Straws Drawn Here.”

10:58 a.m.: Soknacki laments the free-for-all segments of the debates. They often turn into chaotic shouting matches.

“I find that that is such low value,” he says. Kelcey responds: “But you’re in it.”

11:02 a.m.: Soknacki checks his phone. “I got an SMS from my son, which is most unusual,” he says. They get along, but Andrew is in his 20s, working for a tech company in Ottawa, and dad tries his best not to pester.

11:19 a.m.: Soknacki has a request for Dwivedi: can someone coming to the debate from the campaign office, he asks, “see if there’s an apple for me?” Dwivedi: “Would you like a — sandwich?” Soknacki makes it clear that he would be satisfied with the apple.

11:27 a.m.: Dwivedi warns him about the swarm Ford will inevitably attract when he enters the debate ballroom. “I would avoid that,” she says. Soknacki: “It’s a circus, right.” Dwivedi: “One of the bad circuses. That abuses elephants.”

Pre-debate. Toronto Ballroom, Hilton Toronto

11:47 a.m.: “Ohhh!” Soknacki says. “A KPMG table!”

Soknacki, the very model of an active listener, never seems more gleeful than when he is learning things. He expresses excitement, often with an enthused “Ohhh,” at even the most mundane of facts he manages to acquire while making the pre-debate rounds. Both endearingly and somewhat awkwardly, he begins his interactions with strangers by peppering them with questions.

“So are you all consultants?” he says to the KPMG group. “All in one area? Like HR, or systems, or...”

When he is told “government,” he gestures to an empty chair. “So the temptation is for me to grab that seat over there and talk policy.”

11:49 a.m.: Soknacki approaches the SEIU Healthcare table. “Are you nurses, nurse practitioners...” He gets a quiet, unremarkable answer. He almost shouts in response. “Ohhh! Wowwwww!”

11:53 a.m.: “I really like your ideas,” a woman tells him. He gets that a lot.

11:56 a.m.: A man offers a semi-compliment about his transit plan. “You have the best plan because you have no plan,” he says. “Do you agree with that?” Soknacki: “No!”

11:58 a.m.: Soknacki talks to a man about the problem of TTC buses bunching together. He bounces up and down, hands moving at shoulder level, like a professor discussing his life’s work.

12:09 p.m.: Soknacki: “This is the table of...” Man: “A little mishmash of everything.” Soknacki: “Mishmash!”

12:16 p.m.: Soknacki finally sits down at the table reserved for the candidates, beside Olivia Chow. Volunteer Fiona Luck has left a Royal Gala apple for him on the table. He takes a bite. Ford teases him for bringing his own apple.

Debate. Toronto Ballroom, Hilton Toronto

12:35 p.m.: Soknacki submits a typical-for-him debate performance: articulate, knowledgeable, factual, probably forgettable. He concisely explains the benefits of LRT over subway in Scarborough, earns laughs when he calmly corrects Ford’s claims on jobs, tells Tory that his transit-funding proposal relies on “fantasy money.” But the story of the day is Tory’s merciless Ford-ridiculing. As the two of them go at each other, Soknacki sometimes lets several minutes pass without speaking at all.

Post-debate

1:50 p.m.: Liberal MPP and former councillor Peter Milczyn approaches Soknacki in the hallway outside the ballroom. Milczyn: “You’re having fun?” Soknacki: “No.” Milczyn, eyebrows raised: “You’re not having fun?”

Soknacki explains his answer later. He has “moments” of “great enjoyment and excitement,” he says, and he loves being able to call up any authority in any field and talk about an issue. “But to win,” he says, “you need 300,000 votes and $2 million. So it’s a level of intensity that never stops. At times the tiredness exceeds the fun.”

1:52 p.m.: Soknacki gets a hug from Luck. “You were wonderful!” she says. “You get my apple?” Soknacki: “That was my lunch!”

1:55 p.m.: Soknacki is informed that Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong has taken t-shirts from the campaign’s promotional table. He decides he will tweet about the apparent thievery.

“Let me just get to a seat where I can have some fun with this,” Soknacki says. “The devil’s in me, I’m sorry.”

Dwivedi tells him she has to read the tweet before he posts it. Soknacki: “Heard Denzil Minnan-Wong whizzed by our stand...?” Dwivedi: “Whizzed. Why not.”

Soknacki tweets: “Heard @DenzilMW whizzed by our table, took 2 tee shirts. Look forward to seeing him wear at least one at Council.”

2:10 p.m.: Ford finishes his post-debate scrum. Soknacki is the final candidate to step to the microphones.

“I guess you saved the best for last,” he says with a grin.

He is asked about his debate assertion that he has obtained documents, via freedom of information, that prove Ford has improperly used his office for campaign purposes. He is also asked about the tenuous status of his own campaign.

Almost no candidate is willing to admit that he is thinking about dropping out until he actually drops out. Soknacki is. By the end of the weekend, he says, he will have another of his regular conversations with Kelcey about whether to continue.

“It used to be monthly,” he says. “Now it’s bi-weekly.”

2:21 p.m.: Soknacki begins to walk away. National Post reporter Natalie Alcoba approaches him before he can leave the room. Alcoba: “David, this is silly, but did you bring your own apple?” Soknacki: “Yes. It’s my snack of choice.”

2:24 p.m.: Soknacki heads back to city hall. Waiting to cross Queen St., he pats his pockets. “I do not have my car keys,” he says.

“Somebody should have noticed that,” says Dwivedi. She goes back to the Hilton. He waits under the shade of a tree.

