We hear the same refrain from western Canada every election. They already know the results before they are finished voting. Mostly it gets decided in Eastern Standard Time because of Quebec and mostly Ontario. Ontario has one third the population of Canada and Quebec has almost a quarter giving the pair a clear majority over the other provinces.
We’ve tried staggering the voting time in different provinces. But this could lead to confusion depending on what time zone you are in and where you get your information from. There just has to be a better way.
So I propose a unique solution. We could have a leap day for the province of Ontario. When we have the leap day could be at the end of any month. We could just make it February 29th 2021. After that Ontario would be about a day behind the rest of the country. This is not as weird as it sounds. Australia is mostly a day ahead of the Americas. Or the Americas are about a day behind Australia.
Then we could vote in the next election at the normal times and on the same numbered day. Western Canadians would be done voting long before Ontario had voted. This would leave some mystery in the relationship. No longer would there be spoilers for Western Canada.
Ontario would be happy with this because they could now strategically vote the hell out of the election. And most of us think Ontario loves to strategically vote. Look at the way Ontario votes for a different federal and provincial leader almost every chance it gets. When the Progressive Conservatives win provincially, Ontario’s federal vote usually goes to the Liberals. When the Conservatives have Ontario’s federal votes, the provincial government voted in is usually Liberal.
However, I feel that Ontario isn’t really strategically voting for the federal/provincial split. I think it’s more a “I can’t believe the monsters we have federally! Can’t have that provincially!” and “I can’t believe what monsters we have provincially! Can’t have that federally!”
But I live in Ontario and I love to imagine the possibilities to strategically vote. With 33% of the vote we could really sway the election if we already knew how the two thirds of the rest of Canada voted. It’s just too bad that the province seems to be divided between city (Liberal voters) and rural (Conservative voters).
Maybe then the rest of Canada could have its revenge. It might end up with the rural part of Ontario hating the city part of Ontario.
If you can’t beat them, divide them.
