Strategic Voting

It really all depends on whether my long term strategic goals take precedence over my shorter term goals. (Does that just make them tactical goals ?) How long term can a tactic be versus how short term can a strategy be ?

My longest term goals are the establishment of a genuinely cooperative commonwealth without much need of government, corporations or unions (see tax credit unionism independentcommunitarian.blogspot.com) with the whole of the green movement being swept up in the notions of the commonwealth, a kind of community of free enterprise workers co-ops breathing clean air and drinking clean water, while eating healthy food, at no one's disadvantage. (see symbiosis independentcommunitarian.blogspot.com)

My short term goals are to stop Harper from turning Canada into a giant Reform-a-tory using whatever fair play tactics I can.

In the past I've voted green, liberal and NDP depending on where I was and what the odds were, the only Conservative I would have voted for in the whole time was David Crombie, when I lived on the poorer side of his Rosedale riding, only I didn't even vote conservative then because I didn't want to give Mulroney my vote even more than I wanted Crombie to have it, Crombie didn't need my help anyway. I voted for Bill Graham when he was still just a law professor. He lost.

Having turned 12 years old in 1967 when Trudeau was in his prime I came of age in the shadow of the Just Society, but then so did Stephen Harper and look what Alberta oil money did to his Leaside soul.

Here in Guelph Ontario where I live, I have become acutely aware that there is a hard right element to the conservatives in this city dating back to the fascism of opera singer Edward Johnson and his equally nasty son-in-law George Drew, so I have have generally voted Liberal just to keep this towns' reactionaries out of power. I have voted Green here in the provincial election (that was my long term stratgey in play) and I've voted NDP, that's my family's traditional background in play (leaving aside all those years the Pragers spent as commie's-in-the-wilderness.)

The NDP can annoy me however. And contrary to the 'You don't know Jack' button, I actually did know Jack Layton because I lived on Algonquin Island when he lived on Ward's and I got along fine with him.I even voted for him as a Toronto councilor. (I'll tell my Olivia story some other time but I have nothing against her either, the underclasses need bantam cock fighting tactics.) No, my problem with the NDP is that even given my labour background, I'm actually CCF, it's the Co-operative Commonwealth thing. And I think they've lost site of the power in their precursor. I don't need an imitation American Democratic Party, New or not. I'm a British constitutionalist at heart.

The NDP can also be too victim culture for me. As a adult who was an abused child I have issues with victims, because I know that victims have a way of taking over their own abuse, so that everything becomes their fault even when they're vocally blaming everyone else. Who were the biggest victims of the 20th century, why the fascists of course, they lost, and yet, with victims rights as the central dogma of the latter half of the 20th century sooner or later it was guaranteed that they'd have their day. And now look where we are.