Democracy is Heartless: A Plea

I wrote this a week ago, and I am posting it here now in a slightly revised form in the hope that it might make a difference.

This is an uninspiring plea. I want to urge you to vote not with your heart, or with your convictions, but with your head – your disappointed head, maybe, your unhappy head, your disillusioned head even. This is not a “Project Fear” plea (a term used by pro-Brexit campaigners that I’ve recently seen appropriated by fellow lefties in Canadian politics). It’s a plea for realism.

Here’s where my heart is: for me, the most urgent issues of our time are climate change and late-stage capitalism. I want a government that radically reduces our greenhouse gas emissions – I want to see things such as massive taxes on meat consumption, a total ban on the purchase of new gas-fuelled vehicles by 2030, a ban on coal-fuelled power generation by 2030, and a phasing out of tar sands exploitation within 20 years. I want to see taxes on upper incomes rise to the level where they were in the 1950s (i.e., I would like to be taxed at a much higher rate than we are right now). I want a universal guaranteed income. I want a government that addresses the reality that many of the jobs we now take for granted will be gone in a decade or two. And so on. I don’t think any of these things are fantasies or pipe dreams: I actually think they are the things we must do to keep our planet habitable and to give our society even a fighting chance of long-term survival.

Here’s where my head is: if I voted with my heart, I couldn’t give my vote to any Canadian party with even a minimal chance of winning a seat anywhere. The NDP is in many ways closest to my political positions, at least in its current iteration (it certainly was not in 2015). On the climate change file, I should be an automatic Green voter. But when I voted in advance polling last week, I voted Liberal.

But that makes no sense, Holger, you might say. The Liberals are just red Tories; they are corporatist shills; they are corrupt (SNC!!!); they are covert racists (blackface!!!); they have broken their promises on reconciliation; they have broken their promises on electoral reform; they bought a pipeline.

Most of which is true, more or less. I don’t know if an NDP government would have achieved more and made fewer blunders, though. And I am absolutely certain that a Conservative government would have done none of the good the Trudeau government did, and instead would have continued Stephen Harper’s legacy of environmental recklessness, neoliberal economics, and cultural and educational devastation. I realize that “the Tories would have been much worse” is not an inspiring slogan, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.

And it is worth keeping in mind some of the promises the Trudeau Liberals kept, too. They did significantly reduce child poverty. They did legalize cannabis (I can’t quite believe how much that has become a non-issue…). They massively increased federal spending on culture. They at least made progress on improving the living conditions of indigenous peoples. They did raise taxes on high-income earners. And they did introduce a carbon tax – which may not seem much, but it might be worth noting that Germany is struggling to get that done! None of these things went far enough, none of them happened as quickly as I would have liked, and on many of these files, the federal government was held back by provincial resistance. But none of this would have happened under a Conservative government – and for that reason alone, I find it completely baffling when friends on my side of the political spectrum throw the Liberals and the Tories into one political pot. One of those parties, in my time in Canada, has stood for incremental progress; the other has stood for radical regression. Treating them as two sides of the same evil coin simply makes no sense to me.

(I have spent much of the past year working on Weimar Germany, reading through reams of newspapers from the 1920s. They were full of progressive parties fighting each other, obsessed with past betrayals, while the parties of the right joined ranks and eventually ended Germany’s first democratic experiment. I hate how often that pattern has repeated itself in other historical contexts: a fractured, internecine left easily defeated by a reactionary minority united, despite their differences, by a shared purpose. Please, please let us not make that mistake again.)

But Holger, you might say: we know the Tories are evil. We don’t want a Conservative government. We want an NDP government. Or, if we can’t have that, we want a minority government.

The minority government. That weirdest of Canadian political chimeras. Look: I don’t disagree. A Liberal government that needs the NDP and Green votes would surely be a more progressive version of what we’ve had for the past four years. But we can’t vote for a minority. And we certainly can’t make a minority happen by weakening the Liberals in every riding. If this were 1972, I might feel differently. But since the Bloc Québécois appeared on the federal scene, the parliamentary arithmetic has changed. You might get a strong Liberal minority (as in 2004), but only if the Tories are really quite weak (Harper got less than 30% of the vote that year). If the Tories are even a little stronger, the calculus doesn’t work anymore and we’re likely to end up with a result like the one in 2006: two parties to the left of the Conservatives, strong enough to form a governing coalition, unable to do so because they would need the formal support of the Bloc. And that is how we got Stephen Harper, and how Harper clung to power before proroguing parliament.

We’re not going to get an NDP government in 2019. I’m sorry, heart, but that’s just a fact. If we couldn’t get an NDP plurality in Ontario in 2018, when the Tories had the actual bogeyman as their leader and the Liberals had effectively collapsed, it’s not going to happen federally either. I know we have seen the NDP surge before – but in 2011, there was a massively unpopular Liberal leader, Jack Layton had built support for years, and the party became the obvious “Stop Harper” choice. And even under those ideal circumstances, and with unprecedented strength in QC (which the party does not have this year) the NDP topped out at 30%, in the process splitting the left-of-Tory vote so badly that we got the Harper majority. For all the talk over the past week of an NDP surge in 2019, that “surge” has meant an increase of 3-5% in the polls. No-one has the NDP getting more than 20% of the vote this year – which is pretty much exactly what Tom Mulcair’s campaign ended up with in 2015.

I know this sucks. And I know it’s at least partly Trudeau’s fault: if he had delivered on the electoral reform promise, we wouldn’t be stuck with the undemocratic farce that is our first-past-the-post system. But he didn’t, and we are.

