Montrealers are well within their rights to skip vote

It’s silly to suggest non-voters don’t have a right to complain

There’s this popular, infuriating trope in politics that tends to resurface at election time: If you don’t vote, don’t complain.

If I had a pothole for every complaining Montrealer who didn’t vote in the 2013 municipal election, there would be no roads.

Choosing not to vote is legitimate and, in the Montreal context, a rational choice made by a majority of citizens evaluating, even casually, a preponderance of evidence.

Even when expressed more eloquently as its French equivalent (les absents ont toujours tort), the trope is silly and untrue. Its origins have been traced to an 18th-century play by Philippe Néricault Destouches, L’Obstacle imprévu. It was meant to express the inability to defend one’s positions in absentia, but has since been warped over centuries to shame non-voting citizens.

Chastising these citizens accomplishes nothing. Their apathy is a vote for none of the above.

Mayor Denis Coderre was elected four years ago by nearly 14 per cent of eligible voters in Montreal. With a whopping 86 per cent showing no interest or rejecting Coderre’s platform outright, the mayor then gave himself permission to preside over costly and often frivolous celebrations and projects to mark Montreal’s 375th anniversary — which happened to have fallen on an election year. A recent Radio-Canada report puts total spending at more than $1 billion, of which 41 per cent was by Montreal.

As Coderre’s term concludes, it is clear that past cases of corruption were less costly (in dollars) than the mayor’s perfectly legal spending sprees during this 375th anniversary year.

If that weren’t enough to foment cynicism and distrust of government, Coderre may also eventually be seeking up to another half-billion in public dollars to finance a downtown Major League Baseball stadium. Multiple studies and warnings from mayors of other North American cities demonstrate clearly that subsidizing pro sports arenas almost never brings a positive economic impact to cities.

And these are only two big-ticket items. A majority (57 per cent) of eligible Montrealers did not vote at all in 2013. If we are to embrace the trope, that’s about a half-million Montrealers who should have kept municipal moans to themselves for the last four years, a wildly unrealistic expectation given how this inefficient city consistently disregards best practices. Apathy is not a virus or psychological defect, it is the logical result of democratic lapses in a system designed to perpetuate the status quo and quash structural reforms of any significance.

Unlike provincial or federal elections, which tend to inspire more interest, municipal voters choose their head of government directly, making Montreal more of an ego-driven republic than a fully functioning democracy.

Candidates are beholden to their parties for election support, strategic and financial; once elected, they are beholden to their mayor for revenue-generating appointments; and their parties tend to be generically named personality cults with no discernible direction or place on the political spectrum. This makes municipal elections little more than personality contests.

Coderre’s is the only major party that bears its leader’s name — Équipe Denis Coderre — just in case there was any confusion on where the decision-making lies.

While Coderre’s “radical centrism” and lack of any discernible vision are part of the problem, a bigger issue is the inefficient form of governance that Coderre inherited. City hall is cloned — not decentralized, as former mayor Gérald Tremblay claimed — across 19 boroughs, each with its own over-bureaucratized structures largely under the mayor’s command. Residents of the downtown Ville-Marie district don’t even get to vote for a borough mayor, one of many undemocratic quirks designed to centralize power.

If reform is impossible without provincial interference (Quebec actually delegated more powers to Montreal last month) and mayoral candidates are uninspiring, what’s an informed citizen to do? Montrealers are well within their rights to skip the vote or spoil their ballot, and continue complaining.