Wanted: engaged voters in 2018

The world could be a very different place a year from now, and all because of how voters mark their ballots in 2018.

Canada will witness pivotal elections in its two most populous provinces — Ontario and Quebec — as well as municipal elections across Ontario.

In the United States, voters can pass judgment on Donald Trump in mid-term contests for the control of Congress.

Italy, Mexico, Pakistan and Brazil, among others, will choose new national governments.

And over the 12 months ahead, the individual choices of hundreds of millions of people will collectively determine the shape of things to come.

There’s so much at stake in these contests, and while Ontarians can’t affect what happens outside Canada’s borders, those who are eligible to vote should make a New Year’s resolution to get engaged and make a difference at home.

It will be their call to decide who runs Canada’s richest, most powerful province.

The 15-year-old Liberal government led by Premier Kathleen Wynne is fighting hard for another term, pointing to its new youth-pharmacare program and a rise in the hourly minimum wage to $15 in 2019 as prime reasons it deserves re-election.

But many polls say Patrick Brown’s Progressive Conservatives, with a progressive platform that could lead to even bigger government, could win a majority. And Andrea Horwath’s New Democrats also pose a credible challenge to the Liberals.

However Ontario votes, the echoes of what happens here as well as in Quebec will reverberate across Canada, and if their respective Liberal regimes are overthrown Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his federal Liberals will lose two important allies in Ottawa.

As for Ontario’s municipal elections, voters in more than 400 communities will determine what the governments closest to them will provide in a host of vital services ranging from roads and public transit to libraries, parks, arenas and the water supply.

Oh yes, those municipal leaders will also set your tax rates.

The crazy thing is, if past elections are any guide the biggest majority in the municipal elections will be the eligible voters who stay home, and the situation will be little better in the provincial vote.

Only 52 per cent of the province’s 9.2 million eligible voters bothered to put an X on a ballot in 2014 — a dismally poor turnout.

As for the municipal showing — it’s embarrassing.

In the 2014 vote, for example, just over a third of eligible voters in Hamilton and Waterloo cast ballots while in Kitchener and Cambridge fewer than 30 per cent did.

It’s hard to know whether such low voter engagement reflects complacency or cynicism.

What’s clear is that the reluctance of so many Ontarians — and Canadians for that matter — to vote comes as democracy is increasingly threatened in this world.

The election of Donald Trump, a mendacious demagogue, as America’s president, and the referendum decision to drag the United Kingdom out of the European Union challenged long-held assumptions that democracy is the best form of government and voters are, somehow, always right.

Those democratic decisions threw two powerful countries into turmoil.

And they happened as the rising powerhouse that is China — an autocratic, single-party state in which 1.4 billion people are ruled by a handful of men — is gaining influence around the world and spreading the message that democracy is neither its way nor the way of the future.

Turkey, Poland, Venezuela, the Philippines and Russia are arguably all failed democracies that seem to prove the Chinese case. Cambodia is also sliding back.

Yet most Canadians believe democracy, despite its real flaws, is still the best way to elect a government that most closely mirrors the people’s will.

It is the best way to keep politicians accountable because it is the easiest way to throw them out if they misbehave.

We know citizens can vote wisely and selflessly. Look how Republican voters in the staunchly Republican state of Alabama rejected the despicable Roy Moore in this month’s race for a Senate seat.

That single outcome weakened the Republicans’ grip on the Senate — and Trump’s hold over Congress.

Next year’s American mid-term elections could do even more to stymie Trump’s agenda if, as might happen, they give the Democrats control over both the Senate and House of Representatives. Stay tuned for an epic confrontation. These can be grim days for democracy. But nothing is foreordained.

If you want a say over how important decisions impacting your life are made, if you believe in democracy, 2018 is the year to become politically informed and politically active.

The world could be very different a year from now. Your vote can make it better.