First, let me say that I have been utterly opposed to strategic voting in the past, and I feel nauseous even thinking about it now. I ran as a Green candidate in the last federal election, and it was depressing the number of people who told me they wanted to vote for me, but…they wanted to ensure that the Conservatives did not get in, more.

Ultimately, it harms democracy when people have to vote for someone they don’t want, because it only ensures you will continue to get what you don’t want.

That said, however, there are some complicating factors.

[For those who already accept this, the TL;DR version is: Don't waste your vote, don't vote strategically - Pair Your Vote!]

In Canada, we are faced with the Conservative Party, which many of us feel advances some un-Canadian policies. We really don’t want them to get another minority, God forbid a majority. (In fact, if they could be defeated this time around, there’s an excellent chance that Harper would retire and the party would split again, as he was the glue – maybe the vise – holding it together.)

That certainly doesn’t solve all our problems because many of us are not totally thrilled with the alternatives, but they benefit from being the lesser evil. For example, while normally I go Green, I would like to see the NDP end up with more power this election. I believe they would help move our economy and society in a more German/Nordic direction – and given how well those countries are doing, that would be a huge benefit to us. (The Green Party would also move us in this direction, but realistically they have a shot at only one seat this time around: Elizabeth May in Saanich-Gulf Islands.)

Why Vote Strategically

In theory, voting for a small party causes the larger parties to steal their policies and thus moves those parties in that direction. The Green Party is often cited as an example. However, there are other ways to get the other parties to adopt progressive policies than voting every few years.

Our First Past The Post (FPTP) system is not fairly representing millions of voters, and neither the Conservatives nor Liberals have any plans to fix that; the status quo benefits them. At the same time, keeping democracy working well requires more than just voting. Donations, volunteering, and actively working in a party are also – arguably more – important.

Let’s take the reasons given to not vote strategically one at a time and see if they hold up:

1. Thanks to public funding, every vote for a party gives them $2.25 per year. This is not peanuts; it gave the Green Party millions of dollars, for example. However, if this is your main concern, you could easily vote strategically and then donate to the party you really like – and get a sizeable tax-deduction. The tax break benefits you and the party gets more money: If you donate $100, you get a tax credit of $75, so you are only out-of-pocket $25. The party, meanwhile, gets $100, far more than the $2.25 per year they would have received from your vote.
2. Sending a message: Every vote does send a message, and the more votes a party gets the more influence it is likely to have. I say likely, because look at the Green Party this time around: Excluded from the debates and generally more marginalized than in the previous election, despite getting nearly one million votes in that election. Also, if non-strategic voting puts a party you really don’t want in power, then how much influence did you have? You may have actually helped to  move the country further from the values you hold dear.
3. You should vote for what you want, not what you don’t want; voting for the lesser evil is still voting for evil. True, and fair enough. That said, if your pure vote results in the greater evil gaining more power….
4. You really only find one party palatable, and can’t stand to give any other party your vote. Again, fair enough, but you should think very seriously about this, as it is ultimately the same as #3, above. Your principled vote could end up putting someone you really don’t want in power.

If you really want to see your preferred party gain more influence and power, your vote is probably the least effective action you can do. That is the sad reality of our FPTP system and only moving to some form of Proportional Representation will change that.

Vote One Way and Support Another

If you care about democracy (and you should) here’s what you should do: Hold your nose and vote strategically to get the best electable choice in your riding elected. The best way by far is to Pair Your Vote, described below.

But you can’t stop there. You may be forced to vote a certain way, but all your other actions can and should go to support your values.

• Per #1 above, donate to the candidate/party you really like. This is critical; it is why the Conservatives have such a big war chest and want to eliminate public financing of elections. If we all supported the party we liked, public funding would be much less of a concern and the Cons would face some real competition. If those approximately one million Green voters each donated an average of $10, the Green would have the largest campaign war chest they’ve ever had. The NDP would have more than $25 million.
• Work between elections for the candidate/party you really like. Democracy fails if the only effort we put into it is 30 minutes to vote every few years. Get involved or stop complaining that more people don’t vote for your party. Work to make them more popular next time, to find really good candidates, raise money, craft great policies, get out their message in ways that broaden their appeal, and so on. The NDP and Greens, for example, could be far more popular if they would learn to communicate outside their respective bases.

