I have no reason to keep it close to the chest. I am not the voice of any organization with political clout. I am not a journalist, expected against reason to be a political eunuch. I do not speak for vested interests, other than my own. I speak as one individual among many, and I am happy with my choice to expose as many people as I can, in my limited way, to the new ideas being brought forward by the Greens.

But being the champion of such a small party as the Greens brings challenges. The relative lack of party machinery, and funding, are among them. The GPO is getting better in this regard – they have a fantastic team of dedicated professionals working hard over at Party HQ – but it still has a long way to go.

All that aside, the most galling and frustrating of the challenges is the absurd propensity of people, especially those who are ostensibly progressive small-g greens who profess to be for change, to resist change. They want us to vote for one of the older, more established parties because, I suppose in my darker moments, change actually scares them.

That’s probably not the real reason. The real reason is that they fail to grasp the importance of building a party, as opposed to just winning this week’s horse race. Perhaps, being greens, they have an impending sense that this might actually be the last election. If Tim Hudak and the his Hudakerrites get into power, they feel, we’ll be hurled back into the dark ages and all the electricity will be shut off and those of us who are left will never vote again. So their constant call is vote the same way they’ve always voted – NDP or Liberal, depending on the cut of their jibs – not because they are building toward their own ideals, but because they are afraid of what will happen if those coal-dirty, backward-to-the-future Tories start ripping down the Green Energy Act.

Of course that’s not true. This is not the last election, and not everything rides on this election, despite the admonitions of MaRS cleantech advisor Tom Rand, shilling here for the Liberals, or @PureShakti, hiding under a cloak of anonymity and shilling for the NDP. Both want you to vote Liberal or Dipper respectively to prevent the Tories from taking power. But they can’t both be right, can they?

Of course neither is right. The best course of action is to build the party that best reflects your own ideals, and get them ready for the next election, and the one after that. Because that’s the only way we’ll ever get to have a viable alternative in this province – we have to build it. The GPO cannot and will not suddenly develop the support and the machinery it needs to win elections out of thin air, or some magical organizational fiat on the part of its leadership. It needs to have your support. You need to have the courage to look forward a little bit, beyond the next four years, and the courage to decide for yourselves what your ideals are and to build toward them.

Tom Rand, climate-change entrepreneur David Noble, and @PureShakti all profess to have green vision. I would warrant a guess that the Green Party matches their ideals closer than any other party in this race. But they all argue that to vote Green would be to waste a vote. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

It strikes me particularly ironic that Tom Rand would point to a piece by Tyler Hamilton in the Star as evidence that we should vote Liberal. Hamilton’s argument there is that Green Energy Act is laudable because it helps develop the critical mass necessary to get the fledgling alternative energy industry off the ground in this province. I whole-heartedly agree: the Green Energy Act is a visionary piece of legislation that is helping to kick-start the solar and wind energy industries here in Ontario.

And yet Rand refuses to see the value of the very same argument when it comes to how he will vote in four days. Instead of helping to build the party that most closely matches his ideals, so it can achieve critical mass too, he wants to try to convince you to vote for second-best. As David Estill pointed out, the Green Energy Act was adapted from German Green Party policy. It’s time to give credit where credit is due.

As Tyler Hamilton says, “It’s not about picking winners. It’s about Ontario not becoming a future loser.” Yet the Liberals continue to support nuclear energy, and their GEA is poorly implemented and subject to momentum-killing moratoriums and corporate handouts. The NDP, meanwhile, wants to take sales tax off fossil fuels, disproportionately favouring those who use more fossil fuels and discouraging efforts to be more fuel-efficient.

My suggestion to greens like Tom Rand, David Noble and @PureShakti is to vote like you mean it. Vote, with some vision, for the party that has provided a consistent and proven Green narrative for the Liberals to copy.

But there are only two possible outcomes of any attempt to swing election results through strategic voting: success or failure. I will argue both outcomes are undesirable, that one is more likely than the other, and that the more likely outcome hurts the strategic voter. A sort of political Pascal’s Wager, if you will.

