Front Burner - Please Explain: The strategic voting edition

Episode Date: October 15, 2019

With one week to go before Canadians head to the polls, words like “strategic voting” and “coalition government” are dominating the news. CBC poll analyst Éric Grenier answers listener questions about Canada’s electoral system.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. I'm Chris Berube, sitting in for Jamie Poisson. So we are now a week out from the federal election, and we're seeing a pretty familiar pitch from the Liberal Party. We are going to stop conservative cuts by electing a progressive government, not a progressive opposition. Justin Trudeau is making a direct play this week for left-wing voters who are looking at their party and the NDP. Meanwhile, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh says he's open to forming a coalition government to stop

the conservatives. We're ready to do whatever it takes. I made it really clear I'm going to fight conservatives because they cut and make services worse for people. And with more new Democrats, you're going to be assured that we change things. Today, we're doing another installment of Please Explain. It's a segment where we answer all of your questions about Canadian politics. And you have been sending us so many questions about the voting system, especially given what we just heard. It seems like a lot of voters are being asked to choose between a party they support and a party that's electable. So does your vote actually count? Does the system work? Or does it make democracy a whole lot messier? We're going to call one of

our listeners in BC and talk about all of this stuff today here on FrontBurner. I have Jesse on the line with me from BC. Hello, Jesse. How's it going? It's going good, thanks. Thank you for reaching out to us. What riding are we reaching you in? Like, where are you in the country? I am in Metro Vancouver.

Okay. And my specific riding is called Cloverdale Langley. So for you, coming into this, are you feeling like an undecided voter? That's very undecided. And the joke amongst me and my friends is sort of that we are as undecided as the fall weather in Vancouver. Coming into this election, what are the big strategic factors you're thinking about when you're considering who to vote for? I'm very cognizant of the fact that the riding will go liberal or conservative. And if I'm not casting my vote for one of those two parties, yes, that will still send a message.

But that message necessarily doesn't have any effect in the power distribution in parliament. I could vote for the Green Party, but they won't take the riding. They won't get a seat or any sort of proportional power out of that. So it's sort of just a really liberal, conservative choice for me right now. Right. I feel like this is something that you hear about from a lot of people. You're thinking about what party do I think is best for the country, but also all of these other strategic factors. I mean, that sounds like that's a really hard way to think about voting. I think it's a really, really hard way to think about voting. And I think people are starting to understand that. And I think that's why we've had, I think, what two provincial governments and the federal government all entertain the idea of proportional representation that actually lets people vote a bit more with

their heart instead of just really looking strategically and saying, well, I don't want to waste my vote. You sent us a really good email about this, wondering about how the writing system works and how life would be different under proportional representation. So tell me about what are your questions about the electoral system? So tell me about what are your questions about the electoral system? So the question that I have, do ridings affect voter turnout and create Democratic citizens who really don't think voting is important because they don't feel like their vote is really doing anything? But I'm wondering, too, if these regional ridings put pressure on politicians to pit Canadians against each other. So what prompted that question for you?

I think we'd have to go back to the Justin Trudeau and SNC-Lavalin scandal. So Jody Wilson-Raybould quoted Justin Trudeau, and he never actually denied this. I mean, there was a press release after and he was asked about this, and he never said that he didn't say this. When Justin Trudeau said, but I am a member for Papino, which is a Montreal-based riding. And we know that SNC-Lavalin is a Montreal-based firm, which I think that that's maybe an example of regional ridings putting pressure on politicians. pressure on politicians, which made me wonder, if we had a proportional representation system, would Justin Trudeau have acted differently? I feel like we talk about this all the time, that there's only certain parts of the country that matter and make a difference in elections. Like people are saying, okay, well, the undecided voters, the only undecided voters are these people who live in the 905. So there's all these tax credits aimed at those people, for example, or all of the parties

being very careful about what they said about Bill 21, because it's very popular in Quebec. And, you know, the NDP, the conservatives and the liberals are all fighting for a bunch of up in the air ridings in Quebec. So they're all being very, very careful about that issue when maybe if there was proportional representation, they might handle that a little bit differently. I think that's a real symptom of what you're talking about is that a lot of the conversation has been about issues that are very focused on a couple of swing areas in the country.

That's how it feels to me anyway, just watching this election. How many seats would a journalist or a political scientist say are actually at play in this election? That's kind of a question that I don't have the answer to. We've got, what, 238 ridings in Canada. Yeah. How many of these actually matter? I'm really interested in that as well. So, Jesse, we're actually about to bring on Eric Grenier.

