This post is a quick follow-up to sabotabby's podcast friday post about Conservative electoral prospects, which I agree 100% with.

Althia Raj, who writes from the Star but who I know mostly from the CBC The National's top political hot takes panel, discusses the type of political prospects that the NDP has, and the conservative nutjob harassment that they're facing, which wasn't a thing before the pandemic. Some MPs like Charlie Angus talk about how everyone says the Cons will win but that they're playing to the base rather than trying to win a larger crowd. So there's hope in that. But the number of NDP candidates who can properly talk their way out of this Conservative nonsense this well is fairly limited, and frankly the number of liberal MPs and candidates who can do this effectively is limited as well. That's the problem when you get opportunists joining a winning wave instead of people fighting tooth and nail for a seat. Not that Trudeau won on a huge wave even in 2015, but he definitely had a wave of opportunists coming in.

From south of the border, I discovered a podcast that discusses American electoral politics, namely how Democrats can defeat Republicans. It's named Words To Win By. This episode discusses in particular how a bunch of progressive Democrats turned MAGA messaging on its head, and how the Democrats won bigger than expected during the 2022 midterms.

I wish that the NDP listened to this stuff. As you can see above, some individual New Democrats get it, but the leadership remains as liberal and milquetoast as ever. I feel that the NDP, when it comes up with the wins that it has extracted from the Liberals to keep them in power, also detailed what they left on the table, telling Canadians how much better things could be if they actually ran the country*. So they could use these agreement announcements as long term campaigning events as well.

*: One of the problems is that I don't think the NDP wouldn't push the envelope that much; but as one of my NDP luminary friends recently reminded me, you better campaign left of yourself because no one ever becomes more left when they're in power.

Cathy Crowe is running for the NDP in the Toronto-Centre by election. If you want to help her out, like we will, you can start here:
Cathy Crowe by-election website

A third of eligible French voters had already voted in the French presidential election by noon, local time, today. There's big wave of new voters who want to prevent another Le Pen presence on the 2nd turn, as happened in 2002. Keep your eyes peeled.

I always find infuriating the way in which the English Canadian media depict separatists (when not depicting Québécois in general) as racists. What I hate is the implication that the separatists are racists and that the rest of people in Québec and Canada aren't. Today the noon news bulletin on the CBC was highlighting André Boisclair's "slanted eyes" faux-pas. Boisclair was commenting on how there were a lot of students from Asia at Harvard, that developing countries sent a lot of students to industrialized countries for their education, that China wasn't just sweatshops. So you could call it an unfortunate formulation, but the intent was not racist.

On the other hand, you have the leader of a party, Mario Dumont of the ADQ, who has spent most of the pre-campaign and a fair chunk of this campaign complaining about "reasonable accomodations" and "setting limits" to what the (other) cultural communities should be subjected to, playing the "foreign invasion" card in the most disgusting way. The debate in Québec has been whether it was fair to compare Dumont to Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of the Front National party in France, whose slogan is "La France aux Français". Does the CBC report on this barely closeted racist populist's campaign? Do the National Post, the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star have headlines about whether Dumont should present excuses? They don't, because the ADQ is not a separatist party, and it's not quite newsworthy when (quasi-)federalist leaders make racist statements. Québec is about to elect what's the equivalent of the Reform Party (and I said that instead of saying the Conservative Party, because the ADQ is at the stage Reform was at back in the 90s) and somehow, that's not news.

Vincent Marissal wrote about the same thing on his blog on cyberpresse.

My editorial for this week's Excalibur, yet to be published (i.e. you lucky people! you get to see this before anyone else!)

Strategic, schmrategic
By François Villeneuve
Technology Editor

It has been a short 18 months since the last election, and many York students will get to vote a second time while studying for the same degree, an unusual occurrence. For those of you voting again, the question arises: Did your vote matter?

Those that voted Conservative, Bloc or NDP saw the Liberal majority melt into a minority, which you would think would make Paul Martin lose the banana-republic arrogance that his party was starting to sport. It didn’t work. Other than changing the wording of the throne speech, the Conservatives and the Bloc were not able to have much of an impact on government.

It was the NDP that managed to have the greatest impact on government policy. In exchange for its support, the NDP got corporate tax cuts that the Liberals had not promised cancelled, and instead made the government spend money on education, housing and the environment. These were all kinds of things that the Liberals had promised they would do, but needed extra pressure from the NDP to actually feel like doing. Eventually though, when the NDP demanded that the Liberals live up to their public healthcare rhetoric, the Libs balked, thinking that they could win the ensuing election.

So here we are now, asking the same question a-new: How can I make my vote matter?

In terms of progressive policy, the NDP is clearly the best choice, promising more money in education, healthcare, a national childcare program and an especially innovative environmental program that has brought Greenpeace and the Sierra Club to support the NDP rather than the Greens. It’s that good.

In recent weeks though, the rise of the Conservative Party in the polls has frightened a great many Canadians, who do not fall for the newly minted “benevolent leader” image that Stephen Harper has carefully manufactured. His dollar-store benignness can only be a thin veneer that will come off should the adoptive son of Western Canada acquire a majority. On the flipside, the NDP cannot aspire to form a majority–its best hope is that of a coalition partner, the conscience of a minority government.

So as they have done in the past, many Canadians will resort to so-called strategic voting. They will vote for a party that repulses them in order to attempt to keep at bay another party that frankly scares the hell out of them. I cannot blame them, as I think of the Harris years in Ontario. I shudder, should such a caustic kind of government rule ad mari usque ad mare.

Personally, I have never voted strategically, always placing my vote with the NDP, no matter the circumstances. I know that whatever the outcome is, I voted with my conscience.

For those whose conscience includes trying to outsmart other voters though, it is imperative that they are well-informed before voting. In this regard, there is a good site, democraticSPACE.com, which offers a non-partisan strategic voting guide for supporters of all parties. It is surprising how few ridings actually offer any potential for strategic voting.

In most places, voting “strategically” at best does nothing at all, and at worst results in the opposite of what one hoped it would be.

Every election, even the best pundits and political scientists cannot predict the final result. For example, no one foresaw the Conservatives’ 1993 collapse, which reverberated across the world. So why do voters keep thinking that they can see the big picture from their armchair?