The Green Voter's Dilemma: Pros & Cons of "Strategic Voting"

The Canadian Green Voter's Dilemma is this:

• If you vote for the party with the best policies and the surest to stand behind those policies after the election, (clearly, the Green Party of Canada), you'll be throwing your vote away, because their chances of winning the seat are slim, and their chances of forming the next government are nil.
• If you vote for the party that is most likely to defeat the Conservatives, on the basis that they've got to be an improvement, you'll be throwing your vote away, because you'll be settling for the best of several evils, and it may just be wishful thinking on your part that the party you vote for will actually be a substantial improvement.

The former option could be called voting on principle. The latter option is often called "strategic voting".

This choice is of major importance! We should all think about it very seriously before 14 October.

The case for strategic voting is very well presented on the Vote for Climate web site. (Thanks to the folks at Voters Taking Action on Climate Change for bringing the Vote for Climate site to my attention.) Please read this stuff! If you decide strategic voting is the way to go, work for it, by trying to get as many people and organization in your riding to rally behind a single "green" alternative candidate. Don't just vote for whomever you think is the most likely to beat out the Conservative candidate, and leave it at that. That would be the worst of both worlds: fragmenting the "green" vote without actually voting for what you believe! Use the suggestions and materials at the Vote for Climate site to help with your organizing efforts.

Here are the beginnings of a case for voting on principle, i.e. voting Green:

• Strategic Voting track record: For five decades I've been watching people vote strategically, because there's always an overwhelmingly urgent issue. But in the 2007 Saskatchewan election, strategic votes for the NDP were a waste of time because the NDP got crushed anyhow. And in the 1964 US presidential election, it was urgent to defeat Barry Goldwater, but when Lyndon Johnson got in, he implemented just about all of Goldwater's campaign promises. It never actually seems to work!
• Differentiation of "Mainstream" Parties: Are the so-called mainstream parties as different from one another as they would like you to believe? I don't think so. Time and again we've seen parties get in power because they say they're different, but their track record shows that we just continue down essentially the same path, regardless of which group we put in power. Oh, yes, there are some differences, and even some fairly important ones, but I personally believe they're more the same than they are different.
  
• Steering into the wind: Basically, if you want to go north, but the Conservatives want to go south, does it make sense to choose a party that wants to go south-by-southwest? Sure, it's a bit closer to where you want to go, but you're still in a position where you, the voting public, have to bring continuous massive pressure to bear for every compass point's worth of steering in the direction you actually want to go. It won't happen. You need a government that wants to go more or less northward!
• Credibility / Consistency: If some parties are talking green, in terms that really seem to make sense to you, what's their track record? Not just on green issues, but on actually sticking to their policies and promises once they get elected? Remember the Chrétien/Martin red book? And how little of it they delivered on? What about the NDP, once synonymous with social justice and support for the common (working) people? In Saskatchewan, at any rate, the NDP had gone so far over to the neo-conservative agenda before the 2007 election, that the ultra-right Sask Party's first budget was basically business as now usual.
  
• Voting for Democracy: Yes, climate change is an overwhelmingly urgent issue, and a majority of Canadians is really concerned about it, but our electoral system lets a minority of the voters elect a government that goes against the will of the people with impunity. We need the people to have a real voice if we're going to be able to deal with climate change. Only the Green Party has electoral reform and proportional representation as a credible, major plank in its policy platform. The NDP in particular has just shown itself to be massively antidemocratic, in its refusal to allow Elizabeth May into the leader debates. (See Leader Debates: Canadian Democracy in Crisis.)
• Voting for Social Justice: If the people that shape our economic directions (and the parties that represent them in Ottawa and Washington D.C.) do actually get moving in the right direction before the fabric of civilization is irrevocably torn asunder by climate change, it will still be with them at the helm, and we'll still have an economic and political system that's concentrating power and wealth in the hands of the few at an exponential rate, and deepening the gulf between rich and poor. The Greens are not socialists, and maybe aren't deep thinkers about class struggle or the contradictions of capitalism; but they do stand strongly and credibly for social justice, empowerment of the community, self-defence and negotiation rather than military aggression, and governing for the common good, rather than in the interests of the few.
• Influencing the "Mainstream" (i.e. co-opted?) Parties: The more votes go to the Greens, the more we'll scare the so-called mainstream parties into adopting green policies, even if we still don't elect any MPs. If, as suggested above, the differences among the mainstream parties are minor, then when Mainstream Party A loses votes to Mainstream Party B, neither party is actually motivated to change direction. But if they are losing votes to a real alternative, like the Green Party, then all the mainstream parties have to take note.
  

Please comment! Add points on either side! Email this post to your friends, and get some real discussion going!