re: Your Fundraising Request for Support
The upcoming elections in Canada, federal and provincial, may well be among the most consequential in our history. The various Conservative parties have been trending further and further to the hard right, with the CPC already messaging that they are open to invoking the notwithstanding clause to deny certain groups of Canadians their constitutional rights. We’ve already seen the Ontario PCs attempt to deny bargaining rights to healthcare workers and teachers, requiring the Courts to finally impose binding arbitration and dictated increases over a period of years. During the last CPC convention in Halifax, the party was four votes away from making anti-abortion one of their official policy positions. We’ve seen healthcare brought to its knees nationally as provincial Conservative governments drastically cut budgets and aggressively open new private, for profit clinics ‘to ease the burden’ they themselves created. Public education is suffering the same attacks with average class sizes up from 28 to 40, no support for special education, reduced funding to support autistic students, and so on. Environmentally, the CPC and the provincial Conservative parties all deny that actions to mitigate climate change are urgently needed and all support substantially increasing investments in fossil fuel industries rather than investing in clean and renewable energy options. When it comes to our social programs, federally, for the past 15 years, CPC MPs have not voted for even one program that would benefit ordinary Canadians, from childcare support, to dental care, pharmacare, support for persons with disabilities, affordable housing, school lunch programs and support for seniors in poverty.
And yet, their glib assurances and superficial slogans (‘Axe the tax’, ‘Build the houses’), their use of emotive speech, like ‘freedom’ and ‘woke’, ‘family values’, and ‘lower taxes for Canadians’ along with their ‘personality politics’ of attacking and undermining progressive candidates, often with outright lies or manufactured ‘scandals’ in lieu of any concrete policy platform information, are all increasingly successful. The average Canadian is too busy to give detailed attention to ‘the fine print’ or notice that conservative candidates refuse to meet with the media, refuse to give interviews, refuse to participate in ‘meet the candidate’ sessions, and refuse to engage in public debates with candidates from other parties. The slogans, promises, and reassurances, the fear that is engendered by misrepresenting Canada as ‘broken’ or that debt or inflation are out of control (when Canada is among the strongest nations economically), the scapegoating of immigrants and other minorities like Trans kids, are having such profound impact that polls indicate that the CPCs are on track to win the largest majority in Canadian history.
I think we can agree that this would be an utterly disastrous outcome for Canada and Canadians.
We cannot afford a ‘business as usual’ approach to the next provincial and federal elections.
The Conservatives aren’t ‘winning’ elections so much as the three or four progressive parties in Canada are gifting them substantial majority wins even though, for example, in the last Ontario election, the conservative votes added to 17% of the possible vote while the combined progressive vote added to 27%. In the recent Toronto St Paul fiasco, the CPC scored 42% of the vote while the combined progressive vote was 54.5% of the vote.
Progressive Canadians are losing to the increasingly dangerous conservative parties because the Green, NDP, Liberal and, in Quebec, BLOC parties not only refuse to cooperate but actively and aggressively compete with one another – despite shared agreement on all the same policies and priorities with only modest differences in how each party proposes to achieve each objective. This frustrates and confuses voters… so much so that in the last Ontario election and the Toronto St Paul by election, 56% (of largely progressive possible voters) chose not to vote at all.
Surveys indicate that Canadians (even those in riding associations) do not see much difference between progressive parties; they do see enormous differences between progressive parties and Conservative parties.
We are in the midst of converging crises of enormous consequence, from climate change to economic disparity, to outright attacks on our democratic rights. The vast majority of Canadians are progressive, ranging from 60% to 90% depending on the policy/program. And yet, you are stifling our voices, putting our futures at enormous risk, all because you refuse to put the needs of Canada and Canadians ahead of your partisan politics. All around the world, and most recently in France, other nations are finding ways for progressive parties to cooperate in the face of this truly existential threat of far right, regressive conservatism grounded in serving the interests of wealth, white male supremacy, and patriarchal religions.
I implore you, literally, I am begging you, to stop forcing us to split our votes based on increasingly hollow party identities when we are in such urgent need for strong, unequivocal progressive leadership at all of our political levels. This is the time to be bold, to stand for what we need to sustain our democracy and our quality of life across Canada, now and into the future.
I urge you to begin conversations within your riding associations, your party, and with other progressive parties, to figure out how you can cooperate rather than compete in the next provincial and federal elections. This could entail only running the single strongest progressive candidate, regardless of party, against the conservative candidate, to give Canadians a clear choice – if we did this, the progressive majority would win most elections in this country. The Supply and Confidence Agreement at the federal level is demonstrating the very positive impact that cooperation can have for Canada and Canadians – we need this kind of agreement to be a model of how the next elections will unfold.
There are approximately, at most, 15 months before the next federal election, but only possibly four or so months before the next Ontario provincial election.
There is no time to lose in shaping a new, cooperative strategy. In the meantime, I will not be donating a single penny to any party which continues to tout narrow partisan differences rather than cooperating to take a strong progressive fight to the conservative candidates.