A Win-Win Strategy

In practical terms, our focus is primarily on the NDP and the Green Party, the two parties advocating most forcefully for electoral reform in Canada.

The NDP and the Greens, with a combined share of 22.4% of the vote in October 2019, ended up with only 8.0% of the seats in Parliament -- a total of 27 seats. Vote-splitting and strategic voting are undermining our democracy and preventing our society from moving forward in the way it needs to do. Why are voters being forced to choose between these two parties, whose political platforms are similar in almost every area of public policy?

Our principal strategy document, A Win-Win Strategy, shows that NDP-Green collaboration in 100 ridings or more across the country could yield fair results benefiting supporters of both these parties. Although the NDP and the Greens see themselves as rivals for the same pool of voters, voters themselves have tended to vote strategically for one or the other of these two parties. As a result, the two parties are very rarely in contention for the same seats.

No one is calling for a merger of the two parties. What we would like to see is maximum voter choice for voters under a proportional representation voting system. However, we can't get there with business as usual.

By conducting a riding-by-riding analysis, we have been able to identify 50 ridings in which the NDP would run a candidate unopposed by the Greens and 50 ridings in which the Greens would run unopposed by the NDP. We predict that the Alliance might win as many as 65 seats in the next election using this strategy: more than twice as many seats as they won in the last election.