If, in the first case, the strategic vote succeeds, it sabotages the democratic process of electing the most popular candidate in the riding. If everyone voted for their ideal candidate, the candidates actually elected would best reflect the wishes of the constituency. In our first-past-the-post election system, that may be the best we can hope for: a crude approximation of voter sentiment. But the cynical, half-hearted act of voting against the candidate you don’t want – and succeeding – means even that is lost.

But by far the most common outcome is that the attempt will fail. There are a number of reasons for this, including the fact that to be successful, a strategic vote has to be organized, which is no doubt a difficult task. But the greater risk is that important benefits that would normally have gone to one’s ideal candidate are transferred to a less-than-ideal choice.

One benefit is that the candidate can demonstrate that he has more support going into the next election four years down the road. And the next election is arguably just as important as the current one.

A second, little-known benefit is that if a candidate can garner at least 15 per cent of the popular vote in their riding, that candidate will receive a reimbursement equal to 20 per cent of their post-writ campaign expenses from Elections Ontario. The candidate can use that money to pay off any debts incurred during the campaign,and the surplus goes to the party riding association to help it prepare for the next election.

So every vote a candidate receives is a vote that helps build the party locally in that riding. And these effects are cumulative and crucial. For all parties, but especially smaller ones, building for the next election is actually the fundamental campaign goal. Yes, they would like to get their candidates elected, but success is measured by growth: growing the numbers, growing the volunteers, growing the popular vote.

But a vote for the other candidate builds the other candidate, not the ideal candidate, and the chances that the strategic voter will ever be properly represented in the legislature are reduced. That is the risk that every strategic voter takes: she throws away her right to build toward her own ideals by participating in a cynical, undemocratic long shot.

To summarize: the strategic vote likely won’t work, and so it will likely help build the wrong candidate with nothing to show in return. If it did work, it would undermine what little representation we get from our current electoral system.

The mere existence of strategic voting with its attendant skewing of election results should sound the alarm that our electoral system is in need of radical reform such as what proportional representation as practised in much of modern Europe would provide. But that’s a discussion for another day.

In the meantime, let’s do our best to uphold the democratic process in the upcoming Ontario election Oct. 6. Let’s take a good look at the candidates, the parties and their platforms, and then vote according to our own values – not against someone else’s values.

At worst, we will ensure that the candidate sent to the legislature properly reflects the ideals of our communities, even if not our particular ideals. At the same time, we will better support our own favoured candidates and help give them every chance to succeed next time around.

At best, we’ll help prove that polls really are for dogs if we happen to send underdogs to the legislature.

1. It is not fair that we have Catholic school boards receiving funding from the province when people of other faiths have to fund their faith-based schools privately.
2. There are exactly two ways to deal with the disparity: either bring the other faiths “into the tent”, so to speak, by funding them provincially and making sure they use the approved Ontario school curriculum and accredited teachers, etc.; or, one board, one system – in effect, get rid of the Catholic School boards and fold them into the regular public boards.
3. Getting rid of the Catholic boards would be divisive.
4. Therefore, we must extend funding to faith-based schools of all faiths.

Who can disagree with point 1? It certainly does seem unfair that if I’m a Catholic and I want my children to go to a school that is accommodating to Catholics and reflects Catholic values and so on then I can do so for free, but if I’m a Muslim I can’t. In fact, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the policy of funding Catholic schools but not other faith-based schools is discriminatory, and in 1999 the United Nations Human Rights Committee condemned Ontario (and Canada) for violating its equality provisions.

Point #3 represents the only argument Tory gave for not going the other way completely and removing special funding from all religious schools, Catholics included. And it sure would be divisive. The Catholics have had the right to tax-funded separate schooling since before Confederation. I’m no lawyer, but if I read this Supreme Court ruling correctly, the right of catholic school supporters is entrenched in the constitution.

Somebody needs to call a constitutional lawyer and find out whether the Green Party plank on this issue is even a possibility.