Comment 43762

By Undustrial (registered) - website | Posted July 21, 2010 at 11:46:31

Blaming voter apathy is too easy.

People are apathetic because they've lost faith in the system. Politicians are incompetant, corrupt and unreliable. Parliament is a joke. And elections have become nothing but self-serving popularity contests, used by the Conservatives and Liberals every couple of years for minor tactical gains in parliament.

Want to increase voter turnout? It isn't hard. Whether it's organizations like the Guelph Civic League increasing engagement, or European proportional represention systems. If democracy works, people tend to get a lot more excited about it.

People aren't stupid. Years of work in politics (from any angle) tends to make people very jaded and misanthropic. It's really frustrating when people won't just line up and do what you say, even if it's what you think is best for them. But for ordinary people, it's just one more self-serving political-type trying to get them to sign on. And of course, once people hear what those political-types actually think of them, any enthusiasm they had tends to vanish.

For every Canadian who voted for Stephen Harper, there's nearly two who didn't vote at all. That's far too much of the population to just write off. How many people need to stop participating, how large of a majority, to show that "none of the above" is a legitimate choice?

"Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century." — Lewis Mumford

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