Voting, whether strategic or not, is not enough to preserve democracy, and certainly will not give us the best government. Ultimately our actions are what will make the difference.

How to Vote Strategically

Here’s how not to do it: By looking at the aggregated, or nationwide polls. They are meaningless for strategic voting. You must look at your riding. Here are the three scenarios:

1. You like the incumbent party, and they won by a wide margin; the seat is considered ‘safe’ for that party. Vote for the incumbent.
2. You dislike the incumbent party, and they won by a wide margin; the seat is considered ‘safe’ for that party. Pair Your Vote.
3. You dislike the incumbent party, and they won by a narrow margin; the seat is not safe. Vote for the party most likely to beat the incumbent or Pair Your Vote.

For example, in the Surrey North riding:

• Dona Cadman, Conservative: 13,714 votes
• Rachid Arab, NDP: 25,366 votes
• Marc Muhammad, Liberal, 5,227 votes
• Dan Kashagama, Green, 1,925 votes

The Conservatives won this riding by only 1,106 votes. You can see that it wouldn’t take many Liberals or Greens voting strategically for the NDP to toss the Con.

Some ridings are more complicated; you need to know the history, who’s running, and so on.

Pair Your Vote

The best way by far to ensure that your vote elects a candidate from the party you like best is vote pairing.

I recommend this method far-and-away above anything else. It mimics proportional representation, it greatly increases the chances that a candidate from the party you like most will get elected, and your vote actually counts! What a concept.

• http://www.votepair.ca/: ”Vote swapping a mere 15,000 votes can control the outcome of this federal election.”

Here’s how it works: You swap votes with someone in another riding, meaning you both give a vote to the party you most favour, just not in your riding. For example, you agree to vote Liberal in your riding, even though you prefer NDP, because realistically the NDP doesn’t have a chance in your riding. Meanwhile your vote-pair buddy agrees to vote NDP in his riding, because his preference, a Liberal, has no chance.

Someday, perhaps, we’ll have a fair electoral system. But until that day, we must do the best with what we have.

Stephen Harper is a vastly better politician than Layton. There is simply no comparison, and last night’s debate proved it.

I don’t have much time to write this post, so I’ll lay it out simply:

There is a very large proportion of Canadians who want a ‘strict father’* as the Prime Minister. The opposite to the strict father is the ‘nurturant parent.’  This style comes across as weak to people wanting a strict father, and they don’t trust such a person to do what is right for the country when times are tough. (As an aside, this is one reason it is much more difficult for a woman to get elected to high office without being a cold, hard Margaret Thatcher-type. Women are naturally seen as nurturers, especially to people who prefer strict fathers as leaders, and therefore are seen as weaker.)

Back to the debates, and Layton made all the same mistakes he made last election. When the other leaders pile on to Stephen Harper, and when he calmly handles the onslaught and sticks to his guns, Harper comes across as a strict father while the others look like teenagers trying to wheedle favours out of Dad. You may not agree with everything the dad says or does, but you sure as hell aren’t going to vote for the teenagers.

Layton and the NDP endlessly compound this error by talking non-stop about how much they care, about the need to support the less fortunate, about how social programs are so important. That all comes across as nurturing, but Canadians are electing a Prime Minister, not a social worker.

Harper, on the other hand, impresses as someone who will make the tough decisions, who will do what needs to be done, who may be a hardass but at least you can count on him to lead.

And this is why Harper is winning, and will continue to win, unless the innumerable scandals perpetrated by his government and cronies bring him down.

