Stop the Split Nanaimo

April 10 2025

Open Letter to Green, NDP, and Liberal Nanaimo-Ladysmith Electoral District Candidates:

“I’m not concerned about it,” said Paul Manly at his campaign launch when asked what he thought about centrist and leftist voters in Nanaimo-Ladysmith splitting their votes three-ways between himself, the incumbent NDP’s Lisa Marie Barron, and Liberal candidate Michelle Corfield.

Well, we, the voters, are deeply concerned about it.

Canadian centrists and leftists know that in a first-past-the-post electoral system, we rarely have the luxury of choice in voting. Rather, if you are against a far-right Conservative Party government, every riding matters, so you must vote strategically for whichever candidate is projected to be able to beat the ridings’s Conservative Party candidate. With vote splitting, we all risk losing. And this time, we almost certainly will lose if we don’t stop the split. 338Canada projects the Conservative Party’s probability of winning the Nanaimo-Ladysmith riding as 99%—with only 35% of the vote. The Green, NDP, and Liberal candidates are virtually tied at 21%1.

Mr. Manly, Ms. Barron, and Ms. Corfield, we need you to put citizens and country before self and party: decide who needs to step out of the race and tell your supporters to vote for one candidate.

Why? If the Conservative Party wins, the fallout will be disastrous.

The US government poses an unprecedented threat to Canada’s sovereignty, democracy, and economy. This threat is magnified by the likelihood that the Conservative Party of Canada may win the federal election. We all know that Pierre Poilievre and his far-right candidates are not equipped to handle the political and economic threats, which include the largest (and dumbest) trade war ever witnessed by modern global economies. As for the moral fallout, the Conservative Party has made it clear through both speech and silence that party policy is Trumpian policy.

But let’s address the three most obvious objections this letter will encounter.

First, party polling shows me winning so I’m going to duke it out until the end!

Right now, the Conservative Party is clearly projected to win in Nanaimo-Ladysmith. Who comes in second place is both too close to call, and irrelevant, given the projected Conservative Party lead.

The poll the Green Party commissioned and is using to sway voters raises serious concerns due to the inherent methodological limitations and biases of such one-off polls. Such polls are notoriously noisy—they have small sample sizes, can easily suffer from systematic biases, and only capture a snapshot in time. Contrary to suggestions otherwise, 338Canada is still the best source for district predictions2. And while 338Canada’s predictions are derived from national polls with regional adjustments based on electoral history and local demographics, they are superior to one-off polls because they take into account many Canadian pollsters with repeated polling, adjust for their biases, and combine them statistically3.

Counter to claims by Mr. Manly that “338 has never gotten it right here”, 338Canada correctly predicted Mr. Manly as “likely to win” in 2019 and the 2021 win by Ms. Barron was correctly within the margin of error in 2021. And horrifyingly, thanks to the two-way vote split with the Green Party, Ms. Barron only won by 1.7% (1,199 votes) over the Conservative candidate! This year, counter to the Green Party’s own polling, 338Canada projects a likely win for the Conservatives, and a toss-up for second place, but this time among not two but three centrist/leftist parties.

We escaped a Conservative win by a razor-thin margin in this riding in 2021, and you want us to roll the dice again? Under these circumstances?

Second, our parties do not want the same things, so how can anyone on the left ask us to unite behind one candidate?

Whether you are a Green, NDP, or Liberal candidate, the core of your parties’ promises on important issues such as climate change, health care, and cost of living is the same. The clear outlier among the four leading riding candidates is the Conservative Party. The Conservative Party has signaled no intent to reduce emissions, and would support far more oil and gas development. It is the only party that has not committed to bolster public health care and that has repeatedly attacked, denied, or exhibited deep ignorance about scientific, medical, and human rights issues that include addiction, vaccination, and transgender rights. Poilievre says he will defund the CBC and that he will follow the Trump administration in cutting the federal public service, when federal public servants in scientific and technical professions make up a large share of the Nanaimo-Ladysmith community.

Whatever you think your differences are, they are minor compared to the gulf between yourselves and the Conservative Party. They will win the riding if you don’t stop the split.

