Canada’s federal election is officially in the home stretch with just three days remaining ahead of Monday’s election night.
That leaves four days for Canadians 18-years-old and older to do something millions of people around the world can only dream of doing: cast a vote to decide who will govern their country.
Although it’s well documented a large number of Canadians didn’t want this election in the first place, the civic duty to participate remains.
In 2019’s federal election, Hastings-Lennox Addington saw 66.7 per cent of 80,079 registered voters show up to the polls, which was pretty well on par with the national average of 66 per cent of eligible Canadians who turned out to vote across the 338 ridings. In other words local turnout was good, but far from great. Especially considering some 2,200 votes were all that separated the winner, Derek Sloan, from the runner-up, Mike Bossio. All told, Sloan gathered 21,968 votes from the aforementioned 80,079 people who could have voted. Of those that took the time to vote, he earned 41.4 per cent of the pie. In 2015 less than 300 votes was the difference when Bossio pulled off what was considered a huge upset at the time, flipping this region from blue to red.
Early reports for the 2021 federal election indicate good news on the voter turnout front. On Monday Elections Canada released data showing 1.3 million Canadians took part in advance voting on Friday, the first day it was available. That represented a slight increase from the 2019 federal election. Whether that trend continues through Sept. 20 remains to be seen but it’s a positive start.
Inconvenient as voting can be-truth be told it takes about 30 minutes out of a person’s day and they have several days in which vote-it certainly beats the alternative. Of those 35 some odd per cent of Canadians who couldn’t be bothered to mark their ‘X’, nearly all of them would certainly miss the right if it were taken away. One could only imagine the reaction women in Afghanistan would give if they heard of Canadians simply refusing to vote. Or a soldier from any of our nation’s great conflicts. Paying respects for their sacrifice every Nov. 11 is great, but it’s not enough.
As troubling as not voting is, incidents like that of a man throwing gravel at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during a campaign stop in London, On. should upset every Canadian regardless of political affiliation. Even Trudeau’s harshest critics should agree he has the right to campaign across the country without the threat of violence. The same goes for every single candidate in this election. Those that disagree with a candidate’s platform have their chance to do something about it-by voting.
Nine months ago our neighbours to the south showed us what happens when an angry mob tries to violently overthrow the democratic process. A jarring reminder of just how precarious our voting rights can be if taken for granted.
Rather than trying to sway voters one way or another (we’ll leave that to the other publications), we’ll simply say: vote.
-Adam Prudhomme