The NDP leadership race could be turning into a nail-biter with no clear winner in sight. But it’s unclear if Canadians are tuning in.
But according to party insiders, three are likely bets to become leader: Heather McPherson, Avi Lewis and Rob Ashton.
“Now”? This country has no clue how to exist in a multi-party system and it’s depressing as hell. We call it “strategic voting” to make ourselves feel better about the fact that we constantly vote against our interests.
A few elections back the NDP got more than half the votes of the Liberals but because our system sucks they got a sixth of the seats. People don’t look at the important numbers, only the seat count, so we all collectively decided to shoot ourselves in the foot so we could elect a conservative instead of a Conservative because our brains are mush.
Getting so fucking tired of Canadian apathy.
For a FPTP system we’re actually pretty multiparty. Like you said, if you don’t vote for a party with a local chance it doesn’t matter how motivated you are.
Except that it is painfully obvious that everyone simply decides what a “good chance” is and that means most people left of the Conservatives piss their pants and vote Liberals, who are just lower-case conservatives. The only people who ever benefit from “strategic” voting are the Liberals, it almost never happens any other way. Why do you think they threw our democracy in the garbage a decade ago when they nixxed that promise?
Vote for the party that aligns with your values or don’t show up and fuck with the numbers. If you can’t handle that then we deserve what we get.
“Boohoo I voted against my best interests and now things that are bad are happening! I did this so often that I’ve helped choke out any idea that maybe we can do better, and further reinforced the idea that the Liberals are some kind of ‘default’ option.”
I mean, the Conservative party existing is a form of strategic voting - it used to be more than one. You’re talking about it as if the spectrum stops at Mark Carney.
It’s just the optimal strategy in this system, and yeah, it inevitably leads to some two parties dominating. You can be as self-righteous as you want about it - while losing.
How is it optimal? All it has done to is allow the centrists to push right without any real fear because they specifically put out messaging telling Canadians to “unite” or “put aside differences” to defeat the Conservatives. At this point it makes even less sense because we didn’t really avoid much of anything as the Liberal party dismantles environmental protections and cows to US demands, and all this last election has done is emboldened them to get even worse next time knowing that Canadians will happily shoot themselves in both feet and their knees.
Just because I have the capacity to think further ahead than four years doesn’t make me self-righteous. Sorry I want long-term success for the country and not a consistent downward spiral?
Vote for the party which aligns with your views or don’t make a single fucking peep when the people you voted for do exactly what they were obviously going to do with your support. They don’t give a shit about the feelings behind a vote, only that they have it. Once they do, you do not matter anymore and they consistently prove that accusation to be correct.
You’re forgetting that Canadians are by and large not as far left as this/you, and most never will be. Whoever you have been voting for can’t form government.
Doorknocking isn’t usually done for edification, but I think you’d learn some things. I dunno, maybe you live in Gulf Islands-Saanich, and a lot of people actually will agree with you, but even there a lot still won’t.
The kind of thing I want to avoid is strategic voting. I don’t care if I lose fair and square, that’s how democracy works, but the practice of throwing your voice in the trash for a fake sense of “strategy” is garbage at every level. Besides, people say they do it to avoid the Conservatives so obviously they don’t want conservatism, and yet their idea of defense against is to vote in people who don’t call themselves conservatives but who enact incredibly similar policies.
“Can’t form government” is such a cowardly excuse, too, because yea if you refuse to support the ideas you believe in nothing will ever happen. And then the next election it’ll be worse, because people see the lack of support from the last time. It becomes a pattern, and here we are. In 2021 the NDP got over half the votes that the Liberals did even with strategic voting so there’s clearly lots of support. Combine them and the Liberals and you get a population that at least believes itself to be largely left of center so actually piss off.
That is a very slim margin, and a whole lot of voters are fence-sitters who might vote left or Conservative. If the Liberals were the NDP… well, Trudeau was not set to win. Because people hated him, and wanted something to his right “for a change”.
You mention the pattern. The pattern is a pendulum swinging back and forth. If you think it’s been waiting to go hard to (one’s specific version of) the left all along, that’s unscientific. The only actual control activists can possibly have is the pace and distance with which it swings.
If someone can’t decide between the NDP or the Conservatives then we are well and truly completely fucked as a country. The NDP are a bigger change from the Liberals than the Conservatives and they actually seem to give even the smallest fucks about the regular citizens. If someone goes Conservative “for a change”, despite their governments always having been bad, then again we’re fucked because those people are too monumentally stupid for our society to ever actually function. They’re also showing what parts of the Liberals they liked and didn’t like, i.e. which parts they would give up and which they wouldn’t, and that they were really just conservatives the whole time.
The pattern is we’re fucking stupid.