The (il)logic of Canadian 🗳 elections

Plus some thoughts as I approach my first time voting

But first… an announcement

Guess what: Yours truly has been invited to hold a workshop at the inaugural Linking Your Thinking Conference, organized by none other than Nick Milo!

I’ll be co-hosting a session with fellow Write of Passage alum Vicky Zhao titled The Compass of Zettelkasten Thinking, which is based on a previous newsletter where I outlined a framework for finding context to link new notes and ideas to. Vicky made a video explaining this framework, and now we have the opportunity to share this simple yet transformative method with a larger audience and I couldn’t be more thrilled 🤩

Check out this link to see the full program, and this link to register to our session which will be happening Monday, May 16, at 7pm EST

It is positively mind-blowing to be given this opportunity to talk about my passion on note-taking alongside so many other well-established leaders in the space.

I am very, very excited.

PS. Do check out Vicky’s newsletter, Intersectional Thinking!

And now, back to the actual newsletter…

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So…

Here are some random facts about me:

• I’ve never watched Titanic the movie, or The Godfather 1/2

• I didn’t smoke weed throughout my 4 years in the Netherlands

• I’ve never voted in my life

While I carry little regret about the first two, the last point nags at me quite a bit. I strongly believe in democracy, in spite of its flaws and shortcomings. It’s not perfect, but as I paraphrase (read: botch) something I heard Kevin Kelly say more than once, if it’s making things slightly less bad over time, it’s working.

Life circumstances were such that since I was of voting age, I never resided in the country I could vote in. As a young adult in a foreign country it felt like I had enough to worry about without needing to also closely follow the Norwegian election cycle. But then that non-habit just stuck, and I never ended up figuring it out later.

18 years later, the voting drought is due to end as of this year.

I finally got my Canadian citizenship and this year there are two events where I can practice my newly gained privileges: the Municipal (Toronto) and Provincial (Ontario) elections!

The first time is always special. I thought it would be good to write down what I’m learning about the process, because you’d think it’d be fairly straight forward…

Canadian voting strategy, explained (with emojis)

On the Federal, Provincial and most of the Municipal level elections, they practice “First-past-the-post” voting.

It is controversial how it works, and I’ll explain why.

FPTP is like a horse race 🏇 It means that the person with the most votes wins, even though only a minority voted for them. How is that possible? When you have, let’s say, 7 candidates on the ballot, you can have voting results that look like this:

25% / 23% / 19% / 14% / 8% / 6% / 5%

And the winner is the candidate with 25% of the votes! Woo! 🎉

Or… wow this is messed up. Someone who had only a quarter of the votes was able to win the election! Are they truly representative of their constituents interests?

This mechanic leads some voters to do something called “strategic voting”.

Let’s say there’s a fruit-ideology party candidate that’s quite popular called 🍎.

However, there are two veg-ideology candidates (🥦 and 🥕) who, according to polls, are right in the heels of 🍎.

Let’s say we know that 🥦 has a slight edge on 🥕.

Voters who are veg-oriented will be sort of ok voting for either candidate 🥦 and 🥕 because their platforms are similar (not like that crazy 🍎 candidate, obvi).

But, what ends up happening is that out of fear of 🍎 winning the election, voters will pick the veg party that they think has the most chance of winning, NOT the veg that they truly love the most 💔

So someone who would have voted 🥕 may end up changing their minds and vote 🥦 instead because bunching up votes strategically on one candidate gives veg-ideology a higher chance of getting elected.

This phenomenon of an ideological majority shared by two+ parties losing to a single-party minority is called “splitting the vote”. Voters may or may not strategize based on this knowledge, but really, it is forcing the more aware voters to act unnaturally in the hopes of getting a rational outcome.

It’s sort of messed up, which is why there have been several campaigns to try to change this system from “first-past-the-post” to something better.

Dave Meslin, author of democracy-forward book Teardown, has actively been trying to get Canadian governments at different levels to change from FPTP to something better. Here is his scorecard for different voting systems (left page). FPTP is part of the “Plurality” group, which is the least representative of voter composition, which therefore gets an “F” in his book. The right page shows how these different systems result in different ballot design and choices.

As of today, there are at least five candidates registered to run as provincial representative for my area, Toronto Centre. There may be more coming.

I hear about people who stick to one party, or one position all their lives. Personally, I think it’s fine to have values and opinions that are, you know, subject to change.

To end it off, here are my thimble-sized hot takes on some key issues for this provincial election coming up for June 2, 2022.

Housing

Housing affordability is a huge problem in Canada. It’s a legitimate crisis. Here’s a graph showing the magnitude of the issue:

Martin Pelletier @MPelletierCIO

To American followers, you absolutely have to see this.

There is much hopelessness and anger towards those who stand in the way of effectively addressing this. The two camps are (true names not used) “abundance” aka we need to open up the floodgates and let housing get built!!, and “scarcity” aka stop the immigration, foreign buyers, developers and all crazy high-rise construction, it’s ruining everything!!

I think housing is the hot topic of this election, and every party will want to have an opinion on this.

Climate policy

Goes hand in hand with dense living. Canadian cities can afford to “densen up”. Get people less reliant on the automobile. Tax carbon and other dirty stuff. Turn fracking from a horror story into a feel-good rom-com by building a homegrown geothermal industry (excellent video by Cleo Abram, former Vox correspondent). Just get started decarbonizing already. Incentivize downtown living. Upzone neighbourhoods. Oh and electric cars won’t save us as much as we think.

Education and Labour Training

There’s a huge mismatch between upcoming construction work and labourers who are able to do the work in Ontario. We can do more to encourage people to take up a trade or craft. Also, the way that public schools are funded (both capital and operationally) is pretty messed around here. The legislation is written in a way that benefits the catholic school board a lot. This smells archaic and it pisses me off.

Health care, Child care, Long-term care, COVID recovery

The pandemic brought to light so much stress to these societal services. It is clear that the capitalistic machine is not designed to maintain an optimal environment of care, but instead is designed for exploitation. Hospitals, doctors, nurses and every informal caregiver is still reeling from COVID. Who will give them the support they deserve for the service they provide?

(Side note: It’s the difference between why thing-making gets so much attention under the capitalist framework, while any life-making activity gets unreasonably exploited, minimized, and gaslit by policies and budgets. For context, I wrote a quick intro to life-making in the past.)

Infrastructure and Transportation

Goes hand in hand with Climate and Housing. Many transit projects have been launched in the Greater Toronto Area over the past four years. Launching transit projects is good and much needed. Some projects could be better. Some clearly were politically driven. If you’re really interested in the details, I recommend watching RMTransit’s many videos but especially recent vids like this one on finally improving regional rail connecting the larger Toronto region, and this one on a new subway line in Toronto!

And did I mention that electric cars might be cool but they won’t save us?

Economy, Jobs, and Businesses

Main Street retailers have been hit hard by the lockdowns, and many long-standing businesses and restaurants closed as a result. How will we incentivize new businesses to move in and make the street vibrant again? Also, Toronto continues to be seen as an attractive place to do business, which is good for jobs but puts more strain on Housing, Infrastructure and Climate. As long as we continue to dawdle on fixing those things, it’s a steady spiral choke… priorities, priorities.

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This was a longer letter than I had anticipated writing. Good on you for getting all the way here! What are your strategies for deciding who you vote for? Which key issues are front of mind?

Give this letter a ❤️ if you enjoyed it (and do share the letter with friends who may appreciate it too!)

Until next time, stay safe and stay curious.

—Fei🪢