Canada's strategic voting crisis

We must do everything we can to ensure the bad party defeats the worse party. But will the cycle of strategic voting ever end?

How much longer will you vote strategically? This is not a rhetorical question.

I will not ask who you plan to send off to Canada’s 45th Parliament, because the decision has already been made for you by Trump’s inadvertant renewal of Canuck nationalism and a relentless barrage of opinion polls: you must support the Liberals or else.

Two neoliberal parties are the only viable options in English-speaking Canada, apparently, so you must choose the better of this false binary—and there is no time to question whether the real function of modern political polling is to reveal or shape our opinions on public affairs. The situation is far too urgent for reflection.

Given the forgone nature of this election (though not as foregone as it once seemed), I will refer back to my opening question: how much longer will you vote strategically?

How much longer will you defend the lesser of two evils, the harm-reduction we begrudgingly accept as we lose sight staring down fascism’s dark and gloomy gun barrel?

I am finished reliving this same scenerio. Did it not itself lead to a villainous Republican party and flaccid, corporate Democratic party? Has it not wrought the same results in Canada? It feels like we have been having this conversation forever.

Strategic voting has blighted politics for as long as I’ve been a voter. It took a back seat when Jack Layton’s NDP ascended to official opposition status in 2011, but I suspect Michael Ignatieff’s stillborn Liberal campaign merely contributed to strategic voting of a different kind on that occasion.

Even Alberta’s political realities cannot escape this trap. I voted for an anti-abortion Progressive Conservative in 2012, for example, because his Wildrose opposition was a libertarian freak who fears the fall of western civilization (whatever that means) and believes climate change is simultaneously not real but also very natural and never a bad thing (countless extinct species and ravaged ecosystems throughout the eons would disagree). He also opposes abortion, of course.

The 2012 Alberta election was the first and only time I voted ‘strategically.’ I share this story with you—in spite of my shame—so that you understand I am not without the same impulse to settle for bad to prevent worse.

To be fair, strategic voting in Alberta is a relatively new phenomenon. Some of us reminisce, I’m sure, about the good old days when you did not make any weighty decisions at the ballot box at all, rather in the preceding months when you bought a Progressive Conservative membership and voted in the real election to determine the leader of our one-party state.

Alberta’s reputation as a conservative stronghold was achieved through outright victory, historically, whereas the rest of the country has drifted rightward mostly due to the cheap, valueless electoralism enabled by strategic voting.

The great irony is that Alberta is as conservative as ever thanks to strategic voting, which Danielle Smith and Rachel Notley thrust upon us in the early 2010s and that Neheed Nenshi’s team is more than happy to nurture.

You may not yearn for conservative parties, but you seemingly yearn for conservative politics. Committed Liberals and centrists certainly do, and all versions of the NDP now believe they must also chase conservative campaigns and policies to remain relevant. There is no surprise here. This is simply the road down which strategic voting leads us.

Why bother with democracy, given these circumstances? The few of us who would rather vote for what we believe in are a dwindling minority. If every party is some version of a conservative party, we should end this ridiculous voting business, appoint a centre-right oligarchy, and save ourselves some time.

Speaking of time, let us return once again to the original question. How much longer will you vote strategically?

I want to know. I want every smarmy progressive and centrist who is too smart for their own good to give me an answer. Just how many more ‘progressive’ conservative governments must we endure in the name of voting for the safe and reasonable alternative?

Perhaps you cannot provide an answer. Perhaps it is an impossible question because we cannot know what the future holds. Well then, let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that there will always be an awful conservative party you wish to defeat on election day. Shouldn’t that make the question easier?

No? Then I will ask you another, more interesting question.

How much progress would we have made—in just the last 15 years or so—if we had fought for what we believed in instead of settling for strategic voting?

I hope you see that the impossibility of the first question is dispelled by the infinite possibilities of the second.

The question is unfortunately idle, however interesting. First-past-the-post ensures strategic voting enthusiasts will always have at least one good argument to make, however embarassing. And a universe in which ‘progressives’ did not vote strategically would require us to perform real political outreach, not just electoralism.

It would require honest political conversations with each other—agitating, educating, and organizing our friends and neighbours to support the transformative, social democratic issues that matter.

Rather than appealing to the lowest common denominator of what an average voter already thinks, we would offer real solutions to their problems. And we would not just shove a graph or a standing committee in their faces, we would reach them with stories. We would make music out of stories that vibrated to our shared struggles, literally and figuratively.

We would earn votes not because we offer a gentler version of right-wing policies, but because we actively work to make leftist solutions more popular and follow through with our promises to help each other.

What a world that would be! But it is a dead-end dream, I must admit, and dead dreams are best left in the past. No one wants to dream during our present federal election, that’s for sure, and so my thoughts turn instead to the future.

How much longer will you vote strategically?

Better yet, how much longer can you keep this up until the parties’ differences are truly irrelevant, or until our political poverty results in a real dictatorship?

When will strategic voting admit defeat? When the Overton window finally careens irreparably to the right? When the weight of our hubris and naivete buries us? When the world ends?

To put it a kinder way, when will the electorate earn your permission to vote for what they believe in? When will competing parties earn your permission to offer something new and truly progressive? When will you earn that permission for yourself?

When will you choose to end the strategic voting crisis?