You may be asking why I have a subject line boosting Jack Layton, especially when I’m a Conservative supporter.
It’s easy – the better Jack Layton does in this election, the better it is for the Conservatives.
You see, under our First-Past-The-Post election system, the candidate with the “plurality” of votes wins the seat. A plurality is different from a “majority” becuase a majority indicates more than half the supporters, and a pluralty indicates simply more votes than anyone else. It’s like the old joke – two men in Africa encounter a tiger, which starts to chase them. One person says to the other, “do you think you can outrun the tiger?” The second says, “I don’t need to outrun the tiger, I only need to outrun you!”
Conservative voters will probably never vote NDP. The viewpoints are funamentally too far apart. Liberal voters, on the other hand, just might. Liberal voters might just vote green too.
The point in all this is that the more diluted the Liberal vote gets, the better it is for the Conservatives.
So, that is why I am cheering on Jack Layton.