Statement About Vote Splitting
You may have seen that some of my Green colleagues, and some candidates from other parties in Ontario, have chosen to step back in their races or endorse candidates from other ridings. I am and always will be deeply supportive of every candidate making what they believe is the right decision for themselves and their ridings. I believe that it takes a great deal of selflessness to step back from a race and I think it speaks to the characters of these candidates that they have done so.
If anyone is wondering if I or other Green candidates in the Waterloo Region are considering stepping down, the answer is no. I’ll explain my thinking here, because like others, it is deeply important to me that Conservatives don’t get to keep leading this province.
First of all, the real winner in the 2022 election wasn’t the Conservatives. The real winner was – quite literally - nobody. The majority of Ontarians did not vote in that election, and the Conservatives consequently got a majority government with only 18% of eligible voters supporting them at the polls. This speaks to how disengaged and uninspired we have become in our relationship with politics. The Conservative government seems to know that they benefit from low voter turnout, and I think it was very deliberate that they chose to call this election earlier than expected and in the middle of winter – giving voters less time and opportunity to learn about all parties to make their decision.
Secondly, let’s take a look at our Kitchener South – Hespeler riding. In the 2022 election, Jess Dixon won with roughly 40% of the votes. The next runner up, the NDP candidate, earned around 26%. Even if we, the Greens, had added every last vote to theirs, we still would not have changed the outcome of that election.
Today, with where the polls sit (see this page), we, the NDP and the Liberal candidate are all within 5 percentage points of each other. And no two of us combined could match the Conservative’s projected 46%. So again, dropping out or endorsing another candidate would not be very fruitful. And there’s little reason to believe that I should be the one dropping out.
My role in this election is not to ‘steal’ votes from NDP or Liberal voters. That is not something I am interested in doing. I have met the candidates from both parties several times now, and I have a great deal of respect for the expertise that they bring and the amount of care that they have for this community. They can have their share of the votes.
My role in this election is to inspire, engage and give a voice (and more importantly, a set of ears!) to the people of Kitchener South - Hespeler and to encourage people to vote! Half the battle, sometimes, is reminding people that there is an election.
The Greens this year have so much to be proud of. We were the first of the major parties to release our fully costed platform, and we were all so proud to have a leader like Mike Schreiner representing us in the debates. Here in Waterloo Region, we have such a strong and caring example of what a Green can do in Aislinn Clancy, who has put forward meaningful legislation to protect renters, feed kids in school, and protect this region’s farmland, while representing Kitchener Centre. I deeply believe that this is the best party for the province, and am so proud to have been selected to run with such a great team. It would be a disservice to our province and to my community to back away from the Green presence that we are successfully building here. So I will stay in this race, I will continue to promote the Green vision and message, and most of all I will ask you all to go out and VOTE!
