I have a friend, a very good friend, who’s pretty smart and informed and spent the day bitching about the futility of voting.
I can sort of understand if you’re young and apathetic and your life revolves around partying and other things of that nature…but this guy is doing a Ph.D, he’s aware of urban issues such as poverty, housing, and transit, he understands the science behind pollution and how to mitigate it and he’ll spend the rest of his life complaining about it without casting a vote. I’m beginning to hate my generation between the slackers who think that signing Facebook petitions is going to accomplish something versus the other set of slackers who sit around and complain and don’t do anything about it; I’m just disillusioned with people.
I’m ashamed… I was in a bit of a depression in September and didn’t bother filling out the form to get an absentee ballot. :smack: So I’m one of the young voters to make those statistics. My riding will be the same until the end of days, so I wouldn’t have made much of a difference, but I agree that it’s the principle. Maybe that’s why young people aren’t voting - many university students would actually need to fill out a form online, get a stamp, and put their ballot in the mail? Not like we have any excuse; I know about the elderly people taking their walkers to the polling stations, and I couldn’t get a stamp.
(But at least I have made no pathetic attempt to sign Facebook petitions.)
I guess you’re right: historically we’ve been higher than the (as I copy/paste) 58%. I think it’ll go higher, but still. It took me literally 10 minutes to vote, and that’s from taking my bike out of the shed to putting it back again.
But hey, it was my first time voting! (I’m still a little giddy – I grew up in the U.S., so I’m usually disenfranchised.) I’ll grant that my candidate didn’t win, but hey, life can’t be perfect, and it wasn’t exactly a heavily contested riding. I spent some time this evening after the polls closed, pulling down campaign posters to put on my wall.
And yeah, it wasn’t a great night for the Liberals. Still, Conservative minority means no real change for the worse, so it’s hard to be too upset.
I never really expected the NDP to take power, and as much as I didn’t want to admit it, our [del]jerkass[/del] Liberal candidate pretty much had a lock on the riding (the Conservative guy, Joe Oliver, gave him a really good run though!).
In the coverage of the coming Liberal cannibalism, it’s interesting that Rae maintains a ‘Dionne is still my leader. He’s bleeding now. Give him some time.’ attitude. Ignatiev, OTOH, has a lean and very hungry look about him. He hasn’t learned how to hide an unsheathed knife. I’m not sure that will serve him well in the upcoming festivities.
What’s with all the parties in that link that only got a few hundred votes? (PPP, WBP etc) Are they actually on the ballot or do people write the names themselves?
They are probably on the ballot in only a few ridings. When I went to vote, I believe that there were six names on the ballot: Conservative, Liberal, NDP, Green, and Independant, and some minor party that I can’t remember. Hmm…
(Checks the results for his specific riding.)
Ahh, the sixth entry was ‘PC Party’, which got up into the thousands of votes, but still less than one two-thousandth of the overall. From the name, I’m guessing that it’s a splinter group trying to keep alive the ideals of the old ‘progressive conservatives’, maybe believing that they betrayed something important when they did the ‘unite the right’ thing.
The Canadian Conservatives are left of the US Republican party. They’d have to be, considering Canada has such a comprehensive social safety net as status quo.
Our Liberal incumbent was re-elected, but it was close–something like 68 votes. I did vote Liberal this time around. I did not want to see another seat go Conservative. Our two votes seem to have really mattered!
I am very disappointed in Dion’s leadership, though I still hold a bitter grudge against the Liberals for not doing more during the “leaky condo crisis”, GST, CBC funding and other issues that mattered to me. I would like to see a dynamic Liberal leader, who might lure me back. I’d like to see the Liberals move more left. If not, I will go back to voting Green according to my conscience. I would have voted Green in this election, but it was a matter of keeping a Conservative out, rather than voting *for *someone.
Jack Layton won our riding…it wasn’t a huge shocker. It almost wasn’t worth all of the hassle I went through to vote. It was my own doing, mind you, my voting card went to my parents house instead of my own and I didn’t register before yesterday like I should have (I think the card went to my parents house because my tax returns always end up going to my parents for the purposes of storing them, I don’t know).
I work, for the time being, right across the hall from a Liberal Headquarters (I’m not sure if it’s THE liberal headquarters but it’s a pretty big one and I’m in downtown Toronto. Anyhow, they aren’t all that fun to be around today…
The question of unification of the left is an interesting one. The intuitive wail that I heard last night at an NDP 'Victory" (Hah!) Party – “Why didn’t the Greens just vote NDP? Combined we would have won.” ignores a reality. The first priority for the NDP is social justice. If that cause can be advanced that’s good. If the environment benefits, that’s a bonus. The first priority for the Greens is the environment. If that cause can be advanced, that’s good. If that results in greater social justice, that’s a bonus. Those sound similar – and probably could be worked with in a coalition. Using them as a basis for a merger is tricky, though, unless one side is willing to give up on core values. (Or one side has someone like Peter McKay who’s convinced he’ll be able to sucker the other party after the merger and is willing to pay the consequences when he’s wrong.)
As to the Liberals, they certainly are a party of the left from an American perspective, but almost anything is. Their centrist tendencies have long been a cause of concern among the further left. Tommy Douglas warns of it here.
Unfortunately, from the looks of it, Layton’s win was partially due to voters staying away from the polls because they figured his win was a sure thing and didn’t want to waste their votes (many of our neighbours told me this was why they couldn’t be bothered to go out and vote, despite the fact that the polling station was down the block). I suspect that there’s actually a fair bit of directionless anti-Layton sentiment in the neighbourhood, but most of those voters couldn’t find a candidate they liked enough to vote for instead.
Personally, I think the low turnout had to do with voter apathy… as I described it previously, this was a race between a shmuck, another shmuck, a separatist and some guy with a funny mustache. It doesn’t help either that the last election wasn’t all that long ago, either.
Given that we’ve got another minority on our hands, I predict another premature election in the next 2-3 years… which in turn will have an even more dismal turnout unless something really gets shaken up from the leadership perspective for ALL the parties.
You’re right, but Thomas Mulcair is the first NDP member to be elected in Quebec in a general election. And the most amazing is that Outremont used to be a Liberal fortress.
A right-leaning Conservative with a master’s degree in economics.
A left-leaning Liberal with a BA and MA in political science.
A separatist political science student.
A socialist leader with a Ph.D. in political science.
And the rest.
Perhaps your academic credentials and experience surpass these fine gentlemen who have devoted their careers to politics. Or perhaps you’re bitching because your party didn’t win. Either way, calling them schmucks and dismissing their contributions to Canadian politics is immature and pointless.
In the US, all of their politicians are on the right side; you got far right Republicans, and not quite as far right Democrats. Like others have said, Canadian politicians tend to inhabit more of the spectrum. I personally think most Canadian politicians start on the left side and go further left. The choices I had to vote from yesterday were Conservative, Liberal, NDP, Green, Libertarian, and Marxist/Leninist.
As for why you don’t know more, that I can’t help you with. We’ve got some interesting shit going on here, you know.
I know George Snuffalupagus is really down on the Conservatives since he is majorly sucking on the CBC teat - how was his commentary yesterday?
Can’t say about yesterday but George has been down on the Conservative since way before he started at the CBC. I remember when he was doing traffic and updates on the all-sports station.
