Thanks to social media campaigns and the uprisings in the Middle East, Canadian voters are super engaged this election. But we already knew that, didn’t we?
Everyone is particularly impressed that young people seem to be so engaged.
Montreal-based Apathy Is Boring, one of several non-partisan organizations that have sprung up to promote increased voting in this federal election, hailed the busy advance polls as a harbinger of hope for Canadians’ interest in the political process.
“WE. ARE. DOING IT,” the group boasted after the Easter weekend numbers came in.
“Let’s keep turning up in record numbers to prove that young Canadians care about democracy, and that apathy is boring.”
Coalitions: Going Down
While Stephen Harper is ratcheting up his coalitions-are-scary-things rhetoric, and more and more Canadians seem to believe him, coalitions are both normal and stable in other parts of the world.
“We’ve have been forming coalition governments at the national and state level for a long time,” says Norman Abjorensen, a leading political commentator and professor at the Australia National University in Canberra. “And the sun has always risen the following day.”
The typical pattern in Australian federal politics, says Abjorensen, is either a leftish Labour government or a coalition of right-of-centre Liberals and rural Nationals.
“We change governments rarely here,” he says. “Only six changes in more than 60 years. No coalition has fallen except at the ballot box or on the floor of the house when in a minority in 1941.”
Western democracies such as Canada and the United Kingdom are behind the times, argues London School of Economics political scientist Jonathan Hopkin.
Not that Canadians haven’t thought about it:
A few days after Trudeau’s comeback victory in the 1980 federal election, he invited NDP leader Ed Broadbent to his office.
“I had a surprise for him,” Trudeau, who had just led his Liberals to a majority government, recalled in his 1993 book Memoirs.
“In an attempt to negotiate some sort of alliance with his party, I offered him and his colleagues some senior positions in our cabinet,” wrote Trudeau, explaining that his scanty take in Western Canada — just two seats, both in Manitoba, out of 143 Liberal MPs — had left him craving some of the widespread western representation of the NDP.
National unity, Trudeau believed, “would be strengthened if we could consolidate our forces.” He noted that there had been similar Liberal-NDP collaboration talks “on and off since (Lester B.) Pearson’s day,” but that Broadbent, who feared that his party would lose its power and credibility, quickly declined the offer.
Women in Politics: Going Nowhere
I mean that two ways: women who are in politics aren’t leaving anytime soon, but women are making very few gains in politics right now.
Anita Neville, a Liberal Member of Parliament and former minister for the status of women, agrees that more needs to be done to recruit women, and that the tone of Canadian politics is a barrier to that goal.
“I don’t think any of the parties have done a great job recruiting candidates,” she said at a campaign rally in Winnipeg, Manitoba last week.
“The rancor and nastiness of the political discourse turns off” many women, Neville said, adding that the atmosphere before the last election was “a really ugly Parliament.”
The New Democratic Party said April 11 it had set an “historic first” by having women as 40 percent of its nominated candidates. Still, Equal Voice said on its website that only 31 percent of NDP candidates in what it gauges are winnable ridings are women. That figure compares with 27 percent for the Liberals and 22 percent for the Conservatives. The Conservative Party did not respond to requests for comment yesterday about this issue.
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