After early troubles, will debates help Paul?
Green leader’s backers give her high marks for performances
OTTAWA—In keeping with the tumult of her time as leader of the Green Party of Canada, the most important week in Annamie Paul’s political life started with a crisis.
Shortly before noon last Sunday, Paul gathered with a small group of volunteers and staff at her campaign office in Toronto’s Gay Village. The night before, Paul told them, her younger son “had a bad accident.” She quickly added that “he’s OK,” but said she wouldn’t join them to canvass voters that day.
She didn’t appear in public again until the French-language leaders’ debate three days later, during which time her campaign cancelled events because of this “family crisis” and Paul took time to observe the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah. The Greens also quietly published their policy platform without Paul or anyone else holding an event to highlight their campaign promises.
Even before this period of absence from the campaign trail, Green operatives around Paul had circled this week’s leaders’ debates as the crucial opportunity for her to turn things around.
For months before the election, the Greens were consumed with infighting that included a costly legal battle between Paul and her own party over direct efforts to oust her as leader. It got so bad that, on Friday, Paul admitted she has refrained from travel during the campaign, in part because her presence with local Green candidates might cause more harm than good.
“It’s incredibly difficult to acknowledge that, but you know, those are the facts,” she told reporters on Parliament Hill. “We just have some catching up to do.”
Paul made history this week as both the first Black person and the first Jewish person to take part in the federal leaders’ debates, and her supporters hope her performance gives her and the Greens a welcome boost. Their reviews were uniformly positive.
Phil Des Rosiers, Paul’s deputy campaign manager in Toronto Centre, told the Star that she “knocked it out of the park” by highlighting issues in the riding she is trying to win, and that the campaign is now seeing a rush of requests from residents to volunteer for her team.
Paul congratulated herself Friday morning for a “good performance,” and said people will elect good MPs if they vote Green — despite the fact that the party was not able to “present the strongest face forward” because of “self-inflicted wounds” when the election was called.
Three days earlier, on the same day Paul was taking time off for Rosh Hashanah, the incumbent MP she is trying to unseat was knocking on doors and greeting voters in the riding of Toronto Centre.
Marci Ien, a veteran journalist and broadcaster who was born in the riding’s dense and diverse neighbourhood of St. James Town, defeated Paul in a local byelection last October to win the seat for the Liberals.
The victory marked the continuation of a tradition of Liberal wins in Toronto Centre: the party has held various iterations of the riding since the Blue Jays last won the World Series in 1993.
Striding down a residential sidewalk past the charming Victorian brick row houses of Cabbagetown this week, Ien said she’s not taking anything for granted. The only way to win again, she said, is to focus on the local campaign with at least two outings per day to personally canvass voters.
Ien also said she has a “national profile” of her own to counter Paul’s as a federal leader, and that she hasn’t paid attention to what the Green leader has been doing.
“Our best bet — and it has worked before, we won last time — is to just concentrate on what we’re doing: listening to people and getting our message out there,” she said.
Not far from where Ien was canvassing, NDP candidate Brian Chang sat on a rock in a small park where people walked dogs. Like Paul, Chang is running in Toronto Centre for a third time.
“I don’t know what’s going on over there. Not sure they know either,” Chang said of Paul’s challenges in the Green party. “It’s weird to watch from the outside.”
Chang echoed Ien in saying he’s focused on canvassing voters. He’s also arguing New Democrats can get results even if they don’t form the next government, citing the party’s claim that it pushed the Liberal government to implement sickness benefits and better supports for people who lost their jobs during the pandemic.
For now, as the campaign enters the final stretch before election day on Sept. 20, the Greens trying to get Paul elected in Toronto Centre are stressing climate change, housing and supports for small business. Des Rosiers told voters on a street near Maple Leaf Gardens last weekend that the Green leader has a “phenomenal” chance of defeating Ien, given how she placed second in last year’s byelection and is able to share the spotlight of televised debates with the other federal leaders.
“I really believe in Annamie and she’s offering what no other campaign has, which is that she’s a national leader,” he said.
Back in Paul’s campaign office, paper cut into the shape of a large tree was stuck to the wall, with green leaves taped at the ends of branches and signed with the names of supporters. One of them included a short message: “It should not be this impossible.”
Paul and her team have little more than a week to prove it isn’t.