Jeff Green | Oct 21, 2015


It is not exactly news now that the biggest winner in the 2015 election was the Liberal Party and Justin Trudeau, who have been given the right to push through their agendas without consulting any other party, even though they received less than 40% of the popular vote.

Does that sound familiar?

Locally, Scott Reid has won a sixth term in office in the new Lanark Frontenac Kingston (LFK) riding with a comfortable 48% of the vote. Adding Mississippi Mills and the portion of the City of Kingston north of the 401 to the riding in exchange for Lennox and Addington seems to have made little difference.

The change did create an opening for the Liberals in the new Hastings Lennox and Addington riding, however, where Liberal Mike Bossio won a squeaker over long-serving Conservative Daryl Kramp.

Liberal candidate Phil Archambault can also be considered a winner on the night. He received over 19,000 votes (a 34% share), more than doubling the number of votes his party received last time around.

There were losers, too. Nationally the NDP suffered a greater defeat than even the Conservatives did, dropping to under 20% in the popular vote, losing more than half of their seats in Parliament and being relegated again to third party status.

LFK candidate John Fenik shared in that fate, receiving only 14% of the vote. For Fenik, who abandoned the Liberal Party just five months ago to join the NDP, the outcome could not have been what he had hoped for. He returns, however, to his municipal role as mayor of the Town of Perth, where he will no doubt be lining up with municipalities across the country to get their share of the promised Liberal infrastructure grants.

While his party kept its base support of 32% of the vote, Stephen Harper went from being the most powerful politician in the country, to a man with no job and no influence on national policy. He also lost, it must be said, considerable personal credibility by allowing the Niqab issue to fester in this campaign. Without going too deeply into it, the Niqab debate was about more than a head scarf, it was about identifying an “us” and a “them”, and you can pick the “them” the way you pick your favourite flavour of ice cream, based on colour or texture or public sentiment.

This election also demonstrated, once again, that our voting system is flawed. There are many, perhaps hundreds of thousands of voters in this election who voted strategically, meaning they reluctantly voted against the party or candidate they would have liked to support in order to try to bring down the Conservatives. The voting system could be easily changed to make this kind of tormented decision-making unnecessary.

The Liberals have promised that there will be a change in how the vote is carried out the next time around. If recent history is any guide, mixed member or proportional representation systems will not likely be acceptable to Canadians.

The easier change, ranked voting, would not address all of the problems, but it would have two important effects. First, it would allow all of us to vote according to our conscience for our first choice, without fear of inadvertently helping to elect our least favourite party. Strategic voting would be a thing of the past.

Second, it would force all parties towards a more conciliatory approach to politics. It would no longer be possible for a party to use wedge politics to carve out a winning 35 or 40 per cent of the electorate, safe in the knowledge that even if 60 or 65 percent of the electorate despises them, they can still count on vote splitting to enable them to win the country. Every party will need to create at least some good will with at least some of the people in the country who do not support them fully.

Finally, a confession. Back in August when the election was first called, I wrote but did not publish an editorial that said Liberal supporters might just as well switch their allegiance to the NDP immediately because Justin Trudeau was the latest in a line of unelectable Liberal leaders.

I did not run the editorial because I thought it was cruel to beat up on Liberal supporters before the election was even underway, not because I thought it was wrong-headed. I looked for the editorial in my files today to see what it said, but it turns out I wisely deleted it from my hard drive.

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