So he is the polling analyst at the CBC. He's a guy who has studied these questions a lot. That is his job. Jesse, I want to say thank you so much for coming on. It's really great to talk to you, and thanks for being a fan of the show. We really appreciate it. Yeah, no, thank you so much for having me. It's been fun.

Eric Grenier joins us now. Hello, Eric. So a lot in there. Yeah. A lot of questions. I feel like there, Eric. So a lot in there. Yeah. A lot of questions. I feel like there are two big categories of question in there. One is about our writing system and how it works, how it impacts politics. And the other is about, you know, is there another system that could work for Canada? So let's start with writings. How many writings are actually in play?

It depends on the election, because when you think about 2015, the Liberals had 34 seats that they won in 2011, and then they jumped up to 184 seats. So that means that 150 seats swung between one other party and the Liberals. So in that election campaign, pretty much half of the ridings were up for grabs. I don't think that's probably what we're looking at in this campaign. And instead, you're probably talking more about maybe 100 ridings that you could conceivably say are really, really being contested between multiple parties. Right. So 100 out of, for context, 338. So a little less than a third. Where are they? Where are most of the ridings that are in play? They tend to be in the suburban centers of the country and in some of the downtown parts of the country as well. Most of them are in

places like the BC Lower Mainland, in the Greater Toronto Area, and in the suburbs off the island of Montreal. I'd say that's where most of those swing ridings are located, and that's where most of the leaders are spending their time, because they understand that those are the ones that are most likely to flip over. It takes a lot of time to go out to a riding, maybe a rural riding where it's hard to get there. There's not as many people that you can reach in a short lot of time to go out to a riding, maybe a rural riding where it's hard to get there. There's not as many people that you can reach in a short amount of time. So it might not be worth the effort for a riding that is pretty hard to flip over if, for example, you're a liberal leader heading to rural Alberta or a conservative leader heading to certain parts of Quebec. Right. And when you think about it, you only have maybe 45, 50 days in an election campaign.

You can only hit so many places. So where have the leaders actually been campaigning the most this election? It has been in these suburban centers of the country. And it's rare when you see a leader heading out anywhere else. And when they do, it's almost a news story. We saw Justin Trudeau head to Nunavut. After this event, I'm looking forward to sitting down to discuss with elders about how climate change is affecting northern communities. It's a conversation that we need to have right across the country, but especially here. That's just one riding, and it takes an entire day to go there, an entire day to get back, and the election's not going to be decided by one riding.

That shows how political parties, they really do need to think pretty hard about where they're going to spend their time and their resources. You can also take into account the message that is being sent. Trudeau is going to be the only leader who spent any time going up to the north. So maybe that has an impact on the two other ridings in northern Canada. Andrew Scheer, he headed to a riding, Chateau Gay-Lacolle in Quebec, that is on the American border. That's where Roxham Road is, where all of the people are crossing the border irregularly. And the Conservatives have no chance of taking that riding. It's not a riding that is ever going to vote Conservative. But he went there because of the message. Because of the incompetence and the negligence of the Trudeau Liberals,

the majority of Canadians now have a negative impression of immigration. They doubt the fairness of our system. So they do have to balance these things out. Actually, we saw Jagmeet Singh earlier in this campaign go to New Brunswick for the first time, and that was a series of writings that don't really seem to be in play for the NDP, but he went because he'd never been to New Brunswick, and he was trying to send a message that the NDP is listening to people out east. Like, that was very symbolic. Yeah, and half the questions he got were, why haven't you come to New Brunswick already?

I'm really sorry. I'm sorry that I didn't get here earlier. I'm happy to be here. I'm honored to be here. It's a beautiful place. So I'm not sure how well that went, but you're right for the new Democrats. You know, if they're looking at the map of Canada, spending a lot of time in Atlantic Canada, where at most two or three seats are most optimistically in play for them, probably not as good time spent as in heading to downtown Toronto or in the lower mainland in B.C. Are there ridings this election where we've seen more than two party leaders show up? Like, are there ridings where they're getting party leaders all the time? Like, are there ridings where they're getting party leaders all the time? Yeah, there's a number of these ridings where they get multiple visits from the candidates because they know that when they head to a riding, it energizes the base. It energizes the volunteers.

