Anne Kingston: As preview, it delivered in polling gaffes, federal strategies and emphasis on the environment
NANAIMO, B.C.— The most astute words I heard about the Nanaimo-Ladysmith federal by-election days before a vote that elected Green Party candidate Paul Manly on Monday night to a seat held by the NDP didn’t come from a political operative. They were delivered by a local hotel manager who declared himself non-partisan.
The election of Manly, a filmmaker and communications specialist, doubles the federal Green caucus from one to two, and brings to an end Green Party leader’s Elizabeth May solitary sojourn in the House of Commons since 2011. “We now have gender parity,” Manly joked on Monday night before a cheering crowd at Cavallotti Lodge, a unprepossessing cinder-block reception hall on the outskirts of Nanaimo.
To see Nanaimo-Ladysmith as a proxy for the nation is a mistake, yet the willingness to vote Green can’t be ignored. The riding of 99,413 eligible voters, created with the merging of two electoral districts in 2012 , skews lower in terms of household income, older, with more than 20,000 seniors, and with far higher unemployment than the national average.
A week before Monday’s election, city council passed a motion officially declaring a climate emergency. Housing affordability is another major worry, given the influx of Vancouver area residents after cashing in on their real-estate lottery. A starter home can run half a million dollars. Gas here costs $1.54 a litre; two retirees report only putting $40 worth in their car because that was all they could afford. Crime is rising, as is drug addiction.
Another glimpse the by-election offered was into potential federal campaign strategies. In his victory speech, Manly highlighted the Greens running a positive campaign that reframed the conversation around the climate crisis. Calls for governments to take responsibility and to stop the subsidizing fossil fuels were themes he repeated on Monday night.
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