All of the recent polls report the Liberals ahead in this election. If the election were held today, 338Canada  and CBC’s Poll tracker are projecting a landslide victory, with between 193 and 202 seats going to Mark Carney’s Liberal Party. It’s a bit more difficult when it comes to calculating the outcome in individual ridings. According to 338Canada’s projections, North Island-Powell River is the bluest of the four northern Vancouver Island ridings. Aaron Gunn is expected to receive about 47% of the popular vote, but projections rely on algorithms and past voting history, and there are some things that can sneak under the radar. 

For example, does 338Canada know about NDP candidate Tanille Johnson’s following, as the only non-Conservative councillor in the city of Campbell River? Or that Liberal candidate Jennifer Lash, her Campaign Manager and Deputy Campaign manager are all government staffers who have amassed an army of 150 volunteers to knock on doors, man the phones and put up lawn signs? Or of the small successes of a Green Party movie and conversation night? 

The following stories came out of interviews with an NDP Campaign manager, a Liberal Deputy Campaign manager and two of the leading Green Party campaigns workers. The Conservatives were to have replied by an email which, should it arrive later, will be published separately. 

I asked Isabella Lee, the NDP Campaign Manager, about the tight race for second place which 338Canada has been depicting between her Party and the Liberals.    

Isabella Lee (NDP):  “All those polls aren’t actually polls. They’re model productions from federal polls onto individual ridings. There’s been no local polling here. What we’re going off of is the people we’re talking to and past election results. This has really shown us that it is still between us and the Conservatives, the other parties just don’t really have a huge opportunity to get the votes they need to actually win this riding.”

“It’s a two-way race and we’re trying our best to keep the Conservatives on their toes and we are working really hard to keep this riding orange. There’s a lot of people that want to see the riding moving forward. That’s what we’re trying to do in the next 26 days.” 

Cortes Currents: I don’t know how big of a following she’s built up, but as the only non-conservative Campbell River City Councillor, Tanille has definitely built up a following. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Isabella Lee: “I think people know Tanille as a really strong voice and advocate for the community and it’s something that people have really latched onto. There’s a lot of people around us that know that she consistently speaks to what she’s hearing. She knows the issues, whether it’s been on city council or through her job working in healthcare. Tanille knows what this riding struggles with and what the challenges are. She is the right person to get those things done and people respond to that, acknowledge that, and have been wanting to come out and support her, which is really awesome to see.” 

Don Goodeve from the Green Party added, “Tanille is  an awesome individual.  She’s been the one sole voice of sanity on the council in Campbell River.  I think she can do very well. Obviously she’s very new at this game, but she could be a really good choice. I think she would definitely stand for the community here.”

Isabella Lee: “We’ve had volunteers for a while on the campaign helping us out, calling and talking to folks. Ever since the writ has dropped, the momentum has just kept building. We now have volunteers going out almost every single day in all parts of the riding, whether it’s Port Hardy, Courtenay, qathet or here in Campbell River.”

“So it’s just been really fun and positive to see the momentum building and to see just so many new faces come out each week. There’s people that are like, ‘what can we do?’ and we’re like, ‘go on the doors, go and call, put up a sign.’ It’s been really fun to just see how many people are coming out to support Tanille and the NDP.”

Cortes Currents: Do you have any idea how many volunteers you’ve got? 

Isabella Lee: “I don’t have an exact number, but well over 50 volunteers – if not more.” 

Cortes Currents: That was a trick question. The projections for this riding suggest it may actually be a three-way race, and I’ve been trying to gauge the relative strength of the NDP and Liberal campaigns. I had already seen a Facebook post that mentions 72 new volunteers joining the Liberals. Holly Johnson, their Deputy Campaign manager, was about to inform me there were more.

Holly Johnson (Liberal): “We’ve had record numbers of volunteers signing up. We had over 72 in our first few days of new volunteer signups, probably closer to 80, so now we’re looking at about 150 volunteers in total and we’re getting more and more volunteers every day. People are reaching out, wanting to get involved. We’ve had hundreds of emails from people wanting signs, wanting to help build things, wanting to make phone calls, and wanting to go door knocking. We’re really happy to see the momentum that Jen’s building here in the riding.” 