One thing is very clear to me: parties aren’t swayed by minorities of voters choosing other parties. The Tories won’t care at all about anyone who doesn’t vote for them already – except for wealthy Liberal voters, perhaps, and for socially conservative voters across the party spectrum. The Liberals might shift their policy proposals slightly to woo uncommitted Green and NDP voters, but that doesn’t make it a rational choice to vote Green or NDP in a riding where Liberals and Conservatives are in a close fight. Why? Because the shift has already occurred: what Trudeau is proposing in his platform is an effort to retain potential Green or NDP voters. You can signal that that isn’t enough for you by still voting for a party that has no chance of winning, sure. You can signal that you don’t trust that the shift is real, because it didn’t go far enough and promises were egregiously broken last time. And if we had a better system, your signal might have an effect. But in the system we do have, it is likely to lead to the election of the party that neither wants to hear you nor cares about what you have to say.

There are a lot of ifs in this argument: if we had a better electoral system; if the NDP vote were more efficiently distributed; if the Bloc didn’t exist; even if the NDP were ahead of the Liberals in the polls now, as they were at this point in 2011 – under any of those circumstances, I wouldn’t vote Liberal, and I wouldn’t try to persuade anyone to do so. Here’s another if: if you’re lucky enough to be in a riding where the NDP and the Tories are the main contenders, I envy you. If you’re in a riding such as Essex (ON), or Elmwood-Transcona (MB), or Desnethé–Missinippi–Churchill River (SK), or Saskatoon West (SK), or Edmonton Strathcona (AB), or Cowichan-Malahat-Langford (BC), or Kootenay-Columbia (BC), PLEASE don’t vote Liberal. But please don’t vote Green either: because it might feel great to boost the environmentally conscious vote, but unless you manage to double it, all you’ll do is elect a Tory.

But if you’re in a riding where neither orange nor green is really in contention, please don’t listen to your heart. I look at half the ridings in BC, and cringe at how easy it is for the Tories to walk into a seat there with barely a third of the vote. I look at ridings like Mississauga-Lakeshore or Simcoe-North and am baffled by the self-defeating logic of supporting parties 20-30% out of contention when all such a decision does is ensure that the Liberals will lose a seat to the Tories by single digits. What does such a vote achieve? It registers your conviction – at the cost of supporting, in effect, the political forces most opposed to your own.

The other day, I listened to a segment on the CBC’s The Current from Milton (ON): four voters talking to each other about their respective parties of choice. It was a pretty depressing conversation, to be frank — in good part because it was so shockingly ill-informed. Ill-informed about the issues, about what the parties under discussion in fact have done and are proposing to do — but also ill-informed about how our electoral system works. Milton is a key riding in this election, I think. It has along-term, well-known Conservative MP in Lisa Raitt. The area has had Liberal MPs in the past, but the NDP has never even come second in a federal election in Milton (or its predecessor ridings, going back to 1962). Even in 2011, their vote share fell short of both Conservatives and Liberals. Now that year, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway: Raitt won over 50% of the vote. But in 2015, the vote splitting essentially gifted her a seat in parliament; and in 2019, the same thing may very well happen again. But none of the four voters in that CBC segment seemed to be really clear about that, at all. So, for three of them, and for the rest of you who may be in doubt about this: if you’re in a riding where your progressive party of choice regularly comes in third, far behind the two front runners, your vote does nothing to support progressive politics. It sends people like Lisa Raitt to Ottawa, even though a majority of voters in Milton did not want her back there. Let’s stop sending people like Lisa Raitt to Ottawa.

So, yes, in the end, I suppose this is just another strategic voting plea. I know that’s uninspiring. But it’s not pointless. And it’s certainly not baseless. We have at least two forecasting sites that use sophisticated models to project outcomes: http://338canada.com/districts/districts.htm and https://calculatedpolitics.ca/2019-canadian-federal-election/ (ignore the CBC Poll Tracker: it aggregates polls just fine, but its forecasting model is… fuzzy). Of course those sites are only as good as the polls they draw on – but those polls have in fact been very good and very consistent, for over a decade. They have consistently overestimated the NDP’s and the Green’s vote share in every federal election since 2004. They have generally underestimated the positive effect of incumbency, and often somewhat underestimated the Conservative vote; except for 2015, they have got the Liberal vote more or less right. On the whole, however, the polls for the last decade have been reliable, within their margins of error. There is no reason not to take them, and the riding-level forecasts based on them, as guidance for your vote.

I’m not a defeatist. I’m all for campaigning hard for the causes you believe in and for the party that best represents your views. But if by voting day it is apparent that your party has not persuaded enough voters to win, I then am all for jumping ship, betraying your heart and voting, with a disappointed head, for whichever left-of-Tory party is likeliest to win. That may not be victory, but at least it’s better than total defeat. “Better than nothing” – not exactly a great slogan either, but good enough for me, this year.

A quick postscript: to make it easier to figure out who is in contention in your riding, here’s an extremely handy list of toss-up and uncertain ridings from 338canada.com. If the “parties in play” don’t include the Tories, by all means vote your heart: the demographics of your riding are progressive enough to let you do that. If you’re in a three- or four-way-race riding: my condolences. I wouldn’t know what to do in that situation. I’d probably wait and dither until Monday to see if a gap opens up. But if there are only two parties in that “in play” column? PLEASE vote for whichever of them isn’t the Conservative Party of Canada.