How to vote

With the announcement of the federal election on June 28, I again face the quandary of how to vote. Do I vote for the Prime Minister I think could best lead the country, the party whose policies I favour, or the local candidate who has the integrity and dedication of which I approve? The problem arises when the choice of candidate in my riding does not meet the first two criteria.

This is not a new problem for me, but it has become somewhat less pressing as far as policy goes since each of the three main parties poach each others’ platform in an effort to keep the middle, if not high, ground in our political spectrum.

It is difficult to base my choice on past performance of the federal parties. The Liberals have so much baggage coming into this election: the sponsorship scandal, the gun registry, the Human Resources boondoggle and the memory of Jean Chrétien. The Conservatives are carrying memories of the Reform Party’s right wing extremism and the failed Progressive Conservatives, as well as memories of Brian Mulroney and Joe Who, and a feeling that they are not sure of what their policies will be if elected. I like Jack Layton’s fire but just don’t feel comfortable with the NDP policies – especially after the Bob Rae experience in Ontario – and the prospect of too many new faces in parliament.

How important is the party leader in all of this? No doubt it was Chrétien who decided not to join the coalition in Iraq. Harper would have gone in an instant. A strong leader in the House can force his will on his party, whereas a weaker or perhaps more thoughtful leader might make decisions based on party consensus. The problem is that like any of us, the party leader can be here today and gone tomorrow. If the PM dies, the party would hold a leadership convention to pick the new PM. Only that party has a say in the choice of the new leader. Since I belong to no party, I am disenfranchised if I vote based on the choice of Prime Minister. So I do not vote that way.

This should lead me to vote for the party. The problem is that I am a one-man political rainbow coalition: liberal in favouring reform and progress in our democracy, a fiscal conservative in financial matters, an NDP on most social issues and strongly Green for the environment. I support a central government so would not vote Bloc even if I was a Québécois. I have also been around long enough not to believe any election platform, whether it is written in a red book or not.

You can see that I’m now down to the riding level. Voting for the local MP carries the same vulnerability as voting for the Prime Minister, but if the local MP passes on or drops out for other reasons, we get to have another election, right away. The problem is that my party member may not have a free vote in the Commons on an important issue. I seem to remember Woody initially being against the gun registry, but his only way to show this was to play hooky on the day of the vote – which was a vote for it.


So it comes down to the person and whether I think he will stand up and represent the riding in a way which I approve. Of course a candidate can change his or her minds once comfortably installed in Ottawa, but that’s a chance I have to take. All we can do is look at the past performance of the candidate. If the candidate is the incumbent it makes it a little easier, but this time around we have new people. Worse still, I know and like both the Liberal and Conservative candidates!

Maybe I’ll have to vote for the party. Let’s see – that would be the party that selected Martin, Harper or Layton as potential leader of the country. There has got to be a better way.

And there is. It’s called proportional representation. The idea behind PR is to reduce the disparity between a party’s overall votes and the number of seats they hold in parliament. For instance, if the Liberals get 38% of the popular vote, they would end up with only 117 out of 308 seats in the house. Under the present system they could hold a clear majority, depending on the number of ridings that they carry by splitting the vote among the other parties. With PR, a party getting 10% of the votes would hold 10% of the seats or 30 seats in parliament. (There would be some re-alignment of ridings to accommodate PR so the number of MPs would likely change.)

The thought behind proportional representation is that all voters deserve representation—as do all political groups – in proportion to their strength in the electorate. There are a number of techniques used to vote using PR, but all attempt to give the voter a choice of party and of candidate – not necessarily the same. So I could vote for the Liberals as a party but vote for a Conservative MP.

Just under half of all democracies use some form of proportional representation, so it is not something new. It allows new parties, such as the Green Party, to gain some influence in parliaments. It also allows Independents a chance of gaining a seat while not upsetting a major party. For more details you can check out the methods of PR voting by using Google to search proportional representation.

One appealing thing about PR voting is that it gives the electors a way to express their preferences with some assurance that they can have an effect on the outcome when the seats are proportioned in parliament. People who support the Green party can vote knowing that they will have representation for their ideals whereas a vote for a Green candidate now is simply lost because they have little or no hope of beating the Liberal, Conservative or NDP candidate. All votes become important so more people will vote.

When we finally get around to electoral reform, I would be interested in hearing the discussion around PR as well as a fixed term, the appointment of the judiciary and an elected senate.

In the meantime, I have to think about June 28 and how to vote.