June we’ll be back at the polls here in Ontario voting in a new provincial government. This year the political climate is quite strange. The PCs have selected Doug Ford as their leader (I’m going to resist the urge to candidate bash here) which seems a strange choice to me. The Liberals seem to have ticked off the more vocal and volatile conservative base. The NDPs and Greens are once again framed as being inconsequential. It should not be surprising that even in our last election there was a rise in the number of rejected ballots and I suspect that trend will continue. (You can vote non-confidence in Ontario and if enough do the election of a riding is redone with new candidates!)

Vote Compass results

Every Canadian election CBC puts up a vote compass to help you sort through the issues. While it is not perfect or comprehensive, I highly recommend it and have put up a synopsis of my run through after I weighted the results for the issues that I feel are most important. What initially strikes me is that while I’m not as economically left wing as my favoured party (I’m not sure they have the Greens that accurate I find their economics quite a bit ore conservative than Compass reports) I am not terribly far from any of the parties in an overall sense. 51% agreement with the Progressive Conservatives on issues is not a huge difference from 66% for the Green party. Seeing that brings me a bit of hope in what I can weather even if say Ford gets actually in, although I know this would be quite different if I were an LGBTQ+ identified person, a non-settler, a recent immigrant, or even a member of the Sikh or Muslim communities. (I would have liked to see LGBTQ+ issues raised in the vote compass because I know people in that community that are deeply concerned about this election.)

What is interesting to me as a political theologian is the narrative dynamics of the current election process. Despite the desire I have to urge people to vote based primarily on issues, it really is a climate of personalities forged in story that will be most persuasive this election. Worse, these stories are amplified and thrown around as if all that matters is the personal narrative of each party leader – which will likely cost some good candidates their riding. The Greens are left out of this narrative vilification largely because there is a concerted effort to not give them public voice despite the fact that they are running candidates in every riding. Alas if the Greens were afforded more public visibility they might end up with a worse narrative framing, so I need to be careful what I wish for.

If I could urge anything it is this: get to know your candidates and think deeply about how they frame the issues that matter to you. Take the narratives about the candidates and party leaders with a grain of salt. But do not completely discount those narratives. And most importantly – vote.