Third, aren’t you being alarmist and naive to think that we will listen?

Hardly. We simply refuse to do nothing or to accept this harmful adherence to partisanship under these stakes.

Our sovereignty is under threat. Our economy is under threat. Our human rights are under threat. And our country will be more vulnerable than ever to becoming a puppet state of the US should we fall under the leadership of the Conservatives. Responding to this threat demands unity from the citizens in each riding. Two thirds of us in this riding are united against the Conservative Party. The problem, however, is that you—Mr. Manly, Ms. Barron, and Ms. Corfield—are not united. And yes, we are concerned about it.

In July 2024, France faced the likely win of the far-right National Rally party, despite the party having only 1/3 of the vote share. Sound familiar? In a move of true patriotism, over 200 centrist and leftist parliamentary candidates pulled out of the election to stop the party from taking power. United, they called for voters to back whichever candidate was best placed to defeat the local National Rally rival. And it worked.

If you unite under one candidate, we, the voters of Nanaimo-Ladysmith, can flip this riding and prevent a Conservative win. If you truly want to be public servants, then act like public servants. Put the public first. Tell your voters to back one candidate. Stop the split.

Signed,

Sacha O’Regan, Nanaimo
Sean Anderson, Nanaimo
Jane Wodlinger, Nanaimo
Monica Mather, Nanaimo
Philina English, Nanaimo
Jenny McLennan, Nanaimo
Christine English, Nanaimo
Diana Demarchi, Nanaimo
Dana McFarland, Ladysmith
Thomas Jackman, Nanaimo
Kate Wodlinger, Nanaimo
Jenna Cragg, Nanaimo
Brad Harris, Nanaimo
Andrea Andrews, Nanaimo-Ladysmith
Emily Upham-Mills, Nanaimo
Don McLennan, Nanaimo
Jan McLennan, Nanaimo
Elise Keppel, Nanaimo
Kaila Keppel, Nanaimo
Cameron Freshwater, Nanaimo
Caroline Fox, Ladysmith
Roxan Chicalo, Nanaimo
Laura Buechler, Nanaimo
Jennifer Ross, Nanaimo
David Rawlins, Nanaimo-Ladysmith
Barrett Nash, Nanaimo-Ladysmith
Andrew Boxwell, Nanaimo
Patrick Chamberlain, Nanaimo
Jessica Stockholder, Nanaimo

How can you, the voter, help?

Centrists and leftists should be encouraging their district candidates to unite and back one candidate, not gamble with Canada’s future. You can help in three ways:

  1. If you’d like to sign this letter, add your name here.

  2. Email the Green, NDP, and Liberal4 candidates and tell them you agree with this open letter. Please link to this website.

  3. If the candidates do not put Canadians first, then monitor 338Canada and smartvoting.ca and vote strategically.

Footnotes

  1. As of April 9 2025. The day after writing this letter (April 11), the 338Canada prediction for Nanaimo-Ladysmith shifted to favour the Green Party in second place. It is possible this was due to the 338Canada model adding the Green Party’s Oraclepoll Research poll to its data sources. The Green Party did not increase on April 11 in other nearby districts (e.g., Victoria, Courtney-Alberni). As of April 15, the 338Canada model gives the Green Party a 33% chance of winning the Nanaimo-Ladysmith riding. The main point stands: there is a three-way split on the center-left.↩︎

  2. The ultimate test of whether to trust a poll is to check its past results. In the 2021 Federal Election, 338Canada predicted the correct winner in districts across Canada 92% of the time and the winner was within the 95% margin of error 95.6% of the time. Across 18 general Canadian elections and 2,039 districts, the correct district winner was within the 95% margin of error 95.8% of the time. That’s pretty damn impressive! In other words, the predictions and uncertainty in the 338Canada model are well calibrated at the district level.↩︎

  3. The Green Party’s pollster, Oraclepoll Research, is downweighted in the 338Canada predictions due to its ‘B’ rating.↩︎

  4. Ms. Corfield does not have an email posted, but she can be contacted on social media.↩︎