Should you vote strategically for LPC, NDP or CPC in your riding?

Anybody But Conservative strategic voting can be summed up as:

1.   If Cons have no chance of winning, vote for whomever you want

2.   If Cons are sure to win, vote for whomever you want

3.   If Cons are close to being beaten by only 1 party, vote for that party

4.   If in a 3-4 way race, decide & vote for who has best chance to defeat the Cons

The problem is mostly with points 1 & 4.

 Point 1: If you spread the votes around all progressive parties, none may end up with more seats than the Conservatives, who would then be asked to form a minority or majority government! 

Yes, they could be defeated and then the next party with the most seats should be given a chance to do likewise, but there are many variables here that make this much more difficult and unpredictable (long delay before parliament reopens, content of the Throne Speech, leaders quite, BQ holds balance of power, coalition demands, the GG's discretion, etc.), with no guarantee it will succeed, as we saw in 2008-09.

Also, you should let the campaign run its course before locking in and advocating such a strategy. Campaigns can have large effects on voting intensions. As Bob Dylan's "The times, they are a changing" song goes, “The loser now will be later to win,” and we’ve seen it play out in this and other elections.

Point 4: It is nearly impossible to decide what party to support if the race is tight between more than two parties, given all the hope and hype, continued campaigning (barrage of negative ads, unforeseen events, massive disinformation, last minute policy changes, assurances given, speeches & rallies, etc.) and its influence on undecided & non-firm voters, polling margins of error, and the efficiency of their get-out-the-vote ground game. 

So I would rewrite these two points with a same conclusion:

1.  If Cons have no chance of winning, vote for the party with the best chance of defeating the Tories overall and forming a government (many already do this)

4.  If in a 3-4 way race, vote for the party with the best chance of defeating the Cons overall and forming a government

Word of caution: As alluded to above, voters can change their minds on mass and quickly over the last few days of the campaign, so any polling data you base your voting on is already obsolete (and possibly inaccurate) and could throw you off where the margins are small between parties. One more reason to figure out which party has the best chance overall of winning and replacing these neoconservatives. And that never includes the Bloc.

With this in mind, you can get info on your riding here votetogether.ca and on other websites)

Here is one good example where strategic voting would help, given the LPC is the party best placed to beat the CPC in 2015: Calgary-Confederation: