In this election, there is going to be another silly debate about the merits of “strategic voting”. This debate will be silly because of its very premise, which is that it is possible to vote without a strategy. You see: on Election Day, every person thinks about how to use their one vote most effectively to bring about the kind of Canada in which they want to live. And that is their voting strategy. Today, when the fate of our country and our planet hang in the balance, it is our responsibility to craft the most effective voting strategy we can to bring about a just and sustainable Canada. But it is sometimes hard to craft the best strategy for doing that.
The main reason it’s hard is because of the voting system Canada uses. The “first-past-the-post” (FPTP) voting system will be turning 800 this year. It was created by the brightest minds England could assemble in 1215 to design a system of “ridings” to represent the commoners living in the isolated villages of the English countryside.
Voting for Pro-Rep
In most modern democracies, regardless of where you live, you can pool your votes with other citizens of like mind and concentrate them behind candidates and parties you all support. In most of the European Union, people casting votes for Green candidates can be separated by hundreds of miles and still pool their votes to elect candidates who share their worldview and elect parliaments where most parties’ share of the vote corresponds to their share of the seats.
But until we get proportional representation (PR) in Canada, we still use medieval England’s voting system, in which the country is carved-up into 338 arbitrary polygons. So we can’t pool our votes with people whom we agree with, but instead must pool them with people in our polygon or riding.
And so, creating a strategy that connects our political aspirations to political outcomes through our votes is tough. First, we have to make a guess about which candidates in our riding are close enough to winning that our vote could push them over the top and make them the “first past the post.” But our guesses are sometimes wrong. Sometimes our guesses are also dispiriting. We look at the lawn signs, the polls, the results of the last election, media reports, and conclude that the only candidates close to winning are ones we don’t like very much. That’s why academics have observed that FPTP reduces voter turnout.
I am voting NDP in this election for two reasons. First, the NDP has promised to enact PR if they win. Unlike Greens and Liberals, they are not promising to study it. They are not promising a referendum. They are promising to legislate PR on day one of their mandate. Tom Mulcair and democratic reform critic Craig Scott have fought naysayers in the party because they understand that PR is a human rights issue. The right to have one’s vote count equally with that of every other Canadian is a fundamental one and, without PR, we don’t have it.
Second, I am voting NDP because I want my vote to affect the outcome in my riding. Unless you live in the Southern Gulf Islands or Greater Victoria, BC, or the Bruce Peninsula and Owen Sound, Ontario, casting a Green vote is extraordinarily unlikely to affect whom your riding sends to Ottawa. You can legitimately say that there is a small chance I will guess wrong about the finalists in my riding. But the fact that we might be wrong does not absolve us of the responsibility to make our best guess.
Greens – A Long Shot
Some people will say that they are willing to bet on that one-in-a-million chance that the Green Party of Canada will do better than any other Green Party running under FPTP ever has anywhere. I might find that argument more compelling if it could be shown that, when in power, the Greens significantly out-perform other parties on environmental and social justice issues. But that is not what the record shows. In their thirty-two years, the Canadian Greens have elected less than a dozen people, but they have elected enough that there is a record.
In 1999, the Greens elected a parks commissioner in Vancouver and a councillor in Victoria, BC; both crossed the floor within months of their election and finished out their terms as NDPers. In 2002, they elected a Vancouver school trustee who, in 2005, was instrumental in defeating PR in BC’s nail-bitingly close referendum and, later that year, switched parties to the pro-developer Vision Vancouver. In 2013, the Greens sent their first MLA to Victoria; in office, he voted for the BC Liberals’ Liquid Natural Gas bonanza budget, with its education cuts, privatization, attacks on worker rights and expansion of the fossil fuel sector. And he remains a shill for oil refinery and pipeline development on BC’s north coast. In 2014, the Greens elected their second Vancouver school trustee who currently holds the balance of power on the board; so far, she has used it to ditch the progressive incumbent chair and replace her with a Fraser Institute-backed conservative who advocates public-private partnerships with oil companies and privatization in our schools.
I would never take away from the strong track record of Vancouver parks commissioner Stuart Mackinnon, councillor Adriane Carr, or Saanich’s superb MP Elizabeth May. I just want to note that electing a Green does not guarantee you a strong advocate for social justice or the environment. And with the party’s opposition to caucus solidarity a Green Party slate is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.
Like the Greens, the NDP has good and bad candidates and policies. Unlike the Greens, the NDP have a shot at winning in most ridings. And, unlike the Greens, the NDP has a process for choosing policies and sticking with them. But most importantly, the federal NDP has a strong commitment to giving Canadians PR so we can finally put these strategic voting problems behind us.
Symbolic Meaning
Some people say that if we want environmental sustainability or electoral reform, what matters is not whom your vote elects, or whether your vote elects anyone, but the symbolic meaning of your vote. “The more Green votes there are, the greener Canada will become,” people will say or “the more wasted votes there are, the less legitimate our voting system and our government will be and the more pressure there will be for electoral reform.” But these are not truisms; they are testable hypotheses. Wasting more anti-Tory votes does not increase pressure on Stephen Harper to ditch FPTP or fight climate change; it makes him an even-more committed defender of the status quo.
If moving votes from electable progressives to unelectable Greens resulted in greener policies, Ralph Nader’s presidential bid against Al Gore would have made George Bush sign the Kyoto Treaty. And moving votes from Adrian Dix’s NDP to Jane Sterk’s Greens would have made Christy Clark less committed to climate change denial, pipeline-building and privatization. But the reality is that when climate villains, pipeline shills, privatizers and extreme-right think tanks watch people move their votes from the NDP to the Greens, they raise their glasses and order another round of martinis.
Casting a Green vote in most ridings, in defiance of real, measurable, empirical evidence is not a decision not to vote strategically; it is just choosing a bad voting strategy. It is just voting using a debunked, disproven theory that flies in the face of the available evidence, much like climate change denial.
So, this fall, take time to develop a voting strategy based on the best evidence and a realistic theory that connects your vote to the kind of Canada you want.
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A founding director of Georgia Strait Alliance and Fair Voting BC, Stuart Parker served as leader of the BC Green Party from 1993-2000.