Volunteers are very important in these very close races. They get the media that comes out to these ridings and broadcast to the entire area. For example, we saw Andrew Scheer. He's heading back to Winnipeg Centre. He went to Winnipeg Centre on Monday. And first of all, I want to say that my heart goes out to all those who are impacted by the storms here. This is a riding that I don't think is very good for the Conservatives. It's a downtown Winnipeg riding. It's seen as primarily a liberal NDP battle, but he's already gone twice. The reason is that's where all the media is in Manitoba and in

Winnipeg. So if you want to get your message to as many people as possible in that area, then you head to where the cameras are going to be. Right. That makes a lot of sense. I mean, I feel like you have also seen this with places Elizabeth May has been going. She spent a lot of time in Toronto. Very proud and happy to be here in Toronto to launch our platform. There don't seem to be Toronto writings in play for the Green Party, but of course, the CBC is here, CTV is here, like everyone is here. Yeah. And she did the same thing on the island of Montreal, where, you know, the green chances aren't great. But if you're going to go somewhere to get your message out there, that's probably the best place to go if you're going to be in Quebec. This all makes sense. It seems very logical. Bonjour tout le monde. Je suis ravie d'être ici à Montréal.

This all makes sense. It seems very logical. You have a short campaign. You got to focus on the places that might be swing ridings. I guess the question is, do these places disproportionately influence the election? Like, do you see issues being talked about that are really mostly important to swing districts? issues being talked about that are really mostly important to swing districts? I think so. You know, we do hear a lot about commuters and the problems that they face in terms of public transit, in terms of gas prices. And so that is directly aimed at those people in the suburban ridings in the country. Anything that's aimed at younger families, they tend to also live in these parts of the country. There's not a lot of people living in rural Saskatchewan and Alberta. So you do have to take that into account as well. If you look at a heat map of

where the leaders have gone, it looks a lot like where Canadians live. So that plays into it as well. Right. So it's not necessarily a bad thing that they're focusing on these issues that influence swing ridings because, you know, there's lots of voters who live there. Yeah. Well, they do have to try to reach the most amount of people that they can. So Jesse, when we spoke to him, he mentioned an interest in how these swing ridings impact things. Does it take a lot less focus off the blowout ridings? Like what are the real blowout ridings where nobody's been visiting this election? Well, you do look at places like in rural Alberta, rural Saskatchewan. These are places that vote 60, 70, 80 percent for the Conservatives. They're not getting a lot

of visits. I don't think they've gotten any visits during this campaign. Those are writings that the Conservatives know they're going to win. And I have no doubt that they will. There's writings on the West Island in Montreal that will vote 50, 60, 70% for the Liberal Party. Those are the kinds of ridings that election after election do vote the same way. Just here in Ottawa, Ottawa-Vanier is a riding that has a large Francophone population. It has voted Liberal, if I'm not mistaken, since the days of Wilfrid Laurier. So there's not a lot of incentive, as I said, to go to these kinds of ridings. And that's not great for the voters who live there. But for the party leaders that are trying to decide,

you know, how they're going to spend their time, where they're going to put the resources in order to win an election, they can't afford to, and I'm, you know, I'm sorry to use this word, waste their time on these parts of the country. Well, this is something Jesse brought up is, are we getting good citizens and informed voters from the system like in these kind of blowout ridings where it's going to be no hope for your candidate if or, you know, your vote will just be contributing to someone who's going to win a huge majority. Like, do we see lower voter turnout in those places because they're blowouts? Not really, actually, which is what's surprising about it. I mean, in that way, maybe it's a testament to people's belief in the democratic system that even in ridings that we know will vote conservative, we know will vote liberal, that people will still turn out. The turnout figures are not that different from other ridings who will bother to go vote for the NDP or the Greens or 10% for the liberal. People will still go out and cast their ballot, even though they know they're probably not electing an MP. Right. So based on the polling, what parts of the country show up the most? Like who actually cares the most about elections nationally? Well, I don't know if we can really

gauge how much people care about the election. What's kind of interesting, though, is that you can see that people who vote for different parties tend to have much more commitment to that party. Conservative voters, for example, they know who they're going to vote for. They tend not to have second choices. They're all in. And they tend to be the people who say they're the most likely to go vote. They are a very energized base. And for the conservatives, they know that they have the most energized base. So for them, election after election, they can usually count on the same number of voters. They just need to make sure they actually get out to vote. For the other parties, you don't see that kind of commitment. You don't see for the liberals, and particularly for the New Democrats or the

Greens, that their voters are 100% certain that they're voting for that party, 100% certain that they will vote, or that they might not maybe go to a different party. And that's why you see, particularly in this campaign, that there's a lot of movement on that side of the spectrum, not so much on the other side, because the conservative vote is pretty locked in. And you've been seeing this in the last week of the campaign as the liberals are making a pitch to left-leaning voters and the NDP are making a pitch, you know, hang on with the NDP. We'll try to make a coalition with left-leaning parties. What happened under Stephen Harper when we had a strong NDP and when we had a strong bloc? Cuts to culture, cuts to services, cuts to veterans. If the conservatives win more seats, will you still try to form a coalition government with the liberals?