The problem the NDP has is that they just don’t get this – and they are arrogant. Where Harper does what needs to be done to win, Layton and the NDP think everyone ‘should’ see things their way. (The Greens are similarly afflicted.) Harper knows damn well many people don’t agree with him, and rather obviously couldn’t care less. But the NDP won’t let go of their precious moral superiority long enough to be objective and accept the fact that they are simply not appealing to a wide swath of Canadians – despite having policies and values that could and should be very attractive to most of us.

If Layton wants to win, he and the NDP must change how they present themselves. I’m not talking about spin, I mean getting some humility and recognizing that not everyone sees the world the same way they do – and maybe there is some truth in that. Once that has been accepted, then the NDP needs to talk to those people in their own language, and that means showing that Jack Layton can be a ‘strict father‘ and a ‘nuturant parent.’

Don’t think it can’t be done; Barack Obama managed to convey both in 2008. (Since then, of course, he’s come across as a total wimp, thus helping to cement the Democrat brand as weak and ineffectual.)

To sum it all up, here is how the two leaders come across:

• Layton: Look how much I care for you! Vote for me and I’ll protect and take care of you! You are much more important that money.
• Harper: Of course I care, but unless the fundamentals – the economy – are sound, nobody will be able to afford to pay for any  ’caring’ programs or anything else.

Guess which approach is winning?

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*Background:

George Lakoff (among others) analysed the U.S. federal election scene, curious how the Republicans were consistently able to get people to vote against their own best interests. He discovered that people vote for candidates who fit their idea of what a leader should be, which fell into one of two categories: nurturant parent or strict father.

The Republicans have been brilliant at bringing forward ‘strict father’ types as leaders, with Reagan being the quintessential strict father. Whether you liked Reagan or not, you had to admit that he would do what he thought needed to be done. George Bush II also conveyed this no-bullshit attitude – and so does Stephen Harper, who has clearly studied and followed the Republican success model.

The latest poll has Mr. Layton and the New Democratic Party he leads in an odd situation: The party remains stubbornly at about 16% in the polls, while Jack Layton himself is the second most trusted politician, and the most trusted to lead a coalition, should it come to that. His personal credibility is not rubbing off on the party he leads.

I suspect many Canadians feel as I do about the Conservatives and Liberals: meh. Uninspiring, either one will keep us on much the same path Canada has been on for decades: largely following the U.S. lead, basing our economy on exports of raw resources, and pork barrel politics.

The latter is what got the Liberals tossed out some years ago, and from which they have never recovered, thanks to the rise of the Bloc, the Greens,and of course the Conservative Party. The Conservatives have turned out to be no better, with a long list of scandals that easily equals the worst the Liberals did with Adscam. (In my own riding, the Conservatives built “an overpass to nowhere.” They spent millions on an overpass to the Victoria airport, a tiny airport with no need whatsoever of an overpass, while promising to build the much-needed Mckenzie Road overpass in a nearby – Liberal – riding if those voters elected a Conservative.  If that’s not porkbarrel politics, I don’t know what is, and from a guy who promised to clean up government.)

And yet, none of this seems to ‘stick’ to Mr. Harper or his Conservatives; they remain stubbornly at around 35%, give-or-take, in the polls. I suspect the reasons are that people are utterly uninspired by the alternatives, most of us in the west don’t trust the Liberals as far as we could throw their bloated and festering carcass, and combined with the loss of 50 seats in Quebec to the Bloc, the Liberals may well be done as Canada’s “natural ruling party.” No loss, as far as many of us are concerned.

However, that does leave us with two uncomfortable problems: Porkbarrel Steve is clearly getting more blatantly corrupt  the longer he is in power. This seems to be a natural thing; power really does corrupt. Really, building prisons – while the crime rate is declining – for “unreported crimes?” How does Mr. Harper plan to fill those new billion-dollar prisons? Or the relatively recent and quite disgusting gorging at the public trough that were the G20 and G8 summits – how does Mr. Clean justify that massive doling out of pork in the middle of a recession? There are a lot better ways to create jobs, and it shouldn’t mainly go to your buddies. It’s time to change the political diaper.

