DarrenBarefoot.com

okay, I wrote without fulling reading the post.

apologies.

as you can tell, I AM a big fan of strategic voting, and find it necessary that all Candians who arent Conservative supporters engage in it or be faced with a Harper majority.

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I’m in a bit of an unusual situation, living in the Burnaby-Douglas riding long represented by the NDP’s Svend Robinson and, since his, er, theft-related retirement, by his former assistant Bill Siksay. Both have been heavily involved in the local community, outspoken in Parliament (Svend more so, obviously), and involved in their party’s platform decisions.

I’m also a left-leaning fellow, so going NDP has been an easy choice ever since I started voting 20 years ago in this riding — I know my vote is not “wasted” (Tommy Douglas was an MP here too at one point, so the NDP/CCF has always been a strong contender), and I agree with the party platform on many issues. Were I in a different riding, I might vote more strategically, choosing Green or Liberal. As it is, my decision was easy when I voted in the advance poll a couple of days ago, because my riding and national interests align.

Buzz has a point about the vote splitting. We can recall the early-’90s era when the Reform and Progressive Conservative parties split the vote on the right, so that even with the Bloc dominating in Quebec, the Liberals maintained power for a decade. In B.C. the brief time when the Socreds, B.C. Reform (remember them?) and the Liberals all divided the centre-right and right vote kept the NDP in power.

The lesson is that, while we don’t really favour formal multi-party coalition governments in Canada, we often get them, in effect, by other means: when groups of left- or right-leaning parties merge (into the B.C. Liberals provincially, into the Conservatives federally) in order to regain power after living in the vote-split wilderness for a few years.

That’s what may happen federally this time. Alas, I fear that means bad things for environmental policy in particular.

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[...] I was talking to somebody about voting. She asked, and I told her (as I told you) for whom I planned to [...]

A couple of comments at a “slightly removed” distance.

First, no vote is wasted. Political parties are partially subsidized in Canada and the the subsidy is directly related to the number of votes a party receives.

http://www.mapleleafweb.com/features/canada-s-electoral-system-introduction-federal-and-provincial-elections

and search for “Government Subsidies for Election Expenses”

A list of the amounts for each party in the last general election can be found here:
http://www.elections.ca/content.asp?section=fin&dir=pol&document=table1_06&lang=e&textonly=false

Second, on strategic voting: non-Canadians will likely be unaware of the dynamics of Canadian politics. Taking only the major parties (Alphabetically: Bloc Quebecois, Conservative, Green, Liberal, NDP) all but the Conservative party are to the left of centre. It is, therefore, advantageous for the Conservative party to have multiple “left” parties splitting the vote. In some ridings, of course, it makes no difference because one party is truly dominant. But in the cases where it is close, the strength of the third and fourth candidates can make a difference in the outcome. It is left (no pun intended) as an exercise to the reader to look at the existing number of seats for each party as it currently stands and then again as it would have been if all votes that went to the Bloc, Green, liberals and NDP had gone to a single left-of-centre party.

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