Bill would end Elections Canada vote drives
OTTAWA — Among the controversial proposals in the Conservative government’s proposed Fair Elections Act is one to eliminate Elections Canada campaigns encouraging Canadians to vote — no matter who for.
Pierre Poilievre, federal minister of state for democratic reform, says Elections Canada’s outreach campaigns — which began in 2003 in response to decades of declining voter turnout, particularly among young voters — have failed to combat the troubling trend.
“I am not arguing that Elections Canada’s advertising drives turnout down,” Poilievre said in an email on Wednesday. “Rather, it fails to drive turnout up, because it does not address the practical obstacles that prevent many from voting.”
Jon Pammett, a political science professor at Carleton University, said Poilievre’s equation reflects a flawed understanding of cause and effect.
True, voter turnout in Canada has failed to rebound significantly in the last 10 years. After falling sharply in the 1990s — from 71 per cent to 61 per cent — it hit an all-time low of 58.8 per cent in 2008 before recovering in 2011 to 61 per cent.
But in the relationship between voter outreach and voter turnout, Pammett cautions that A plus B does not always equal C.
“You simply don’t know from simple observation of two things. It’s quite possible that the decline would have been even greater if the campaigns weren’t working.”
Pammett notes that there hasn’t been much research into the impact of Elections Canada’s efforts to inspire youth to vote — from TV ads during some elections to schoolbased initiatives such as a mock election program. U.S. evidence, however, has shown that non-partisan campaigns do make a difference in getting people to vote.
Celebrity-laced TV ads from the youth-oriented campaign Rock The Vote made a measurable impact during the 2004 presidential election, said Columbia University political scientist Donald P. Green, who suggested Poilievre could use a “remedial course in statistics.”
“It’s one thing to say governments should have no business encouraging voter turnout. … But to say that such efforts do not work is demonstrably false.”
Elections Canada spokeswoman Diane Benson said it’s unclear from the bill whether the agency would still be able to visit schools to promote voting or to partner with youth voter organizations such as Apathy Is Boring.
Asked if those programs would be affected, Poilievre’s spokeswoman Gabrielle Renaud-Mattey responded: “The job of an election agency is to inform citizens of the basics of voting: where, when and what ID to bring.”