It seems to me that Stevie has had his day. As Layton says in one of the NDP’s campaign ads, Stephen Harper has simply replaced Liberal scandals with his own. But, given that many of us no longer consider the Liberals a viable alternative to the Conservatives, where do we go?

Go Green?

I find the Green Party actually very progressive conservative in many ways, but they haven’t been able to elect a single candidate since their inception. The momentum they had after Jim Harris greatly increased the Green vote has sputtered and stalled under Elizabeth May. Suggestions that proportional representation are needed may be true (all European democracies use some form of PR), but the Reform and then Conservative Party managed to gain seats without it.

Overall, I doubt the Greens are going to make much of a breakthrough under Elizabeth May and with their current messaging strategy.

NDP: Social Democrats with a Failure to Communicate

Like the Green Party, the NDP seem to have a very difficult time appealing to those outside their ‘base.’ They are stuck at ~16% in the polls, and I believe the main reasons are:

• The economy is doing tolerably well, which always favours incumbents, and
• They just don’t know how to talk to people who don’t already ‘get’ what they’re saying.

The Greens also suffer from both problems, but the NDP do have seats and decent organization. What they lack, completely and utterly, is humility. The result is that they keep preaching to the choir while getting frustrated when nobody outside the church converts.

If you look at what the NDP want to do, it could actually be quite popular with a much broader cross-section of Canadians than it currently is. Essentially, the NDP want to bring Canada more in-line with what well-run social democracies like Germany, Denmark, and Norway do. Germany, for those not paying attention, is an economic powerhouse.

• Germany is who the broke nations of the EU turn to for bailouts
• Germany has a trade surplus of high-tech manufactured goods with China
• Germany has a high rate of unionisation, yet labour problems are rare – because the unions serve on the Boards of Directors and have a significant say in a company’s strategic and tactical decisions (and guess what: workers think longer-term than CEOs, who tend to focus on next quarter’s profits and their own bonuses)
• Germany has a solid, stable manufacturing base
• Germany is moving into the ‘green’ economy in a huge way, including being a leading producer of things like wind turbines, high-speed trains, and buildings that use zero energy for heating and cooling

What Canadian wouldn’t want Canada to be doing the same? We don’t just have to export our raw resources, leading to a boom-and-ultimately-bust economy. How much will a house in Fort McMurray be worth when the tar sands have been drained dry? About the same as houses in any other mining town when the mine closes: A heck of a lot less than people paid for them during the boom.

If the NDP would shift us in a more German/Nordic economic direction, this would be a very good thing. It would rebuild our manufacturing base while ensuring unions and management work for the best for all. It would give Alberta and Saskatchewan a manufacturing base to buffer the ups-and-downs of a resource-based economy.

The NDP would shift tar sands subsidies to things like wind and solar factories, both energy sources the prairies ultimately have more of than oil. Imagine if Jean Chretien had done this after he signed the Kyoto Accord; billions of dollars would have been put into clean and green energy and thousands of jobs created.

We need to start doing things like this: rebuilding a competitive manufacturing base, becoming a world leader in ‘green energy,’ and eliminating labour-corporate strife.

Too bad the NDP doesn’t know how to talk to anyone but themselves. Jack, if you want some help talking to people outside the church, give me a call. I won’t hold my breath; I bet tonight’s debate will be yet another wasted opportunity to reach out.

UPDATE:

As requested, here is some information on the German economy, and why it is a model that Canada would be wise to follow.

A good place to start is Wikipedia, of course, which points out that Germany, despite being “relatively poor in raw materials,” and needing to import two-thirds of its energy, is “the largest national economy in Europe, the fourth-largest by nominal GDP in the world.” Germany exited the recession in 2009.

Keep in mind that Germany had the very heavy burden of reunifying the formerly Communist East Germany with the free West, and that placed a very heavy burden on the country as a whole that has still not been overcome.

