Angry in the Great White North
The Canadian group-think?
Sunday, April 30, 2006 at 10:22 PM

Read other posts by Steve Janke published by the National Post
Leader

I hate it when I read this:

Canadian voters gave Stephen Harper a cautious go ahead Monday to form a slim minority Conservative government, handing him groundbreaking support in Quebec and more clout in Ontario as they sent Paul Martin into retirement as Liberal leader and Grit MPs to the benches of the official Opposition.

That quote came from election night, but the notion that Canadians somehow contrived to deliver the Conservatives a "tryout" is nonsense that continues to be repeated. I recall Andrew Coyne making this point in an interview once (perhaps in print as well -- I want credit to go where credit is due). Every Canadian who voted for a Conservative MP on the basis of party affiliation wanted the Conservatives to win a majority. The same goes for voters for other parties. There is no communication or collusion.

There is nothing "cautious" about the vote.

Anthropomorphizing the electorate is poetic nonsense.

The reason I bring it up because another variant of this fallacy comes up often:

That’s why fully 64% of Canadians voted in the last election for parties who supported a national early learning and child care program.

See, the Conservatives won the most votes, but can't implement their program, because when you break down the platforms, the majority of the people votes for various parties that had similar (but not identical) programs.

Again, piffle!

We don't know what each voter was thinking when they voted. Indeed, the fact that the Liberals, who had the actually implemented a nationalized daycare program (sort of), were defeated suggests that nationalized daycare was not the single most important thing on voters minds.

The fact that the programs of these other parties were different from each other as well as different from the Conservative program is conveniently ignored. So is the fact that most people voted for the Conservative variant.

The whole point of having parties is to give the electorate a set of distinct choices. After the vote, the winning party is assumed to have a platform that resonated with the majority of voters. Not a perfect fit, but then what is? And then we have elections regularly so parties can refine their platforms. If you then start to rewrite the winning platform to conform to the losing platform based on some sort of numerical breakdown of voting patterns coupled with assumptions of what that breakdown says about the electorate group-think, then why bother having elections? Just run polls, and hand the results directly to professional full-time bureaucrats to implement.

That is logical conclusion of that sort of thinking.

Or should I say "group-thinking"?

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