Thoughts on Yesterday’s Canadian Election: Harper Still Doesn’t Speak for Canada

But so far we are not angry enough to vote into power a truly progressive government — the three “third parties” (New Democrats, Greens and Bloc QuÈbecois) are all well left-of-centre socially and economically but remain perpetually on the fringes of power, and so enamoured of their parochial interests that they are unable to get together and present a unified and unambiguous progressive voice. 

So we got treated to a virtual replay of the election of two years ago — the Conservatives got the same 37% of the vote, but nearly won a majority of seats because of a shift in the votes among the two thirds of Canadians who loathe the Conservatives (surveys suggest that in a single-transferable vote system they would get almost no second-place votes). What should be happening is that the Liberal leader should be pulling together a coalition of the four opposition parties to create a government that reflects the interests of the 63% of Canadians who support progressive, not reactionary, government.

If we had proportional representation, such as a STV system, the Conservatives would have only 113 seats (they got 143), the Liberals 83 (they got 76) , the NDP 58 (they got 37), the Bloc 31 (they got 50), and the Greens 22 (they got none; in fact, because a lot of Greens voted strategically instead of “wasting” their Green votes, the Greens under a PST system would probably have more than 40 seats today). If that were the case, the idea of an out-of-touch 37% running the government and bragging that they had a “renewed and increased mandate to govern” would be seen as as preposterous as it really is.

Such a colossal waste of energy, time and money ($300 million, just to run the election). The fact that the turnout was a record low really says it all. It really shows how dysfunctional our electoral system is. And the fact that Canadians fell for Harper’s Bush-inspired character assassination of the Liberal leader, and Harper’s falsely smearing the idea of a carbon tax as an “additional tax burden” (the scheme is revenue neutral and would only punish polluters and gas gulpers) was really disappointing — it demonstrated how depressingly effective negative, dumbed-down campaign advertising can be.

Ugh. Here we are, again, in the same place.