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The entire exchange takes about five minutes. If you didn’t know better, you’d think Tomsons was a crackerjack political campaigner. And she is, except for a few key details.

For one thing, she’s thanked by the Blackburn Hamlet resident for “all the great work you’re doing … good for you guys,” which is a response politicians seldom hear at the doorstep.

The second and more important difference between Tomsons and a political candidate is that she’s not running for office. She works with Ecology Ottawa, an environmental activist group that’s decided to take its message to the (residential) streets during this election.

It’s not unusual during campaigns for various interest groups to try to gauge the views of, and elicit promises from, candidates on a number of issues. For example, a myriad of organizations — labour, firefighters, advocates for electoral reform — will send candidates surveys and publish the results. At every ward debate I’ve attended, a representative of PAWS, an animal welfare group, has asked candidates whether they’d support a bylaw that bans the retail sale of cats, dogs and rabbits.

But rarely do you hear about a group essentially campaigning door-to-door during a municipal election.

Graham Saul, the executive director of Ecology Ottawa, has been an activist for decades. He says studies on the impacts of different forms of engagement show the results you’d expect — talking face-to-face with someone makes a much bigger impression than receiving an email.