Head Tale

Best buds?

A couple years ago in April 2013, soon after the NDP and Liberals had their respective conventions, I blogged about how each party had a strong “cooperation” element within their party – represented in the NDP by Nathan Cullen who took third place in that party’s leadership race and ended up with 25% of the vote.  For the Liberals, it was Joyce Murray who took second place in their leadership race with 10% of the vote in what was otherwise a blowout for Justin Trudeau.

Here’s what I wrote at the time…

Since 1993, Canada has been led by parties who benefited, at least in part, from splits among parties on the opposite end of the political spectrum – the Reform/Conservative split divided resources and focus on the right for three elections (four if you count 2004 when they finally merged) that they may have otherwise been able to win.   Then the split flipped to the “left” (I know the Liberals are more centrist and also, more culturally distinct from the NDP than the Conservatives/Reform were but work with me here) and now the Conservatives have won three elections in a row.

They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.  Canadians now have TWENTY years of evidence that splits on one side of the political spectrum ensure that the other side will enjoy long runs in government.

The desire for cooperation between the Liberals & NDP is still popular with over half of Canadian voters.

On that note, I recently came across an article which proposes a limited form of cooperation – if the Liberals pull out of eight ridings where the NDP is the main challenge to the Conservatives and the NDP do the same in eight ridings where the Liberals are the main challenger – that would greatly increase the odds of the Conservatives losing up to 16 more seats while the Liberals and NDP would each stand to win an equal number and the popular vote would (roughly) balance out.

Of course, anything can happen and this wouldn’t be guaranteed to work exactly as outlined.  But if each party’s true goal is to get Stephen Harper out of power and if the projections look like the NDP and Liberals are going to end up working together anyhow if we end up with a minority Conservative government, why not take the opportunity to make sure the Conservatives finish third instead of (barely) first?

Again, this is probably something that would have worked better if it was arranged before the candidates were picked in these ridings and invested this much in the campaign (like back in April 2013 or so?)

Beyond that, I think both parties still see too much light between themselves and the other party to work together in such a concerted fashion.  Plus, even if they did, there’s a chance it could backfire if Canadians saw this as too much “tilting the table” even if it would be perfectly legal (I got enough pushback on Facebook when I talked about vote swapping – which is also completely legal.)

Anyhow, as strong of an NDP supporter as I am, I would be very happy to see some type of arrangement as early as possible because I think the country is too important to risk even the slim chance of Harper getting another majority (with two weeks left, who knows what tricks he has up his sleeve?)