Here’s an excellent article on German economic strength. Some high points:

• “Germany’s per-capita income was $44,600 [compared to] America’s $47,500 — an impressive performance in itself and all the more so when you realize that the typical German worker put in just 1,432 hours in 2008 versus 1,792 hours for the typical American.”
• “Germans now live nearly 14 months longer on average than Americans.”
• “From 1998 to 2008 the German current account went from a deficit of $5.9 billion to a surplus of $267.1 billion. The contrast with the United States could hardly be starker: The American current account deficit shot from $233.8 billion in 1998 to $568.8 billion in 2008.”
• “Germany is a leader in key new technologies, including renewable energy such as solar and wind power.”

There’s lots more, from six weeks annual paid vacation to a much better social safety net to worker involvement in corporate decision making, which results in higher productivity (if lower executive salaries). Google away.

UPDATE 2:

This post has sparked quite a bit of comment; for an interesting discussion, head over to the thread at Reddit.

In the event of an election, poll results point to the Conservatives either maintaining their minority or even sliding into a majority, despite the recent scandals. Given that, combined with the desire of the opposition to pull down the Harper Government™, the Liberals would be further ahead to seek either the leadership of a minority government or another attempt at a coalition.

Here are the issues:

1. The Conservatives find themselves mired in a serious of scandals, and, for an historic first, actually in contempt of Parliament.
2. Given #1, the Liberals, NDP, and Bloc will look mighty duplicitous themselves if they don’t vote “non-confidence” in the Harper Government. (Note that this applies even if these parties use some trickery, such as having some MPs get ‘strategic flu’ and not show up to vote in a confidence motion.)
3. However, the polls show that if an election is called, at worst the Conservatives will win enough seats to form another minority, and might even get enough to form a majority.

Option A: A Liberal Minority

Given this, what are the Liberals and others to do? An election is a big risk for the Liberals. A much better bet would be to ask the Governor General to form a minority government supported by the NDP and Bloc. This gives the Liberals a chance to show they are, at worst, no worse than the Conservatives at governing.

The NDP would likely get more out of the Liberals than they will out of the Conservatives. Mr. Ignatieff would get a chance to show his stuff. The new minority government could immediately gain some goodwill by cancelling some of the more odious Conservative ideas, such as building more prisons when the crime rate is declining, cancelling the long-form census, or muzzling government scientists.

The Conservatives could hardly oppose the idea because they’ve been in a minority position for four years now and, as they keep telling us, Canadians don’t want an election. Well, they probably would oppose the idea of a Liberal minority strenuously, no doubt referring to it as a coalition of socialists and separatists, but that’s a dangerous route to take if they’re not actually a coalition. I suspect that the majority of Canadians – and remember that a majority of Canadians did not vote for the Conservatives – would be quite willing to let the Liberals have a go. So the more vile the Conservatives’ rhetoric about a Liberal minority, the more it is likely to hurt themselves.

As an added plus for the Liberals, Mr. Harper ends up back as the Leader of the Opposition, and there’s a good chance he would quit. As he was the glue that held the Conservative-Reform-Alliance Party (CRAP) together, there is also a good chance that that coalition would fracture. Several very high profile Conservative MPs have already quit (Strahl, Prentice, Day, Cummins), and it’s hard to imagine the party being returned to the opposition and losing Mr. Harper’s iron hand not resulting in further losses and likely a split.

Option B: Coalition Redux

Having said all this, there seems no need of a coalition, but that would depend upon the NDP. They might want to force an election in the hopes of gaining a few seats, although would end up widely loathed if the election ended up in a Conservative majority. However, given the Liberals weak position in the polls, the NDP might want to force the Liberals into a coalition in which the NDP gets a few cabinet posts and some key legislation pushed through.

The Conservatives could be counted on to return to hysterics about socialist/separatist coalitions, and unfortunately too many Canadians are gullible enough to fall for that. However, once the coalition is actually formed and working, what would – what could - the Conservatives do about it? In reality, not much except stamp their feet and cry that the sky is falling. Give the coalition six months of governing, and those hysterical objections would likely come to be seen as just that, further discrediting the Conservatives.

All this said, what will actually happen is anybody’s guess. There is no guarantee that any of the parties mentioned will do what is best for Canada.