本文发表在 rolia.net 枫下论坛Catch 22 aims at preventing Harper majority


One campaign group is looking to raise a little Heller this election.

Borrowing its name from the classic Joseph Heller novel (but having little to do with it otherwise), Catch 22 is looking to prevent a Stephen Harper-led Conservative majority government by promoting strategic voting in 56 ridings across the country on May 2.

“It started over a year and a half ago as a response to Harper closing down the Parliament for 22 days,” said Nick Fillmore, the group’s vice-president. “The idea was that he is so anti-democratic, and he’s shown this a number of times, that a group of ordinary citizens came together to form this volunteer group to attempt to do things in this election campaign to stop him from getting re-elected.”

As of April 15, more than 1,300 people had signed up on the group’s website. The group lists on its website its targeted ridings with close races and whom voters should vote for if they want to prevent the Conservatives from winning the seat.

There are only three Prairie ridings listed and none in the Conservative heartland of Calgary.

“We’re a volunteer organization, we have a small budget,” Fillmore said. “We just didn’t see the benefit of working in ridings we’d have no hope of having an impact in.”

University of Calgary political science professor David Stewart said that these types of campaign groups usually aren’t very effective.

“It takes a lot of effort across a large number of ridings to do that,” he said.

In 2008, Anti-Harper Vote Swap Canada tried to stop Conservatives in close races by allowing voters to pair with others in ridings across the country. One in the pair would agree to vote for one party other than Conservative in their riding if the other person would vote for another party in another riding.

Stewart said that the effort wasn’t very effective and it showed how difficult it is to coordinate these types of campaigns.

He said he believes that groups like Catch 22 have sprung up because the Conservatives are governing, and that if the Liberals were in power, it’d be unlikely that these sorts of campaigns would form.

“I think [people] feel the Conservatives are too right wing on social policy,” he added. “They disagree with the tax priorities that the Conservative government has. For some there would be a fairly strident disagreement with their foreign policy.”

Fillmore said the group is non-partisan and has no particular political sway, but that he got involved because he’s afraid of what a Stephen Harper-led majority would do. He pointed to the Conservatives’ lack of action on the environment, their policy of corporate tax breaks and funding cuts to women’s organizations, human rights groups and foreign aid as reasons he wanted to be involved with Catch 22.

“There are many, many kinds of things that I believe in and support that this government has stopped doing or is doing bad things in those areas,” he added.

The group hopes it can turn the tide in five to seven of its selected ridings and prevent a Conservative majority government.更多精彩文章及讨论，请光临枫下论坛 rolia.net