A ballot going into a box.
A ballot going into a box. Credit: Elections Canada Credit: Elections Canada

The monster called strategic voting has reared its ugly head yet again in Canada.

Many who, with justice, deeply fear what a Pierre Poilievre majority government would do to this country are seeking some kind magic bullet to spare us that catastrophe. 

They advocate we all vote strategically for the Liberal, NDP or even Green candidate most likely to defeat the Conservative in each of the 343 federal ridings.

It seems, on the face of it, to be a reasonable suggestion, given our winner-take-all, first-past-the-post electoral system.

There have been calls to vote strategically in that way, on and off, for many decades. Most of them have come from Liberals or Liberal party supporters. In fact, some say the phrase “vote strategically” is just code for “vote Liberal”.

The proponents of this electoral strategy have at least one legitimate argument. 

They point out that, in the past, Canada’s Liberals and Conservatives were ideologically closer to each other than either was to the left-of-centre New Democrats. That is no longer the case.

The Conservatives took a hard right turn a couple of decades ago when they merged with what had been the Reform (then the Canadian Alliance) party. 

Today, the NDP and Liberals share much more in terms of political aims and philosophy than either does with Pierre Poilievre’s climate-change-denying, heedless tax-cutting, anti-trans Conservatives.

Replacing the current moderately progressive Liberals with Pierre Poilievre’s wrecking ball gang would, indeed, produce extremely painful political whiplash. So radical is the Poilievre gang that it seriously proposes getting rid of our national public broadcaster.

Even Stephen Harper did not go that far. 

If you want an idea of what that kind of sudden, lurching shift would mean just cast your eyes south to Washington D.C. and Mar-a-Lago Florida.

In that light, it does seem to make sense to use one’s vote with negative rather than affirmative intention: To vote against the option which would be terrible for the country rather than for the option with which you most agree.

There are two big flaws in that approach.

Opinion polls give scant riding-level intelligence

The first flaw is the notion of basing your vote on opinion polls. 

Polls are supposed to tell you which party has the best chance of defeating the Conservatives and thus which party you should vote for. 

But consider this:

The publicly available federal polls in Canada are almost all country-wide in scope, usually based on a sample of somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 people.

The sample for your province could be as big as a few hundred or as small as 20 or 30 respondents.

Most polls do not mention a margin of error these days because many polling companies do not randomly dial people by telephone, as they did in the past. They use the internet to poll within a pre-selected pool of people who previously indicated a willingness to take part.

If pollsters did mention margin of error, it would be something like plus or minus three per cent for the entire sample. For a sub-sample of one province, that margin would leap to nine per cent or more – given the small size of the sample.

That huge margin of error means most polling information is useless as a means of knowing how to vote strategically, even at the provincial level. 

More importantly, as of the next election there will be 343 federal ridings, and we do not normally get riding-level polls for any individual ridings during a campaign. That means determining how to most effectively vote against the candidate you do not want in your riding is almost entirely a matter of guesswork. 

There is simply not enough information available to allow you to make a meaningful choice.

As an aside, political polling these days is at best a mixed blessing. Polls do provide some sense, overall, of who is up and who is down. But they have assumed a far too prominent place in our political discourse, and, especially, in political journalism.

A case in point is the 2022 Ontario election. Media coverage of that campaign was obsessively preoccupied with polls, to the exclusion of significant policy matters, such as the dearth of family doctors or the crisis in long-term care.

News organizations – including, to its shame, the CBC’s – led off almost every report with some sort of statement along the lines of: “Polls show Doug Ford’s Conservatives headed for an overwhelming majority.”

The result of this journalistic malpractice was to foster a kind of resignation in the electorate, which depressed turn-out. Only 43 per cent of Ontarians bothered to vote.

Polls and pollsters have their place, but it should be a circumscribed one. Sadly, the Pollster has achieved the status of a modern-day Oracle of Delphi. 

Those who champion strategic voting reinforce pollsters’ unearned influence – which, overall, detracts from vigorous and meaningful public dialogue on policy options.

We are not a two-party country

The other big reason to not engage in casting one’s vote strategically is Canada’s multiparty political culture. It is one of the many features of this country which sets us apart from the two-party U.S.

Canada has not had a two-party system, federally, since the election of 1921. 

During the first half century after Confederation Liberals and Conservatives completely dominated the federal political stage. 

In the very first post-Confederation election, in 1867, Joseph Howe’s Nova Scotia-based Anti-Confederation party won 17 seats, but they quickly decided to sit as Liberals. 

Throughout the period ending in 1921 there were always a handful of independents, a few running as Labour candidates, and small parties, but they had negligible impact.

Then, in the 1921 election, the agrarian, populist Progressive party roared into the House, winning 58 seats and second place, behind William Lyon Mackenzie King’s first place Liberals. 

That result did not shake up the political system as much as it could have because the Progressives were kind of an anti-party party. They would not even accept the role of Official Opposition, which fell to the third-place Conservatives.

Although they remained a force in some western provinces (where they called themselves the United Farmers) for many decades, the Progressives petered out over the ten years following the 1921 election. Many of their MPs drifted to either the Liberals or Conservatives.

In the 1930s the Progressives were replaced, federally, by new and more enduring parties: monetary-reforming and populist Social Credit and democratic socialist Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), forerunner to the New Democratic Party. 

Both, especially the CCF-NDP, had a significant and long-term impact on Canadian public policy. 

In the classic film It’s a Wonderful Life a guardian angel stops a depressed George Bailey from committing suicide. The angel asks George to contemplate what life for his community would be like had he never existed. It is a pitiful sight.

Those who want us to vote strategically should engage in a similar thought experiment. 

What would Canada be like now if we had all voted strategically and the democratic party of the Left never got any sort of foothold in Parliament.

No universal health care. 

No Old Age Security or Canada Pension Plan. 

No CBC. 

More steeply unprogressive taxes than we have now. 

Even as recently as the last few years the presence in the House of a left-of-centre third party with significant influence has resulted in at least the beginnings of national universal pharmacare and dental care, not to mention a big hike in the minimum wage for federally regulated workers, and a federal anti-scab law.

There was a time, not that long ago, in the 1990s, when the Left lost almost all influence in the federal House of Commons. During that time the chief driver of federal policy was the newly-emergent, right-populist Reform party.

The result? 

The governing Liberals engaged in massive budget slashing, cutting all federal funds for housing, making deep cuts to foreign aid and cultural programs (including the CBC), and, most significant, slashing federal transfers to the provinces for health, social services, and education. 

At the same time, the Liberals, egged on by the Reformers, cut corporate taxes deeply. All the while, they did not ask a single millionaire or billionaire to contribute one penny in extra taxes to help reduce the federal deficit.

The only Canadians asked to sacrifice were the voiceless majority, working people and the poor.

That’s what strategic voting gets you.

Karl Nerenberg

Karl Nerenberg joined rabble in 2011 to cover Canadian politics. He has worked as a journalist and filmmaker for many decades, including two and a half decades at CBC/Radio-Canada. Among his career highlights...