Oh, absolutely, because we're not going to support a Conservative government. We're going to fight a Conservative government. And that's something that's changed since the beginning of the campaign, because at the start, the Liberals and the Conservatives both looked to be pretty strong and that both could potentially win a majority government. So for the Liberals, they were able to pass along the message, if you want to block Andrew Scheer, you have to come with us. Now we're at the end of this campaign.

It's looking much more like a minority government is on track. And now the New Democrats and the Greens have a much stronger argument where they can say, look, we're going to get the balance of power. You don't need to vote for the Liberals. The question is going to be on a seat count. If we have Mr. Trudeau in a minority or Mr. Trudeau in a majority, voting for Green MPs is your very best guarantee, Canada, that you don't get the government you at least want. So it's really kind of changing how the parties are talking and making it a bit more challenging for the liberals to make the message that if you want to ensure that there's a progressive government, that your only option is the Liberal Party. So to summarize all this, in terms of the riding system and how it impacts our politics, What we see is there's, in this election particularly, maybe about 100 ridings that could swing. A lot of them are concentrated in suburbs

out in BC, suburbs in Quebec, suburbs outside of Toronto, in Ontario. And there has been quite a bit of focus on issues that matter to those people, including the tax credits and transit issues. But that's not necessarily a bad thing for our system because a lot of people live out there and that's what a lot of voters care about, right? Yeah. And you can also think about it in terms of how much value you're putting in your vote. If your vote is harder to buy for a party, then they're not going to try to buy it. But if you're, you know, you got low prices and you're willing to give them a discount if they give you this or that, then you're a much more valuable voter to them. Not to be too crass about it.

No. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections.

So Eric, listening to Jesse, he had a lot of questions about ridings, how they influence what we talk about in the election. His second set of questions seem to be about our electoral system and whether there's maybe a better way to do something like this. So one way that's been proposed is something like proportional representation. I think we need to explain it quickly for people who don't know what proportional representation is. What would that look like? Well, there's two different kinds of systems, just to complicate things further, because the discussion of this gets into the details. But a basic proportional representation system would be that if a party gets 30% of the vote, it would get 30% of the seats in the House of Commons. And those seats would be allocated based on a list, usually, that a party would set out. They

would say, if you give us 30 seats, these are the top 30 people that are getting into the House. The other kind of system, which is what is used in a lot of different places, that's mixed member proportional representation. So how that works is it is kind of a hybrid system where half or a certain number of the seats are decided in the old way, the current way, the first past the post system. So you elect a representative for your riding. And then the other seats are distributed to make sure that, again, if you got 30% of the vote in the country or in a region that you'll get 30% of the seats. So you get these top up seats to get you to that part. So the idea is that, you know, to use the arguments of people

who want proportional representation is that no vote is wasted, because if you vote for a party, it'll go towards at least electing one of the mixed member candidates if you aren't able to successfully elect someone in your riding. Now, the argument against that is obviously, who are these people accountable to? Because if you aren't voting directly for a human being, you're voting for a list with names on it. That person might not have constituents to report back to. They might be less responsive to pressure from voters. Does that seem fair? That seems to be one of the bigger criticisms. And there's also other criticisms in terms of whether it makes parliament much more dysfunctional because there are more parties and it's harder to get a majority government. One of the pros of the first pass-suppose system for those people who support it is that it gives strong governments that are able to actually do things over a four-year

mandate. Right. So in terms of what the liberals promised, they had actually promised last time around they were going to change the system so that this election in 2019 would be different. What was the promise they made? They promised to end the first-past-the-post system and to look at different options and to determine which option, which was the one that would be the best to go forward. This will be the last election held under the first-past-the-post system. It was a commitment we made. It was at the center of what we were talking about, how we needed to reform government. I mean, there's a lot of different people with some very interesting and legitimate ideas out there

about how we can make our democracy stronger, make our governance stronger. So the ones that were put on the table were the proportional representation system that we talked about and also ranked balloting. So this would be where you have all your candidates in your riding, and you rank them in terms of your preference. And if your person gets eliminated because they don't have enough votes, then your vote goes to your second choice, and so on and so on until anybody gets a majority of the vote. So in the end, what had happened is that the Liberals did go forward with setting up a committee. The committee, in general, it was in favor of a

kind of proportional representation. And the liberals had decided in the end, they didn't like that option. They had wanted to have ranked balloting and said that there wasn't a consensus. And so they dropped the idea entirely. I remember this because Karina Gould came in as the Democratic Institutions Minister and, you know, gave her first press conference. Someone asked, so what's going on with this electoral reform promise? And she said, well, it's not in my mandate letter. We're just not going to do it this time around. Based on all of that information, reviewing all of that input, we've made this decision that it's not in the interest of Canadians to change the electoral system. And I look forward

to working on the other items in my mandate letter. Yeah. And it seems to have been a change of heart for Justin Trudeau, who, you know, if we take what he said at his word, that he was open to the different options, but the more he had thought about it, he only really thought

that a ranked ballot was a good idea. And when that was clear that that was not the preferred option, that they wanted to drop the issue. He had made the argument that a system like proportional representation would have too many extreme voices

and that the system that we currently have forces every party to have a broad tent and try to find consensus among the largest amount of people. I will not move towards any form of proportional representation, but if people want to talk about a different system that might benefit Canadians, like a preferential ballot, I'd be open to that. Yeah, and I mean, if you look at these European democracies that have proportional representation, a lot of them end up electing a whole bunch of parties. Like in Spain, they had an election earlier this year, and they elected 13 parties to their parliament. Like you get these very small,

very like particular parties that come out of it. Yeah. And there's different systems all over the place. You can have the place like in the Netherlands, where as long as you get enough of the vote to warrant getting one seat, then you get a seat. Whereas in a place like Germany, which would have been maybe the system that Canada was likely to adopt, it had that mixed member proportional representation, has a threshold of 5% of the vote in order to get into the Bundestag. So it has a different kind of system. And, you know, there's been different success rates, let's say. You have a place like Italy that has a lot of different governments because their parliaments are never strong

enough to survive. The unlikely coalition between the anti-establishment five-star movement and the center-left Democratic Party has forced the far-right league leader Matteo Salvini out of government after he pulled the plug on his previous alliance with Five Star last month. And then you have places like Germany where they tend to have more or less the same party system as we do. Right. So getting back to Jesse's question, how would life be different in Canada under a proportional representation system? And he was asking about the SNC-Lavalin affair.

And, of course, Justin Trudeau said, I'm a member for PAPINO. I have this very regional concern I have to worry about, which is these jobs in Montreal. very regional concern I have to worry about, which is these jobs in Montreal. And would life have been different if we had PR? Because then maybe he'd be thinking more about the whole country. I mean, does that track for you? Well, we have to think about what the idea is behind sending an MP, right? We're all getting together as little communities, choosing a representative to go speak for us at the big parliament in Ottawa. That would be the other way of looking at it. But in terms of how things would change, it could change pretty dramatically. It would change the way that politics is done because you would have to speak to as many people as you can.

It wouldn't be just about trying to reach commuters in a suburban Toronto, because if you get that 10% of the vote in rural Alberta, that 10% of the vote is going to be useful to you. And it would also change the parties because you wouldn't need to have these big tent parties that try to gather as many different voices into one party because it becomes more viable to win elections. You could have the splintering of different parties. And you, you know, for Maxime Bernier, the People's Party, right now, if he's lucky, he'll win his own seat.

But if he was in a proportional representation system, it would be easier for him to say, vote for us, and maybe they get to a 4%, 5%, 6% threshold, and then you have People's Party MPs in the House because of the system that allows that to happen. Right. And I mean, you're saying the People's Party, we'd also see a situation where probably the Green Party and the NDP, their representation would probably be closer to the number of votes that they had. But of course, yeah, lots of complications you can't foresee.

And would people vote differently? Jesse talked about in his own writing, it was only between the liberals and the conservatives. He wouldn't be making that same choice with a different kind of system. That makes sense. Well, Jesse, I hope that was clarifying. Eric, I have one last question for you before we go. Who's going to win the election? This is your definitive prediction. What's going to happen? You know, I actually get people on the street who just

stop me and say, Eric, who's going to win the election? Really? All the time? Yeah. And I just say, we'll see. So my prediction is democracy and Canadians will win on election night. Oh, I don't love that. Eric Grenier, polling analyst for the CBC. Thanks a lot for coming on FrontBurner. Thanks for having me. That's all for today. Jesse, thank you for writing in to Please Explain. And if you have a question about Canadian politics, send us a note at frontburner at cbc.ca. We will do our best to answer it in a future Please Explain segment. I'm Chris Berube. Thanks a lot for listening to FrontBurner.

For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.