2:31 p.m.: Soknacki descends the steps of the parking garage. When he gets to the first level, he peeks in the window. “Not here,” he says. When he gets to the second level, he opens the door and takes three steps inside, then decides his car isn’t there either. “Three!” he declares on the third level.

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The car

2:34 p.m.: Soknacki enters the grey BMW sedan. “When you have a minute and feel like a chuckle,” he tells Dwivedi, “find out if Denzil responded.”

2:38 p.m.: Soknacki rolls up to the parking booth. “I misplaced my card,” he says. Attendant: “You lost your card?” Soknacki: “I lost my card. Am I going to go to jail?” Attendant: “No, no.”

2:49 p.m.: Soknacki drives to his campaign office in an office building at Yonge and Eglinton — more aggressively than his public manner might suggest, switching lanes whenever there is even a small advantage to be gained.

3:05 p.m.: Soknacki rubs a scratch he sees on his trunk. “Can’t blame that on Denzil,” he says.

3:08 p.m.: Soknacki drops a dime on the ground as he walks. “Oh, for heaven’s sakes!” he says. Dwivedi: “What?” Soknacki: “Money!” Soknacki bends down to grab it. Dwivedi: “It’s a dime! It’s worth it!” Soknacki: “It is!”

Platform review meeting. Campaign office, 2300 Yonge St.

3:20 p.m.: Unlike his rivals, Soknacki does not have a street-level office that doubles as advertising. His team works out of a 16th-floor suite.

Soknacki sits down at the head of a boardroom table, joining Kelcey, Dwivedi, and four other aides. They are about to review a draft of his policy platform. He starts eating another apple.

3:21 p.m.: Soknacki asks about his debate performance. Kelcey, who didn’t watch, says he has heard only one comment: Soknacki “didn’t claw their eyes out.” Soknacki: “They always want me to claw their eyes out.”

3:42 p.m.: Soknacki, approving, says little as Kelcey leads him through the platform document: transit, housing, parks. At one point, Kelcey asks him if the document is sufficiently detailed for a candidate with a “budget geek reputation.”

“This is just fine,” Soknacki says. “If anybody challenges us, then here comes the data.”

Kelcey: “Drown ‘em in paper?” Soknacki: “Drown ‘em in data.”

4:03 p.m.: They reach the end of the platform. Soknacki’s verdict: “Streets ahead of everybody else.” Kelcey: “Would you vote for a man with this platform?” Soknacki: “Yeah. The trouble is, they want celebrities.” “They” being Toronto residents. He says he may go set his hair on fire.

4:04 p.m.: Someone jokes about an acquaintance who would sarcastically complain that the platform lacks a “Sharknado policy.” Sharknado is a campy TV-movie series in which Ford made an involuntary cameo. Soknacki: “The — which policy?”

Aroma Expresso Bar, 2300 Yonge St.

4:25 p.m.: Soknacki joins Kelcey and Dwivedi at the cafe below his campaign office.

He has a slight problem. Media calls and emails are coming in about the FOI to Ford’s office. But despite his strong words during the debate, he doesn’t actually know exactly what is in the documents the campaign obtained.

“Are we okay?” he asks Kelcey. “Did you see what I said?”

4:45 p.m.: He returns to his regular complaint about debates.

“I still have trouble with who gets value out of people shouting at each other,” he says. “So I shout over John — and all I did is not allow him to make his point. If I tried it with Ford — he’s so loud and monosyllabic...”

Kelcey: “We’ll work on your monosyllabic presentation.”

Soknacki starts grunting syllables. “Eee! Ahh! Ohh! Eee! Ahh! Ohh!”

The car

5:06 p.m.: Minnan-Wong responds on Twitter. Harshly. “ur Make Socknacki (sic) Mayor t shirt will soon be as valuable as a Pantalone, Jakobek or Hummer Sisters for Mayor t shirt.”

5:18 p.m.: Soknacki is driving with the aid of a map application on his Samsung smartphone, but he is slightly lost anyway. He pulls over to get his bearings — then starts driving while holding the phone up, illegally, in the left hand he is also using to steer.

He says his wife Florence keeps telling him not to do that, keeps reminding him that it’s a $280 offence.

“I live off of this,” he says. “If you made it a capital offence I’d still do it.”

5:44 p.m.: Soknacki finally pulls over again. “Florence would be so proud of me.”

5:53 p.m.: Success: Soknacki spots three volunteers waiting for him on a street corner. “Look at that, happy volunteers,” he says. “They’d have been able to have a shirt if Denzil hadn’t stolen one.”

Canvassing. Coxwell and Gerrard

6:00 p.m.: After a 45-minute drive, volunteer coordinator Victoria James tells him he can spend only 20 minutes knocking on doors in the neighbourhood before he has to head to a Jewish organization’s “Meet Your Next Mayor” event at Yonge and St. Clair.

He asks what information she would like him to gather. She says the campaign wants to know if residents are interested in voting for him. “Since people uniformly lie to me,” he says, he’ll just ask about issues, and a volunteer will come up behind and ask the person about him.

“That way,” he says, “you’ll get a more honest answer.”

6:06 p.m.: Soknacki hurries down Gainsborough Rd. with a purpose. “Knock knock!” he says after residents have already answered the door. “I’m David, David Soknacki, running for mayor.”

He asks one man what he cares about. The man says “public transportation.”

Soknacki listens intently as always, and he asks a couple of questions. But he does not say anything at all about himself or his own detailed public transportation plan.

“Well, thank you very much,” he says, ending the conversation faster than it had to be ended. And he darts to the next house, a man running out of time.