“We started campaigning pretty much as soon as the writ dropped, and we have been traveling around the region a lot. We’re looking into opening campaign offices in Powell River as well as Comox. I’m here in our Campbell River campaign office, which is our home base, right now.  For the next few days, we’re going to be traveling to Gold River, doing an event there. We’re heading over to Quadra Island. We are heading to Powell River. We’re going to be in Powell River at least once a week throughout the campaign because obviously it’s a really important area and Jen wants to get to know the people there and hear about the issues that are most important to that community.”

Cortes Currents: It turned out that Holly was a professional.

Holly Johnson: “I live in Ottawa. I work for the Minister of International Trade. Since it’s election time,  I’m here helping out with Jen’s campaign along with our campaign manager Sarah. She’s also from my office. Jen herself is a staffer in Ottawa and she has a lot of experience  with government and really knows her stuff. We find that we’re very efficient because we’re around such similar political environments every day in our jobs. So I think we’re uniquely well-suited for this kind of role.”

Cortes Currents: It’s a bit early to count the lawn signs on Cortes Island. The Green and Liberal signs have not yet arrived. There do not appear to be any signs on people’s property yet, but there were at least 11 up in public areas. Four of these are Conservative, which is a big deal because I have not seen a Conservative sign on Cortes Island before. Of course, my memory only stretches back to the 2015 election.) The other seven are NDP, which is a given as in recent elections most Cortesians have normally voted NDP or Green. (However there was an upset in the last provincial election, when the Conservatives displaced the Greens to place second in our returns.)   

Isabella Lee (NDP): “For signs, we’re definitely hoping to get more up in Cortes and all the islands and everywhere on this beautiful riding, but we are almost out of signs. We’ve had over 850 signs placed across this riding, and people still want more. So we’re working on trying to get more signs out there.” 

Holly Johnson (Liberal): “We have such an amazing team of volunteers, and one in particular is our Comox team lead. His name is Hugh, and he has taken it upon himself to lead this huge effort to build wood frames for all the large signs that we’ve ordered.  We went over yesterday and stopped by his house.  He had just a ton of people there in the yard helping to build signs. It was a beautiful day. Everybody was out having fun. Everyone got to chat with Jen. It’s just really great to see the energy that our team leads are bringing across the region because obviously we couldn’t do it without them.” 

Cortes Currents: Have you got any signs up? 

Holly Johnson: “Yes hundreds of signs, all over.”

Cortes Currents: There aren’t any on Cortes Island yet. 

Holly Johnson: “I think there should be some coming your way soon. We had  a slower start because of an issue with our sign supplier and we heard a lot of feedback very quickly from communities across the riding that they wanted to see  more red  on the streets. So we listened to that and we’ve ordered more than double the signs that we were anticipating we would need, just because there’s been such a high interest in people wanting lawn signs.” 

“We have a second batch arriving tomorrow, actually. So we’re going to be inviting everyone to come pick up signs at our office. We’re going to be shipping them off with our team leads to different areas. Our signs should be getting everywhere very soon.” 

Cortes Currents: How many signs were there in the first batch? 

Holly Johnson: “I would have to check on that. I’m not sure off the top of my head, but I know it was a lot and now we have well over a thousand signs that’ll be up by this weekend.” 

Don Goodeve had some sign stories from the Green Party: “We’ve had  quite the spate of damage to signs.  Last election cycle, there were one or two sign locations that just got taken out. Somebody  just took exception and knocked them down, but this time around it seems like predominantly the Conservative and Green Party signs around Campbell River have been targeted.  I  fixed some signs on the weekend where  the frame had been smashed, and I saw some additional pictures of some, shall we say, more creative vandalism that somebody had done to the Conservative Party signs as well.”

Cortes Currents: What does that mean? 

Don Goodeve: “The image that I saw was somebody cutting out the outline of an F and the outline of a U out of two Aaron gun signs, and then leaving the F and the U sitting on the ground in front of the sign, which I thought was actually quite creative.”

Annie Smith, who is on the local Green Party executive, emailed, “While I was righting the trampled signs on Saturday at Jubilee and Island Hwy, I was startled to hear a voice ask me if I wanted some help. A woman had pulled her car over and was walking up the hill towards me. I was surprised that someone else felt the need to put things right. It turned out she didn’t belong to the Green Party like I do, but would be voting Liberal and would be putting up signs there the next day. I was glad we could be witnesses together to the bent metal frames and scuffed signs. I was also thankful to be greeted by someone I didn’t know who believes it is important to work together for the common good even when we have differing perspectives on who would be the best candidate to support in our riding.Thanks to this woman, whose name I never asked, I have something new to hope for in Campbell River: that people will go out of their way to support every person’s right to vote as they believe.” 

