Unite the Left…or some of it.

I’m a believer in strategic voting, the only drawback with it is that it only succeeds if everyone else believes in it too. Canada in the 90’s and early 00’s saw its share of a transformation on the political scene. Post-Brian Mulroney (Progressive Conservative) in the late 80’s, early 90’s, the Liberals completely dominated the scene and we had more than a decade of their rule. Things weren’t that bad at all, they had a comfortable majority, and, as with most political scenes, this ends up causing corruption in the ruling party’s over-confidence.

Behind the scenes, the right was getting frantic. They were at an all time low, at one point the Progressive Conservative were not even considered an official party in the house (winning something like 2 seats!). So the right went through its transformation, first with the formation of the “Reform” party, then the formation of the Canadian Alliance, and then they (mostly) joined together to form the current Conservative party of Canada.

It proved to be successful for the party in that it got it in power (what also helped was the fact that the Liberals fell in a couple of scandals that were blown completely out of proportions, in my opinion). But here’s the problem: they won a minority government. What’s even worse? The rest of the parties are all on the “left” of Canada’s politics.

So here’s what I don’t understand: Why doesn’t the Left unite? There’s very little differences between the Liberals and the NDP and the Green Party. Granted, we have another party on the Left which is the Bloc (representing the people of Quebec (or the nation thereof)). Ok, fine, so the NDP are a little bit more happy to spend our cash but they can cut back a little to even out with the Liberals…and with all this talk about the environment, I’m sure they can gather together and come up with some suitable policy to satisfy the Greens.

Take a look at this recent poll, they can get together and have 54% of the popular vote, surely wiping out the Conservatives. Ok granted they might lose a few percentage points to the conservatives but they can win some Bloc votes, and some undecided votes who do not want to see the conservatives in power…

So my call to recently elected Stephen Dion, leader of the Liberals, make this your priority, to bring the Left together. They say that Canadians follow Americans in a lot of things. The Americans made the mistake of voting in Geroge W. Bush into power (twice) for 8 years….let’s not let the conservatives follow in their brethern’s footsteps down south. If, God forbid, Harper somehow forges a majority government….I shudder to even think of the thought. Let’s just say, all those jokes we made about Bush and his evil policies will come back to haunt us.