- by Anne Finlay-Stewart, Editor

This will be the 15th federal election in which I have voted in the forty-seven years I have been eligible.

That would average an election every 3.1 years – but that's not how a parliamentary system works in real life.

The shortest time between elections in my life was nine months – from the day Joe Clark of the Progressive Conservative Party became Canada's youngest Prime Minister with 36% of the popular vote to the Liberals 40%. When Clark refused to dance with the last six Social Credit Party MPs in a Canadian parliament, he lost a confidence vote and Pierre Trudeau became Prime Minister in 1980, and we were back to three parties.

Brian Mulroney's Progressive Conservatives won the 1984 election with 50.3% of the popular vote - the first time a winning party had a real majority since 1958, and it hasn't happened since. It won him 75% of the seats, and 100% of the power, which he kept until he retired months before a statutorily mandated election in 1993. That fall, Chretien became  Prime Minister and the Bloc Quebecois, dedicated to separatism and with no candidates outside Quebec,  took on the role of “Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition”. Reform became the third party, trailed badly by the NDP and PCs.

Nationally, the Conservatives won a majority government again in 2011 with only 39.6% of the popular vote, and 61.1% of the eligible population voting.

  Parties running minority governments try to gain/regain power – Majority governments try to hold on to it as long as they can.

In 2015, Justin Trudeau repeated over a thousand times that it would be the last election run under Canada's“first-past-the-post” electoral system.

That year, Environics conducted a poll in Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound commissioned by an independent advocacy campaign, VoteTogether. One of their goals was to let people know which candidate supported electoral reform in their riding AND had the best chance of winning. Here, the poll showed the Conservative candidate at 43% and the Liberals at 29%.

The final result on election night showed that many voters who had supported the NDP and Greens in 2011 were voting strategically – hoping it was the last time their vote would not count. The final count was 47% for the Conservative incumbent and 39% for his Liberal challenger – up 22% from the Liberal's 2011 result – and the Greens and NDP support lower.

By the time the 2019 election rolled around, with electoral reform completely off both the Liberal and Conservative tables and new candidates for every party in Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound, voters seem to have returned to their usual political homes.

It is unlikely that any party or organization has any reason to spend money on local polling in our riding this time around, although we've had some calls on our landline from national pollsters.

The national outcome may still be within a margin of error, and the future of more than one party leader may be hanging in the balance Monday night, or even for days after.

Here at home, there is no reason to vote strategically in 2021. Vote for the person, the party, the leader or the platform, or decline your ballot.

It is long past time to re-visit the failings of “winner take all” and why so many jurisdictions have left it far behind. But tomorrow, for the 44th time, we will choose a government for Canada.