There Is Hope In Our Youth
Last night my daughter (who is currently enrolled in an Aboriginal Studies program focusing on the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement) and her family were over for supper and she was telling me about the program while we ate. With a federal election on the go there has been considerable discussion on why people should vote for one or another of the parties based on their stated platforms, and they were tasked with developing a presentation on why they think people should vote a particular way on October 14th - my daughter, bless her heart, stood up and asked to be allowed to deliver her presentation based on why people shouldn’t vote for any of them.
Her presentation will discuss:
- how “majority governments” formed with less than 40% of the popular vote are not actually democratic
- how elected MP’s are actually representatives of the party leader in the House of Commons, as opposed to representatives of their constituency
– and conclude with the question of why such a non-democratic system is deserving of any support from Canadian citizens.
I am hopeful that when the other students enrolled in the program discover that many of the things they may have learned in high school about the theory of our great Canadian democracy run contrary to actual political practice they may start to re-evaluate their positions… at the very least I’m sure that there will be a more balanced discussion in the classroom because of it.
A September 30th article found in the Globe & Mail this morning gives me further hope.
They may head to school, work late at the office or spend the day recovering from Thanksgiving excesses, but there’s one thing many young Canadians don’t plan to do on Oct. 14: vote.
The number of young voters “definitely” planning to vote has dropped to 50 per cent, according to a poll conducted by the Innovation Research Group for the Dominion Institute.
In the last federal election in 2006, 57 per cent of young voters definitely planned to vote, but only 44 per cent did.
According to the article
30 per cent said they don’t know enough to cast their own vote. Eleven per cent said they were too busy and another 11 per cent just didn’t care.
I would suggest that if the 30% who said they didn’t know enough to cast their vote believed that it mattered to them or their personal or family circumstance, or if they believed that they could actually make a difference, or if they believed that there was any benefit to be gained by informing themselves, they would do so.
I would also suggest that unless something significant changes this segment of the population will grow into middle age, their children will become the youth of the day, and even greater numbers of that generation will join the growing numbers of those of us who choose not to participate because our vote simply does not matter in the flawed thing that our electoral / government system has become.
– and then, maybe, we’ll see change.
[...] continued at stageleft [...]
I do not think elections are very democratic. Democracy is about people expressing themselves, and the content of that expression having an effect on the way important decisions are made. Voting is like being allowed to express yourself using only certain words. It is no wonder that the process is incredibly frustrating. What an election really amounts to is a choice between one dictator or another. The only way to make the process democratic is for people to take ownership of politics, and to demand something better. Democracy is about action, not reaction.