By Shachi Kurl, President
When has a politician ever admitted that an election they were contesting was unimportant? The honesty alone could be quite refreshing.
In 2021, Justin Trudeau might have simply come clean and asked for the majority mandate that eluded him back in 2019. “Just give it to me,” he should have said. “I want it.”
More recently, Ontario’s Doug Ford was looking to lock in for another four years while his opposition was divided and weak, and while he was riding high on “Captain Canada” schtick. That, too, was presented as an election of the utmost, ALL-CAPS, bold-fonted and italicized importance.
If voters are told a particular election is especially important when it’s really just a routine exercise in democracy or a blatant power grab, they tend to tune out. And they’re less likely to show up and cast a ballot.
Cue the hand-wringing over declining voter participation, which hit particular nadirs in 2008 (the third election in four years), when only 59 per cent of eligible voters deigned to cast a ballot; followed by 2011 (the fourth election in six years), when only 61 per cent of the qualified voting base mustered the energy to attend a polling station.
Why don’t Canadians vote? According to a Statistics Canada study of eligible adults who didn’t vote in the 2021 election, the most common reason was a lack of interest in politics: about one-third said this. Elderly non-voters were more likely to cite disability or sickness, while millennials, in their strung-out years of building careers and raising kids, were most likely to say they were “too busy.”
The thing is, when voters actually deem an election to be significant, they act.
