The NDP leadership race could be turning into a nail-biter with no clear winner in sight. But it’s unclear if Canadians are tuning in.
But according to party insiders, three are likely bets to become leader: Heather McPherson, Avi Lewis and Rob Ashton.
I mean, the Conservative party existing is a form of strategic voting - it used to be more than one. You’re talking about it as if the spectrum stops at Mark Carney.
It’s just the optimal strategy in this system, and yeah, it inevitably leads to some two parties dominating. You can be as self-righteous as you want about it - while losing.
How is it optimal? All it has done to is allow the centrists to push right without any real fear because they specifically put out messaging telling Canadians to “unite” or “put aside differences” to defeat the Conservatives. At this point it makes even less sense because we didn’t really avoid much of anything as the Liberal party dismantles environmental protections and cows to US demands, and all this last election has done is emboldened them to get even worse next time knowing that Canadians will happily shoot themselves in both feet and their knees.
Just because I have the capacity to think further ahead than four years doesn’t make me self-righteous. Sorry I want long-term success for the country and not a consistent downward spiral?
Vote for the party which aligns with your views or don’t make a single fucking peep when the people you voted for do exactly what they were obviously going to do with your support. They don’t give a shit about the feelings behind a vote, only that they have it. Once they do, you do not matter anymore and they consistently prove that accusation to be correct.
You’re forgetting that Canadians are by and large not as far left as this/you, and most never will be. Whoever you have been voting for can’t form government.
Doorknocking isn’t usually done for edification, but I think you’d learn some things. I dunno, maybe you live in Gulf Islands-Saanich, and a lot of people actually will agree with you, but even there a lot still won’t.
The kind of thing I want to avoid is strategic voting. I don’t care if I lose fair and square, that’s how democracy works, but the practice of throwing your voice in the trash for a fake sense of “strategy” is garbage at every level. Besides, people say they do it to avoid the Conservatives so obviously they don’t want conservatism, and yet their idea of defense against is to vote in people who don’t call themselves conservatives but who enact incredibly similar policies.
“Can’t form government” is such a cowardly excuse, too, because yea if you refuse to support the ideas you believe in nothing will ever happen. And then the next election it’ll be worse, because people see the lack of support from the last time. It becomes a pattern, and here we are. In 2021 the NDP got over half the votes that the Liberals did even with strategic voting so there’s clearly lots of support. Combine them and the Liberals and you get a population that at least believes itself to be largely left of center so actually piss off.
That is a very slim margin, and a whole lot of voters are fence-sitters who might vote left or Conservative. If the Liberals were the NDP… well, Trudeau was not set to win. Because people hated him, and wanted something to his right “for a change”.
You mention the pattern. The pattern is a pendulum swinging back and forth. If you think it’s been waiting to go hard to (one’s specific version of) the left all along, that’s unscientific. The only actual control activists can possibly have is the pace and distance with which it swings.
If someone can’t decide between the NDP or the Conservatives then we are well and truly completely fucked as a country. The NDP are a bigger change from the Liberals than the Conservatives and they actually seem to give even the smallest fucks about the regular citizens. If someone goes Conservative “for a change”, despite their governments always having been bad, then again we’re fucked because those people are too monumentally stupid for our society to ever actually function. They’re also showing what parts of the Liberals they liked and didn’t like, i.e. which parts they would give up and which they wouldn’t, and that they were really just conservatives the whole time.
The pattern is we’re fucking stupid.
Well, we agree on that, basically.
Coincidentally, there was a lot of orange-blue swings in Ontario this last election. Factory workers who vote anti-establishment more than one away or another politically. See also how UAW in the 'states has pulled in behind Trump and his tariffs, despite literally being a cross-border union at one point.
How do you individually live a good life in such a crazy world? I admit, the IRL activism stuff I do still feels like trying to piss out a forest fire.
The working class slinging in behind conservatives is one of the reasons I know we’re so stupid. Conservative just have to put on a cowboy hat and say some lies and these morons go right along with it. Helps they have a lot of mutual racism, sexism, and homophobia, of course.
Living a good life for me is playing music and D&D and shit, it’s separate from the rest. That said, things getting better make mean not having as great a time as we want. I’m in a pretty privileged situation so I don’t want to act like I’m some kind of hero but I’ve also been without a job for almost two years and am still willing to take the risks necessary for the longterm health of the country. Getting better is not often comfortable.