The hopelessly split left makes me sad

It makes me sad when I look at polls for the upcoming Ontario provincial election. 

I see, as of today, less than a week before the election date, Doug Ford and his so-called Progressive Conservative Party in the driving seat to win a second term with about 36% of the popular vote, but with 65% of the seats, a handy and apparently unassailable majority. That's one of the things that makes me sad: the absence of proportional representation, and the severely skewed seat allocations that the first-past-the-post system causes.

But the other thing that makes me sad is the hopelessly split left-wing vote. Behind Ford, are Stephen Del Duca's Liberals with 28%, Andrea Horwath's NDP with 23% and Mike Shreiner's Green Party with 7%. So, fully 58% of Ontarians want a leftist party to be elected, but we are still going to end up with a rightist party in power.

The Liberals and NDP, both provincially and nationally, are really not that different from one other policy-wise, even if they fall over backwards trying to distinguish and separate themselves. If they would only, swallow their party pride and amalgamate, Ontario (and Canada as a whole for that matter) would permanently reflect the left-wing bias that the province (and  the country) apparently naturally has. A few hard-core Liberals and Democrats might object to such a merger, but I think the majority would be happy to compromise on certain issues if it meant that a progressive, left-of-centre agenda could be permanently pursued.

Either way, the status quo seems irremediably broken. And that makes me sad.

UPDATE

As expected, and as polled, the Ontario Conservatives won a huge (increased) majority. They ended up with 83 seats, the NDP 31, and the Liberals a paltry 8. It's all inexplicable to me, but I guess people like Doug Ford (and his policies)?

In terms of the popular vote, though, the NDP and Liberals together received 47.5%, and the Conservatives only 40.8%. I don't have the figures to hand - I don't even know if anyone has done the exercise - but it is quite possible that a merged NDP-Liberal Party could have won this election (this, of course, depends on the concentration of votes in particular ridings, etc, and is not just an extrapolation of the popular vote).

In this particular election, not many people on either side seemed very engaged: voter turn out was an all-time low of 43%. In some ridings it was under 35%! Nearly half a million fewer people voted for Doug Ford and his Conservatives as did in 2018 (1.9 million, compared to 2.3 million), so it's hard for him to be too positive about his re-election. However, the second-place NDP fared even worse, with 1.1 million votes compared to 1.9 million in 2018. Apathy on both sides, but more on the left than the right.

Either way, until the two parties put their history and their pride behind them, we could end up with a Tory government forever, and that is is nobody's interest, and does not reflect the will of the people. Or, of course, a proportional representation electoral system would also work, but don't hold your breath for that.

Obviously, I'm not the only one calling for this, but the imperative is now much clearer and starker, and the time for idle speculation is over.