Little done about voter turnout

RE: EDITORIAL: VOTER TURNOUT REMAINS AN EMBARRASSMENT, OCT. 30

When two thirds of your electorate doesn’t vote, democracy indeed becomes something of a joke. Unfortunately, the “solutions” suggested in your recent editorial — ranging from online voting to ranked ballot — miss the point.

People don’t vote when they feel marginalized, disempowered and voiceless. People don’t vote when their daily lives are so dominated by the struggle to simply survive that the shifting sands of politics seem distant and irrelevant. People don’t vote when their access to candidate information is limited to lawn signs, brochures and short bios that are full of platitudes and short on substance, even if the potential voter has adequate literacy skills to read them. People don’t vote when they are unaware of how the decisions made by local and regional political bodies directly and specifically impact their lives.

Political pundits’ advice to candidates is always the same: You get the best bang for your buck by identifying previous voters — especially if they voted your way — and mobilizing them. From an electoral perspective, this makes perfect sense. If you’ve voted once, you are likely to do it again — but in practice it means largely reshuffling the one-third of the community that votes while ignoring the vast majority who remain sidelined and uninvolved. Rather than spending so much time and money on identifying who did vote, if we are to avoid the “embarrassment” of low voter turnout in the future, as a community we need to find out who didn’t vote and why. To me, low voter turnout is not embarrassing in itself. What is embarrassing is we do so little about it. Don Sawyer

St. Catharines

Provincial should run schools

I always vote at each election and remind others of their civic duty to do the same. Having said that, there comes a time when it’s appropriate not to vote and this election was one of those times.

While I did cast a ballot and vote for mayor, local council and regional council, I refused to vote for a school board trustee. In the past eight years I’ve lived in south Niagara, the only time I have heard from trustees is just prior to an election.

Nobody knows what they do or even how to contact them. School board trustees and the boards have become irrelevant. They do what they want, when they want and spend our money. The Niagara school boards’ track record of governance is, dare I say, worse than the Region’s. It's time for the Ontario government to step in and take over the school boards directly. They certainly can’t do any worse than the present boards and unknown trustees.

J Mark Robinson

Port Colborne

Where’s the PC climate plan?

What’s with the Conservatives, federal and provincial? The CPC had a chance to choose Michael Chong’s polluters pay plan with money being returned through income tax reductions and dividend cheques, while also reforming income tax, which is sorely needed. The Ontario PCs had another golden opportunity with Patrick Brown’s People’s Guarantee.

The Conservatives aren’t listening to economists who say a tax on polluters is the most economical way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, nor to a Nobel laureate who says the same. What do they do instead? They spout polarizing rhetoric about a carbon tax killing jobs and costing us more than we can afford, neither of which is true. And what is their response to the latest IPCC report that says we have 12 years at most to turn around our changing climate? Nothing! Neither the federal nor provincial Conservatives have come out with a plan. So, where is the Conservative leadership, who always claimed to be protectors of the environment, and the taxpayer’s wallet?

Gord Cumming

Georgetown, Ont.