Losing Matters

Like all of the elections before it, Monday will test our collective resolve.

The federal election campaign is almost over. Someone is going to lose Monday night.

That’s how elections work.

We spend so much time talking about winners: their celebrations, their mandates, their promises of change.

We spend less time thinking about losers.

And yet, losing honourably is just as important to democracy as winning. Maybe even more so.

Democracy is not the will of the majority alone. It is the collective agreement of all citizens, especially those who fall short, to live with the results until the next election.

Accepting defeat is never easy. It demands humility, patience, and above all, faith: faith in our fellow citizens, faith in our institutions, faith that losing today does not mean losing forever.

It also demands work from the winners.

Photo by LARAM on Unsplash

What Losers Can Do

It is tempting, after a loss, to blame the system or blame the other side.

To say, “It’s not me, it’s you.”

To insist, “This election was rigged.” Or “the system is broken.”

But real resilience requires more.

It demands the harder work of dissecting the loss, of asking what role we ourselves played in the outcome, of recognizing the ways in which we failed to connect.

It requires the humility to understand that the people who denied us victory are not enemies to be vanquished, but fellow citizens to be persuaded.

The very bridges we failed to build this time must become the focus of our efforts next time.

Losing stings. Losing hurts. Especially when it feels like it happens over and over again.

But disappointment is not a reason to give up on each other. Losing is not about retreating into grievance. It is a reason to work harder to understand each other.

If you catch yourself alleging that the system is rigged, or wishing ill upon those who prevailed, you are giving in to factionalism. And that is dangerous.

Factionalism turns opponents into enemies, elections into battles, and defeats into existential crises. It erodes the very trust that democracy requires to function.

What Winners Can Do

Victory carries its own temptations.

It is easy to believe that “to the victor go the spoils.”

It is easy to dismiss the losers, to marginalize them further, to see them as the vanquished rather than fellow travellers.

But democracy demands more.

It demands that winners make space for the losers to save face, to find dignity in defeat, to remain invested in the shared project of governance.

If you find yourself wondering how anyone could have voted differently from you, remember: that misunderstanding is on you.

It is your responsibility, not theirs, to understand their perspectives. To listen. To learn. To resist the temptation to retreat into self-righteousness.

And winners must remember: in most elections, including this one, more than half of voters chose candidates from parties other than theirs.

A victory in seats does not always mean a majority in hearts and minds.

Our system works best when those who win seek to understand those who lost, and when both sides commit to building bridges from their own sides of the divide.

The Real Work

Elections are the cornerstone of democracies like Canada. But the real work of democracy begins after the ballots are counted.

It begins with how we treat one another when the contest is over.

The story of democracy in Canada is one of people who, even in victory or defeat, refused to walk away from each other.

Someone is going to lose Monday night. Like millions of voters over the past century and a half.

How we lose — how we accept it, how we respond — will matter as much as who wins.