MWM, 46, NS, casual drinker, loves to bike ride, votes NDP. Searching for like-minded Lib elsewhere willing to swap.I've joined the sub-culture. I didn't tell anyone, not even my wife, but I'm a vote-swapper. I'm not really proud of the fact, but this year I'm going to vote strategically in the federal election.I haven't done it yet, but by the time this is published, I'll have cast my vote not for the candidate I really wanted to vote for, but rather for the one I thought had the best chance of defeating the Conservatives. It's the first time in my almost 30 year voting career that I've done it - and I've railed against the practice in the past - but it seemed to me an important thing to do this time around.Of course, I'm not alone in making this decision. At least 7,000 voters in Canada have registered on one of the on-line sites dedicated to matching vote-swappers. The idea is that if someone lives in a riding in which their preferred candidate has no realistic chance of winning, he or she agrees to vote for another candidate if someone in another riding agrees to vote for the party the voter is abandoning. So an NDP voter in this riding might agree to vote Liberal while some Liberal supporter in a southern Ontario riding that could be an NDP seat agrees to vote that way.It's an incredibly cynical thing to do and it only serves to prove that our electoral system needs a serious overhaul. And yet, there is absolute reluctance on the part of the two main parties to explore the kinds of reform that needs to happen, such as proportional representation or (better still) a single transferable vote (STV) system like the provincial Liberals recommended in its 2005 referendum.The position of the large parties -and of the naysayers generally -is that any kind of proportional representation will condemn the country to minority and/or coalition governments and thereby limit the ability of a governing party to wield its own legislative club.Given the predicted results of this election, I think it's fair to say that Canadians are ready for minority governments and want their elected officials to put away their ideological blinders and to start finding compromise solutions to the big issues of the dayProportional representation, in some form, works in much of the democratic world. The STV has been used in the Republic of Ireland since 1919. It's also been successfully implemented in the Australian Senate and in local elections in Scotland. Other forms of proportional representation have been employed throughout the world since the late 19th century.My hope is that with the apparent minority tangle that Canadian politics has become knotted in, the government will move towards a more representational form of government so that voters like me won't have to lurk about in internet chat rooms searching for our fantasy vote-swapping partner.