 Holly Johnson (Liberal): “It’s really a terrible thing to see signs being vandalized for any candidate, because obviously these signs are paid for by volunteer grassroots efforts. Nobody really wants to see vandalism in the community. We’ve had a lot of our signs removed. We had reports of signs being  flipped over. So our volunteers have been taking it upon themselves to fix them whenever they see them knocked over and put them back up.” 

“I think that people are really riled up by this election. So in some ways it might be a reflection of all the issues that are going on, but obviously it’s a criminal offence and we absolutely condemn any vandalism of any signs.” 

Don Goodeve (Green Party): “As we were putting out signs, vehicles going past gave us a friendly toot. I hadn’t experienced that in Campbell River before. That was new. I’ve had  people swearing at us, gesturing at us, and accelerating in a cloud of diesel smoke past us, but I’ve not had friendly toots before. That’s a shift. I actually see  this as aligning more  with people’s values to the extent that they’ll go and express that in a place like Campbell River, which is traditionally a resource town and not particularly friendly to those attitudes.”

“The other thing is we put on a couple of movie nights. The first one we had good attendance, not crazy huge, but  significant. The second one sold out.  What I’m getting from that is there’s an appetite for a different kind of engagement and a different kind of conversation. The movie night formats give us a way to do that. If we had a longer campaign or if we’d have started a while ago, it might have given us a seed for a sort of bigger tent conversation, but as it is on an accelerated schedule, we’ll see what impact it has. We’re getting engagement, which is a good thing.”

“Go to green Party.ca. Our plan is the integrated approach there, which has a lot of unexpected aspects in it around yes, climate action, peace and security, getting people involved in creating the future of this country and building community and building resilience is so much the focus of it. In Canada, in contrast to what’s going on south of the border, iwe have an opportunity to look in the mirror and see the values that we actually do hold and share about who we are as Canadians and how Canada shows up in the world. I think this plan reflects being Canadian far more powerfully than anything that I’ve seen from any of the other Party platforms.”

Isabella Lee (NDP):  “I have been driving all across this riding and then having to take a couple of ferries too. It is just the most incredible place in BC and Tanille is working so hard to talk to as many people as she can. We’re excited to knock on doors and hear from people for the next 26 days and tell them about all the cool things the NDP’s going to do for housing, affordability, healthcare, and standing up to Trump and defending Canadian sovereignty and industry.”

“Then we’re also going to talk about the risk that is there with Conservative cuts that could be coming if we elect the Conservatives in this riding. Lots more fun to be had in the next 26 days and go vote on April 28th.”

 Holly Johnson (Liberal): “I have had the privilege of getting to know Jen over the past couple of weeks since the writ dropped, and she is the best candidate for this riding. I think there’s something about her that appeals to everyone. She is very progressive. She is a climate expert. She’s worked in the highest level of the federal government as a senior policy advisor on the Environment and Climate Change and then on the other hand, she’s a fisherman and she loves to hunt and hike in the outdoors.  She’s really a well-rounded individual and she cares so deeply for this riding. She’s lived on the island of Sointula for 27 years. She raised her family there, so she understands what it’s like to be in  an isolated part of the world.” 

“Sometimes the MPs of this region haven’t always prioritized the needs and the wellbeing of the constituents, and maybe by no fault of their own, because it’s been decades since there’s been an MP in this riding who is the same Party as the leader. If Mark Carney is elected, which is what the polls  are starting to look like, and you guys elect Jen here, it’ll be the first time in decades that you won’t have a back bencher MP. You’ll have an MP with a voice and a seat at the table. What we’re trying to do with our messaging is make sure everyone understands that a vote for Jen is a vote for Mark Carney, which is the right direction to go at this point in time.”

Links of Interest:

• Aaron Gunn – Facebook
• Jennifer Lash Facebook Page
• Tanille Johnston for North Island-Powell River – Facebook
• Jessica Wegg – North Island-Powell River GPC Candidate – Facebook

Undesignated photos above are taken from the local Green Party, Liberal, and NDP Facebook pages.

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