What will it take to get Ontarians to vote?
An election is the best of times for democracy, but also the worst of times.
In Ontario, it couldn’t get much worse — a province more democratically disengaged than any other.
Bad enough that Canada has been steadily sliding in voter turnouts, falling well below most developed nations over the decades (despite a 2015 federal election blip).
The bigger problem lies with Canada’s biggest province: In Ontario elections, far fewer voters bother to cast ballots than they do in federal campaigns. The most powerful province in the country suffers from the weakest electoral turnouts of all — edging out even traditionally apathetic Alberta as the worst performer.
That makes Ontario ground zero for a double democratic deficit — a place where voter turnouts are not merely anemic federally, but utterly abysmal provincially.
What’s behind the provincial apathy? Can our political parties do anything about their collective failure to engage voters — and will they?
Ahead of the June 7 Ontario election, rival politicians will be vying for your vote as they always do, and journalists will be reporting on their various manoeuvres. Over the next few months until voting day, I will try to do things a little differently — asking not just who deserves your vote, but whether anyone will get it.
The stakes are high. What if we held an election and a majority of eligible voters didn’t vote for anyone from any party — not Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals, nor Patrick Brown’s Progressive Conservatives, nor Andrea Horwath’s New Democrats.
It’s happened before. In the 2011 provincial election, turnout dropped to an all-time low of 48.2 per cent — compared to 70 per cent of Ontarians who voted in the federal election of the same year (and the 73.5 per cent who turned out in Ontario’s 1971 election).
Why is our province so predictably undemocratic at election time?
Ontario’s government wields more influence than any other province, controlling education, health care, hydro rates, nuclear reactors, policing, road-building, water purity, real estate taxes — and that’s just a partial list.
A declining youth vote is a growing problem, yet Ontario oversees more issues of direct interest to young people: post-secondary education, job training, beer and wine sales, cannabis distribution, drivers’ licences, and mobile phone contracts.
Research shows that voter turnout generally increases with educational attainment — except for our young people, who are more highly educated yet less motivated than previous generations. Statistics Canada found that millennials believe voting is more of a choice than a civic duty. They may also be endowed with extra-sensitive B.S. meters that make them more skeptical of traditional parties.
And they perhaps define engagement differently. Young people get more news from social media feeds, fragmenting the discussion into Twitter communities while undermining traditional “big tent” parties. The data suggests young people know less about how to vote, notably advance polls (Elections Canada set up extra campus voting stations for students in the 2015 federal election, which helps explain a notable youth uptick).
There’s another challenge that may be unique to Ontario: Statistics Canada found new immigrants are less likely to cast ballots upon gaining citizenship compared to Canadian-born voters.
Given the high proportion of immigrants (and refugees) who wind up in the GTA and across the province, that is a major factor. In 905 ridings where immigrants predominate, notably in Peel, turnouts are among the lowest.
The paradox is that many of these immigrants chose Canada precisely because they were denied the vote in their homelands.
Many tell researchers they are intensely frustrated by missing paperwork that leaves them unregistered on voting day, and by a lack of accessible information about where the parties stand (note to media!). Special targeting of immigrant voters paid dividends in the last federal election.
I confess to a certain passion about this issue after covering democracy struggles across Asia and the Middle East for 11 years as a foreign correspondent. Why take voting for granted in Ontario?
We’ll know more in the months leading up to the next election how each party intends to win your vote. The Progressive Conservatives will have a policy convention later this month, the New Democrats held one earlier this year, and the Liberals will telegraph their platform in a pre-election budget next spring, while the Greens stake out their traditional environmental turf.
But collectively, can the major parties break through the political fog and get more Ontarians of all backgrounds, ages and ideologies to pay attention and vote for them? Any of them?
It’s a question I’ll be asking again over the next few months — of both readers and leaders.