The way that SSH command works is by running Bwana on the remote machine and showing you the output. Since there is no Bwana it does nothing. Bwana on your machine has no access to the file system on the remote machine to be able to build the manual page in HTML locally from the source that is remote. You would have to install something similar to Bwana on Linux and use that new protocol instead. The only one I know of is xman (an X window system) and man2html that you would need to call as a command to create the HTML page and then display that page.
I will try to explain a little bit better my setup.
I use Bwana on a macbookpro, the one where I'm writing this right now. I have another linux machine where I have shared through appletalk all the man pages.
Just like that I can locally, i.e. on the macbook, open man pages which reside on the linux machine. I only want to make the call from the remote machine, but through ssh it does nothing, I guess it's because the way Bwana registers itself to manage man:, it is not triggered when opened through ssh.