It’s the riding keeping the Greens from being a one-seat party. Can Paul Manly fend off the NDP and Conservatives in Nanaimo-Ladysmith?

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This article was published 04/09/2021 (1467 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Star is looking at key races across the country to see who’s running, who’s voting and why – and what local battlegrounds tell us about the national fight.

NANAIMO, B.C.—On one of Nanaimo’s main streets, there’s a mural of the Lorax.

The text of the mural urges passersby to “speak for the trees,” over a Seussian backdrop, quoting the storybook character who wanted to protect forests.

Across the street are the offices for one of B.C.’s large lumber-management companies.

In the messages on this street corner lies the task ahead for the only incumbent Green party candidate in the 2021 federal election who is not, well, Elizabeth May.

Paul Manly is hoping his community members will be thinking more “Lorax” and less “lumber” when they head to the ballot box this month.

“When you think about Vancouver Island, when you think about the West Coast in general, this is where a lot of the environmental movements, social justice movements and peace movements have been really strong,” he says, wearing a Green facemask as he gets ready for a recent morning of canvassing.

“There are a lot of people here who think that way. They want to see real action on climate change, real action on the biodiversity crisis.”

More than just Manly’s job in the House of Commons is riding on his ability to hold on to the seat in Nanaimo-Ladysmith.

Manly upset the order of things in Canadian elections when he won a 2019 byelection under the banner of the Green Party of Canada. Never before had a Green candidate who was not May won a riding in Canada. Manly, a filmmaker and longstanding social activist from Nanaimo, proved it was possible — and he now has a chance to prove his election was not an aberration, but the start of long-term electability for Green candidates in Canada.

With the party’s recent controversies over leader Annamie Paul’s statements on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the defection of Fredericton MP Jenica Atwin to the Liberals, the stakes for Manly’s riding are that much higher.

Manly insists he’s not concerned, and that his support is as strong as ever.

“People would have told me (Nanaimo-Ladysmith) is a hard riding to win because in the 2011 election the Greens got, like, six per cent of the vote share,” Manly says. “We win where you have a strong local candidate that people are connected to. That’s a key, key element of winning as the Green party.”

Nanaimo is a battleground for such a task. The traditionally working-class city on the east side of Vancouver Island was the seat of former NDP leader Tommy Douglas for a decade between 1969 and 1979. There are residents who have been voting NDP since those days. There’s a plaque honouring Douglas in the city centre. Manly himself is a former NDP member, whose father was an New Democrat MP.

Now, it’s a competitive three-way race between Manly, businesswoman and lawyer Tamara Kronis of the Conservatives and Lisa Marie Barron, a school board trustee who wants to take the riding back for the NDP.

One thing potentially working in Manly’s favour is that forest protection is currently top of mind for many island residents. The Fairy Creek protests on Vancouver Island are putting the pitfalls of the old-growth logging industry in British Columbia on full display and giving Manly an opening to speak to voters about the federal government getting more involved in protecting biodiversity, while the federal NDP has avoided talking about Fairy Creek. It’s a thorny issue for the NDP, whose provincial government in B.C. approved logging in Fairy Creek.

The Nanaimo-Ladysmith riding was founded in 2015 and has had only two representatives — Sheila Malcolmson of the NDP, who stepped down to run provincially and is now a provincial cabinet minister, and Manly. The area is competitive for the Conservatives, too. Former ridings covering the same area had NDP, Conservative, Reform and Alliance MPs.

Without the party establishment his opponents enjoy, Manly’s hopes of re-election ride on enough people seeing his individual advocacy in Parliament as adequate reason to send him back to Ottawa — and that he can talk about more than the environment.

On this morning canvass, Manly knocks on the doors of houses in a single-family neighbourhood near the city centre, asking about the issues voters care about during what he refers to as a snap election.

Door after door, residents told him they’re worried about the housing crisis, about the number of homeless people in downtown Nanaimo, and about how many people are dying of opioids.

He tells them he understands, and that the government of Canada has allowed “predatory investment” in housing for too long — something he says he’s been pushing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to control by tabling Motion 66 on the housing crisis in Parliament.

One man leans against his door frame and speaks with Manly about addictions. Manly tells the man about his own cousin, who died of an overdose, and the man tells him that his brother overdosed, too.

It’s a common story in the Vancouver Island city, where 20 people died of overdose in the first six months of this year.

Manly has major challengers in both the NDP and the Conservatives. Kronis has not yet responded to the Star’s requests for comment. But it’s Barron, the NDP candidate, with whom he’s most closely competing for the progressive vote.

From her perspective, Barron says, the riding wants representation from a party with more of a national voice than the Greens.

“Although the Green party may have some good ideas, we have some overlap in our values, what we’re seeing is that without that official party status, the Green party is not able to push things forward,” Barron said from her downtown Nanaimo campaign office.

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“The NDP … have the capacity and power to be able to push things forward in Parliament that currently we just don’t have” with a Green incumbent.

Barron said it was NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh who held Trudeau to account during the COVID-19 crisis, pushing forward extended benefits for people who had lost their jobs. A campaign event in the riding Monday with Singh as the speaker drew about 200 people, she says.

The pro-NDP sentiment does run deep. While canvassing, Manly meets several people — a young man referring to his dad, a woman referring to her husband — who say their family members would always vote NDP.

“Tell your dad,” Manly says to one of them, “That I’m NDP-plus.”

Alex McKeen is a Vancouver-based reporter for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @alex_mckeen