Strategic Voting and other Anachronistic Negative Frames

STOP HARPER! You see it daily. Every new Conservative bill triggers a fresh upswell of the Harper Stopping chorus. At times, the Harper stopping is so loud we can’t hear anything else among the political chatter. Stopping things has drowned out creating things.

Truth be told, for the most part Harper hasn’t been stopped at all. He’s been in perpetual motion. We’ve all been passengers on the Harper Omnibus. He rolled right through stop signs. He didn’t slow down for red lights. He plowed through protests, and even ran right over Mike Duffy, though he failed to back up and get the job done.

We’ve arrived at the destination our driver announced at the start of the journey.

You won’t recognize Canada when I’m through with it. — Stephen Harper

In fact, most of us no longer recognize the Canada we see reflected in the national mirror.

Why couldn't we stop Harper? Clearly we have been approaching it the wrong way. We need a new approach, and to find it we need to see what went wrong with the old approach.

One of the ways people have tried to stop Harper is through strategic voting. In 2008 and 2011, I was one of the activists behind the main strategic voting initiatives in those elections. In 2008 it was called Vote for Environment, and in 2011 it was Project Democracy.

Strategic voting is an “anyone but Harper” approach that seeks to identify and shift anti-Harper voters to a candidate with the best chance of beating a Conservative. The theory says if we cooperate, vote swap, fair vote or vote together, we can get more progressive people elected and STOP HARPER.

In 2008 we achieved a high level of accuracy (99 percent) in predicting the candidate with the best chance of beating a conservative. In 2011, not so much (87 percent). The polling we relied on in 2011 was changing rapidly. Too rapidly. We made wrong predictions and in many cases people voted for the wrong candidate.

As a result of 2011 I lost confidence in strategic voting. I didn't feel it was possible to do with a level of certainty required by the value of the votes we were asking people to trust us with. I still don’t.

Since then, things have changed a lot in Canadian politics. I am even more convinced the strategic voting models are very risky when change is in the air. More importantly strategic voting now relies on what I would call an ‘anachronistic negative frame’ that can lead to unintended consequences.

In the Canadian context strategic voting is anachronistic because it seeks to STOP HARPER. Again, we didn’t. You can’t stop a train after it has left the station and arrived at the destination. The opportunity is gone and strategic voting in this sense is living in the past and refusing to come to terms with where we have arrived.

Strategic voting creates a negative frame because it takes the seed of positive creative energy in people who want change and plants it in negativity and fear. It says: “If we don’t vote together to stop Harper he will do bad stuff”. That’s negative and fearful. Plus, he already did.

In fact, the Unstoppable One has now turned his attention to making sure that he can stop us. He wants to ensure the things he did cannot be undone aka retroactively stopped. Bill C-51 is a big part of that. C-51 is about locking it in.

This brings us to the unintended consequences of strategic voting, perfectly illustrated in the difference between how Tom Mulcair and Justin Trudeau handled Bill C-51.

As we know, Bill C-51 is opposed by a majority of Canadians. Justin Trudeau helped Harper lock in C-51 by voting for it on a day when there were not enough conservatives in the house to carry it.

Why did Trudeau vote for it, given he professes to be against it? He told us he was afraid Harper would attack him for voting against it. In other words, he voted strategically, out of fear. We see now that a majority of Canadians oppose C-51, and Trudeau’s strategic vote has clearly backfired. It is a major liability for him. This is an unintended consequence.

On the other hand, Tom Mulcair and the NDP strongly opposed C-51, and they did so before a majority of Canadians had arrived at the same conclusion. They could see how C-51 puts a chill on open debate in Canada. They could see that it guts the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. So when it came time to vote on C-51, they voted from the heart for what they believed in, for a vision of a Canada they want.

Here’s the thing about strategic voting. Things are different now. We can’t stop Harper. We can’t stop him because he’s accomplished his goals. Stick a fork in us. He’s done.

So, enough with defining our future in the negative. What we need now is a new Prime Minister and new governing party with a plan and a mandate to build Canada anew.

So what is the new approach?

It’s simple, really. I believe hope is better than fear. I’m voting from the heart. I’m voting for what I believe in. I’m voting for the Canada I want. I hope you will too.