Explainer: Raise the Bar endorsement process

This election has been a whirlwind. Just a few months ago, all signs pointed to a Conservative majority. Then Donald Trump became the US President and with his tariff war, ushered in a level of economic chaos not seen in generations — threatening the jobs and livelihoods of millions of people across Canada and the world.

Leadnow exists to win solutions that will make a concrete difference in the lives of working people all across Canada — so everyone has access to an affordable home, the ability to put good food on the table, and the promise of a safe future on a liveable planet.

Make no mistake, Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives are an existential threat to that vision. And we’ve heard feedback from some people in the Leadnow community that because of this, we should be running a strategic voting campaign to fight the Conservatives, and that should be the primary, or even our only consideration in selecting our Raise the Bar champions. We understand where this feedback is coming from, especially in a first-past-the-post system. 

One of Leadnow’s key learnings from our 2015 Vote Together campaign is that strategic voting campaigns are very challenging to run nationally. They’re most effective when they are based on local polling, which is expensive and hard to obtain. Elections Canada has changed the rules about what tactics third parties can use, making it very difficult for us to run local polling during elections.

That means we can’t reliably provide high-quality data to make recommendations for our community to base their voting decisions on. 

In an environment where reliable data is hard to access, strategic voting campaigns face two key risks. First, without accurate local polling, voters may rely too heavily on national polls that don’t reflect local dynamics — leading them to vote in ways that are actually unstrategic. This can result in endorsing the wrong candidate or investing resources in races that ultimately aren’t competitive.

That leads us to the second risk. Even when we have accurate local data, strategic voting campaigns can signal to politicians they don’t need to earn our vote. If they believe we’ll back them solely out of fear of the alternative, they could feel less pressure to be accountable or responsive to our priorities. 

This was another key lesson for us from the 2015 Vote Together campaign. Defeating the Harper Conservatives was critically important, and it was not enough. The new government achieved some important climate and social policy wins, but they abandoned their promise of electoral reform and let mega-corporations price gouge and speculate on housing. We have to defeat the Poilievre Conservatives and do more to raise the bar.

That’s why for this election, we first focused on selecting candidates who would make a firm commitment to delivering affordable housing for all, taking action to build the clean energy economy we need, and fighting to ensure corporations are paying their fair share. As an additional priority, we aimed to select champions who made these commitments and also have a shot at defeating a Conservative challenger.

We also prioritized selecting candidates in regions where we have existing volunteers. That’s because we want to back up our endorsements with the power to support champions to get elected, and also because we believe that in a healthy democracy, our elected representatives should have a strong relationship and consideration for the constituents they represent.

Not all politicians are the same. Within each party, there will be members who are willing to buck the party line to do what is right and fight to deliver concrete solutions for the issues their communities and country face. We need more of that in our democracy. That’s why we were open to considering candidates across progressive parties.

To be transparent, there are more candidates than we can endorse and put power behind. That means we did have to make hard decisions and judgment calls about our final slate of champions. We may not have made all those calls right — and we’re always open to feedback!