Meet Paul Falvo, Green candidate for the Northwest Territories

This is the fourth in a series of profiles of the Northwest Territories' federal election candidates. Read our profiles on NDP candidate Mary Beckett, Liberal candidate Michael McLeod, Conservative candidate Yanik D'Aigle, and People's Party candidate Luke Quinlan.

Paul Falvo is 30 minutes late.

In the loading bay of his downtown Yellowknife law office, his communications manager and self-appointed director of signs, Tom Wallwork, is spray painting the Green Party's latest witticism onto a sheet of plyboard.

All around the N.W.T. capital, the handmade signs, occasionally cryptic, have popped up.

"The youth can't do it alone," reads one near a high school.

"Caribou don't get a vote," reads another.

In theory, these signs are for Falvo, the party's nominee in the fall federal election.

But on these signs, Falvo's name is mostly an afterthought, tucked in small lettering into the upper left-hand corner.

"We released a lot of these slogans first," before more traditional signs, says Wallwork, "partially to build suspense, partially because … we want to project the idea that Greens put ideas first."

"And it's just a lot of fun to spray paint."

'Always on the sidelines'

10 minutes more, and Falvo arrives. He's still getting used to the Greens' newfound success.

"I thought I could walk everywhere in Yellowknife in a half hour, but I forget that everybody wants to talk," he says.

On this day, Falvo campaigned on foot, with his exhausted husky puppy, Kanga, in tow. For the next few minutes, the dog anxiously trails him back and forth through the office, as he hurriedly updates maps, chats with campaign workers, and notes the names of volunteers he must remember to thank.

Falvo's campaign, staff say, has benefited from a national surge in interest for the Green Party. And while polling in the North is often highly inaccurate, it seems to bear this theory out.

The Greens started the campaign with a projected popular vote of just four per cent, according to 338Canada.com. Now, all four major parties are within the site's eight-point margin of error — and only the Greens have seen a noteworthy increase.

It's a change of fortunes for a local party which has never before mounted a serious challenge in the North.

"Let's face it, in the past, the Greens were always on the sidelines," says Falvo, settling down with a mason jar of water. "We knew we were raising issues, we were spreading awareness, but we also knew we weren't going to win.

"Still, a few months ago, someone said to me 'we're in it to win it,' and I thought, sure, what did you smoke for breakfast? But then things started to change nationally."

Falvo may not have thought the Greens were electable, but he is no stranger to environmental activism.

A former national president of the Sierra Club and environmental lawyer, Falvo says he was an unconscious environmentalist even as a child.

"I would hook a wagon behind my tricycle, somehow, and I would go around picking up trash," he said. "I just thought garbage didn't belong on the ground ... Maybe kids just know that."

But it was during a stint in the Canadian navy that he first reckoned with the idea of environmental stewardship.

"If a foreign power came in here and did the things to our land that we're doing to ourselves, we'd be up in arms," he said.

"For me, it was an extension of that. It was the same kind of work. You're protecting the land."

The navy also brought him to Halifax, where he first met Green Party Leader Elizabeth May, then a member of the NDP and president of the Sierra Club.

"I said, 'Hey, I came to see what you people do, and I promised my girlfriend I wouldn't join anything,'" he said. He went on to start the Atlantic Canada chapter of the Sierra Club.

'Running uphill all my life'

That almost reluctant activism is characteristic for Falvo, whose career has swung between public advocacy and positions where activism is discouraged.

"I think I've been running uphill all my life, one way or another," he said.

After leaving the navy for the Sierra Club, he went to law school and became a federal prosecutor, a job that places strict limits on activism.

"It can be stressful, when you're passionate about something," said Falvo.

"You have to keep your ethics about you," he said. "There were times when I exercised discretion not to continue a prosecution when it wasn't ethical or in the public interest."

In 2007, Falvo started his own practice as a defence lawyer, a role he says allows him to "be more vocal"

"Sometimes it's like an endless parade of human misery," he said. "But that said, it's like being a paramedic … I don't think paramedics enjoy accidents, but they enjoy that they can make it better."

'Twisting his arm'

Falvo says he comes from an "NDP family" and is a former member of the Liberal Party. He acted as an agent for Green campaigns in Nova Scotia and the N.W.T., but voted Liberal in 2015 — a decision he's since become "disillusioned" with.

He says he decided to run under a Green banner because he believes "in making decisions for the future."

"I guess I never seriously was in a position to seek the nomination for one of the other parties," he added.

Falvo takes a long time to answer when asked if he would've sought the Liberal nomination, had it been realistic.

"It's sort of a past hypothetical. Would I have run in the past?" he asked. "I wasn't really giving serious thought to any party … I kept coming back to the Greens."

Over the years, Falvo said, May has asked him to run on a Green ticket several times.

This time, he said, "I'd run out of good reasons not to do it."

"I totally confess that I have been twisting his arm for years to run as a federal candidate for the Green Party," wrote May in an emailed statement. "Honestly, I need him in Parliament, where I know he'll be the best NWT MP you've ever had!"

Falvo would sink gov't over 'climate action'

As a Green MP for the North, Falvo could have a major influence.

Because the Green Party does not demand its members vote as a bloc, an individual member could be the one to decide whether to sink or sustain a minority government — an increasingly likely scenario.

For Falvo, "the dealbreaker is always going to be climate action."

"You can have a great health or education policy, but if there are forest fires and floods and collapsing infrastructure… those are going to be distractions from your policies," he said.

Falvo still faces an uphill struggle to get elected. As MP for the N.W.T., he would represent 33 widely dispersed communities. His party can't afford to send him to all of them during the campaign, and Falvo confesses he has only visited "about half" in his work as a lawyer.

Regardless of what happens on Oct. 21, Falvo is guaranteed a role in the Green Party. As the Arctic critic in the Green Party's shadow cabinet, he says he's "not going anywhere."

But with support coming from "very unlikely sources," he's still hopeful he can pull off an upset.

"My goal is to do better than any Green campaign has ever done in the N.W.T. Beyond that, the goal is to win."