OTTAWA—In a bid to keep the key downtown Toronto riding of Trinity-Spadina a deep orange, New Democrats are turning to a young man whose ties with Olivia Chow and the late Jack Layton run deep.

Joe Cressy, the 29-year-old who played a key role in Chow’s mayoral campaign rollout has resigned that post and Monday morning will announce he is seeking the NDP nomination in Chow’s former riding.

It’s as close to keeping the riding in the family as you can get. Certainly Cressy can be described as part of the Layton-Chow extended family.

He aligned with Layton while protesting the war in Iraq more than 11 years ago, and was a frequent visitor to the Layton-Chow Huron Street home for a beer or a sandwich and a discussion of issues over the years.

He interned in the NDP leader’s office, ran Chow’s 2011 campaign and is stepping aside as the NDP riding association president to make his run.

He was the best man at Mike Layton’s wedding (and ran his 2010 municipal campaign) and Layton returned the favour when Cressy recently wed Nina Gorka, a social worker he, naturally, met at an NDP convention in 2006.

Indeed, Cressy first met Layton as a kid kicking around the City Hall rotunda. His parents, Gordon Cressy and Joanne Campbell, were both social activists who served on city council before moving on to other high-profile posts.

Trinity-Spadina is precisely the type of urban battleground that will help define the 2015 future of NDP Leader Tom Mulcair and Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau.

So far, the Mulcair-Trudeau battle in urban strongholds has been a draw, with Liberals holding Toronto and Montreal ridings last November, but Mulcair’s candidates maintained their Montreal strength and grew in Toronto Centre.

The Layton-Chow seats were sacrosanct to the party. Craig Scott easily held Layton’s Toronto-Danforth riding and it would be a huge blow to the party if Chow’s 20,000-vote plurality was frittered away.

And while the riding has swung between Liberals and New Democrats in some of the most intense battles anywhere in the country, the party believes the Chow legacy has cemented the riding as NDP.

Already, Trudeau has sparked internal dissent by blocking the candidacy of Christine Innes, a two-time loser to Chow in Trinity-Spadina, allegedly because of the hardball tactics of her spouse and former Liberal MP Tony Ianno. He represented Trinity-Spadina from 1993 until defeated by Chow in 2006.

With Trudeau’s “open nomination” pledge now seemingly in tatters, Glenn Wheeler, a labour lawyer, journalist and occasional Star contributor, says he will decide by mid-week whether he will seek the Liberal nomination.

Cressy, although not yet 30, has a resumé as a social activist that has taken him to South Africa, Ghana and the Canadian North where he worked on aboriginal literacy.

He has been a party spokesperson and television pundit on NDP campaigns at all three levels.

None of this, of course, ensures a smooth transition to the often petty, usually nasty House of Commons.

“It’s not a passing of the torch. Joe earned it,’’ said Mike Layton, the Toronto city councillor once rumoured to be in line for his stepmother’s riding.

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Instead, he hosted a meeting of more than 30 core Cressy supporters Sunday evening.

Cressy told me he will campaign on Chow’s legacy and is “proudly, unabashedly progressive” and prepared to fight for Toronto issues in Ottawa.

Conservatives have slagged downtown Toronto and Liberals have taken it for granted, he said. He will push back against the smaller government, tax-cutting mentality that has left cities in need of adequate rapid transit and is leading to greater income inequality.

“I am a Layton-Chow New Democrat,’’ he says.

Cressy may face a challenge, but his path to the nomination should be smooth.

He has built the type of team that dominates progressive downtown politics and Mike Layton and Jennifer Hollett have stepped aside for him.

Should Cressy prevail, he would join a team that would include Mike Layton, Hollett and Linda McQuaig (who lost to Chrystia Freeland in the Toronto Centre byelection) as part of Mulcair’s Toronto team in the redrawn city core in 2015.

But he will also be looking for a ground team that would normally have included the one he helped build for Chow and could also be busy in a provincial election.

For Toronto New Democrats, careers are about to be enhanced or broken in 2014 as Chow seeks the post that eluded her late husband while the party looks hopefully for Cressy to protect the bastion she built over many years.

Tim Harper is a national affairs writer. His column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. tharper@thestar.ca Twitter:@nutgraf1

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