The recent election results left me perplexed, “ I asked, How did this happen?… strategic voting showed the biggest frenzy ever…more seats then in 2008?” I was dumfounded.

60 % of the electorate didn’t vote conservative, but they had a majority. My 17 year old daughter troubled by the results replied, “Does anybody even care about the environment?”

I felt unconfident to deal with her sense of hopelessness. As a family of Green supporters, she knew about- the growing tar sands, embarrassing international reneging of environmental commitments and the  59% reduction is spending for climate change and clean air programs. Not to mention the abolishing of public funding for political parties allowing corporations more political power, cutting of CBC funding, corporate tax cuts and the declaring that poverty isn’t an election issue because poverty doesn’t really exist inCanada. Why would people vote for a party that has such a track record, I wondered? Was it simply a imperfect system where the strategic vote was split between 2-3 left parties which allowed the conservative right? The majority of Canadians that voted didn’t want this party’s policies but here they are with more power.

While I tried to make sense of this political conundrum. I considered another possibility that was not of any political reasoning. Quantum physics explains the law of attraction – what we focus on we get more of. This is interesting when you consider last weeks election. It occurred to me that many people were focused negatively on the Conservative leader. There were people in support of him but there were many more people who really did not want him in power. Websites devoted to getting him out, inundated my email. I speculated  if all the negativity focused on Harper actually helped him win a majority.

The law of attraction states that any attention- positive or negative will create a focal point and that by focusing on what you don’t want or don’t like actually brings more of it into your life. Everyone has probably experienced this principle in their own lives- How negative thinking seems to draw more negative thoughts and then undesirable outcomes become more likely. It’s common to ruminate on what we don’t like in life. The challenge is to spend less time on the negative and more on the preferred outcome.

Maybe our collective intent would have been better focused on visualizing the preferred party to win. Could there have been better outcome if our energies were spent not on thinking about who we don’t want in power but rather spent on visualizing Parliament  flooded with Green MP’S. Would time have been better spent on visualizing every MP committed to the environment?

Maybe next time we need to scrap strategic voting and just vote Green.ElizabethMay has a seat and this is significant. The shift has begun. We can stop focusing on all that we don’t like and instead focus on imagining success and change happening in the House of Commons. One person can make a difference. We’ve seen it many times in history. We know what we don’t want. This is clear. Time needs to be spent now on believing that change can actually happen and visualizing in detail the preferred outcomes.