So, the major political parties have banded together to attempt to overthrow the ruling party in Canada. Their main argument is that, together, they represent a greater majority of Canadians than the ruling party alone. And, if you’re mindlessly spitting out numbers, they’re right. If you add the numbers of votes for the Liberals, NDP and Bloc together, it’s greater than the number of votes for the Conservatives. It’s also asinine and wrong.
First, let’s deal with the numbers. Sure, if you add the three parties together, it’s a pretty big number… assuming every voter for every party would vote for a coalition of the three parties. Of course, this won’t always be the case. Let’s say I was stuck deciding between the Conservatives and NDP, but sure as hell was opposed to seeing the Liberals back in power. Before the coalition, I cast my vote for the NDP. After the coalition? Well, my vote would naturally go against the Liberals, so it’d go conservative. They’re operating on the assumption that adding their parties together strengthens them, when in reality people are so fickle about their political parties that a NDP supporter would waver when seeing their party in bed with the Liberals, or a Liberal supporter would turn and walk away when they see them shaking hands with the Bloc. This won’t result in a dramatic shift in the numbers, but if there’s even a 10% defection rate, we’d be looking at a Conservative majority. And it doesn’t really work the other way: people aren’t going to vote for a coalition just because a party they didn’t vote for joined up with parties that you wanted to vote for even less.
But the biggest problem is the claim that somehow, magically, a coalition would “represent more Canadians” than the Conservatives, were they to gain power. Let me pick that apart with a weak analogy.
Let’s say everyone in Canada had to vote for their favourite colour of Smartie (which is a hilariously Canadian example to use, since Smarties in Canada aren’t even remotely the same thing as Smarties in the US). The results come in: 40% like blue the most, and 10% vote for each other colour (except brown). Naturally, the blue Smartie is declared the winner. You can operate on the assumption that the blue Smartie represents the country better than the other Smarties.
“But wait!,” says the other anthropomorphic Smarties. “Combined together, more people like Smarties other than blue than people who like blue!” And somehow they derive from this that what people really want is a pack of Smarties devoid of blue. The people have spoken!
“This is a terrible analogy!,” you cry.
“Perhaps,” I reply. Oh, wait. This is a blog. I can just respond directly: Perhaps. But I warned you about that going in.
“But why would you do that? You’re only saying that in order to shrug off people who try to discredit the analogy. Own your words, you weak-willed blogger!”
And to that I reply: This is my blog. I can drudge up whatever logical fallacies I want.
But seriously: considerably more people voted Conservative than any other party. In the last election, the Conservatives did even better than before. Single-handedly, they best represent Canadians. If a coalition were to gain power, they would essentially represent everyone except the largest group of voters. That’s not better representation. It’s like saying you “best represent” computer users by representing everyone who isn’t running Windows.
Now, then. I hate the Conservatives. I don’t like having them in power. But I feel pretty much the same about the Liberals and slightly less for the NDP. But we already had an election, and the Conservatives won. More people wanted them in power than anyone else, and I don’t think we should kill the government just because the other parties don’t like that. Maybe the events of the next few weeks will change my mind. I doubt it. Because as an NDP voter who would rather vote Conservative than Liberal… this coalition really isn’t my thing.
