THUNDER BAY – Introducing Green Party leadership candidate David Merner, former MP Bruce Hyer joked the two were very different.
“David likes to listen,” Hyer said.
With his Tuesday night event at the Lakehead Unitarian Fellowship on Algoma Street, Merner proved him right in spades.
Rather than a typical stump speech, Merner held a talking circle with around 20 people who attended. He listened more than he spoke as the microphone made its way around the circle, with most of the time spent discussing the relationship between Canada and Indigenous peoples.
Speaking with Tbnewswatch before the meeting, Merner acknowledged it’s been tough for the Green leadership to break through a busy news cycle, with the coronavirus outbreak and American politics dominating headlines.
But he says another issue on Canadians’ minds – the dispute over the Coastal GasLink pipeline and the resulting Wet’suwet’en solidarity protests that have swept the country – is one the Greens are well-placed to address.
“There is an energy out there around pipelines and Indigenous issues, obviously,” he says. “The dispute resolution, peaceful negotiation approach is core to Green values, and we’re really pushing the provincial government and the Trudeau government into sitting down with the Wet’suwet’en and sorting it out at the negotiation table.”
Merner serves as the party’s justice critic, and worked as a lawyer in the federal Department of Justice, in the Privy Council Office, and in the office of B.C.’s Attorney General. He says the law is clear that Canada should be negotiating nation-to-nation with the Wet’suwet’en.
“In 1997, the Supreme Court of Canada said the Wet’suwet’en have Aboriginal title to these lands, they have self-governing rights,” he said. “So there’s really no option but to sit down and figure out, is there a compromise here?”
For Amanda Moddejonge, the party’s Thunder Bay-Rainy River candidate in 2019, Merner’s understanding of Indigenous and environmental issues, along with his legal and government experience, make him an ideal candidate.
She acknowledges replacing current leader Elizabeth May, a household name who perennially held the highest approval rating amongst Canadian party leaders, is a daunting task. But while Merner may be unknown to most Canadians, she believes if they get to know him like she has, they’ll be impressed.
“That’s just the thing, you’ve got some very large shoes to fill here,” she said. “David isn’t an Order of Canada recipient [as May is], I understand that. But he’s got an incredible track record.”
Merner is a longtime Liberal, having served as president of the B.C. federal Liberal Association, and ran a fairly close second as a candidate in the riding of Esquimalt-Saanich-Sooke in 2015. He abandoned the party after a string of broken promises following that election.
“I ran in 2015 on a wonderful Liberal platform, and they seem to have broken almost every major promise they made in that campaign,” he said. “They started off by adopting Stephen Harper’s greenhouse gas emissions targets after criticizing them for years, they broke that electoral reform promise within the first year.”
“The Kinder Morgan pipeline was the final straw for me – they bought a pipeline!”
Merner hopes to build a core following across the country with his current national tour, which has taken him across the prairies and will soon bring him through southern Ontario.
Green Party members will elect a leader through mail-in and online voting, with the winner announced at a party convention in Charlottetown on Oct. 4. Online voting begins Sept. 26 and is open to anyone who has joined the party by Sept. 3 – including anyone 14 years of age and older.
Merner says mobilizing young people to vote, and to run as candidates themselves, is key to the Green movement.
“You look here in Thunder Bay at the church filling up, and you think, wow – there is a real potential to build, especially among younger people. There’s a real sense that ‘our future is at stake,’ so we need to mobilize those folks, get them off the front steps of the legislature and into the legislature as MPPs and MPs.”
