The message is everywhere: Get out and vote. But we're not hearing it, and we're getting better at tuning it out.
Despite poll after poll indicating this may be the closest federal election in decades with minority government a possibility if voting trends continue, Canadian polling stations are likely to resemble their more vacant U.S. counterparts come June 28.
Turnout countrywide has dropped steadily to 61.2 per cent from 75.3 per cent in four federal elections since 1988, and election experts say nearly half of us will not cast ballots this time.
“Fifty per cent is the symbolic number,” says Larry LeDuc, a University of Toronto political science professor who co-wrote Comparing Democracies: Elections and Voting in Global Perspective. Anything below that “undermines the legitimacy of governments.”
He predicts turnout will slip to 58 per cent, an all-time low.
While voter apathy among those under 25 is not new — he says turnout for that demographic has averaged 22 per cent to 23 per cent for years — he bases his forecast on an emerging population that he says never develops a political appetite, even as it ages.
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“Politics is simply not part of their world,” he says. “They're not being pulled into it as previous generations were. People used to approach their 30s and then they would get politically involved, but now what's happening is they're coming out in smaller numbers. It doesn't take very long for that to show up in participation.”
Like a dripping faucet, Canada is losing its electorate.
We rank 77th in voter turnout, or 68.4 per cent, compared with other countries since the end of the Second World War according to an international survey by the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. We're behind countries as unique as their concerns, including Israel, Argentina, Congo and Iceland — so we can't blame the weather.
Snow or sunshine aside, voter apathy is an issue political theorists are grappling with worldwide. Canada is just following the tides of indifference.
While it seems to be a largely Western phenomenon, it has arisen in parts of Asia, Europe and Latin America. More baffling is that there is no common link among countries with falling electoral turnouts.
It's an inexplicable global malaise.
“It's a good question. I think I would be given the Nobel Prize if I knew the answer,” sighs the Institute's Maria Gratschew. Ms. Gratschew was the project manager of the survey that examined voter turnout in 172 countries.
“I'm lazy. I just can't be bothered to walk down to the polling booth,” says Darshan Patel, a 32-year-old economist in central London. “I used to vote all the time, but now I don't care.”
National turnout for United Kingdom general elections plunged to 59.4 per cent in 2001 from 71.5 per cent four years earlier. Apathy has become such an issue that to stir interest in recent local and European Parliament elections, the country's electoral commission initiated a $10-million ad campaign featuring two animated characters at a pub debating the merits of voting.
It may have worked. Preliminary tallies show 38.2 per cent of Britons went to the polls, up from 24 per cent in 1999, the lowest in Europe.
But even in countries with a more precarious political history, there is a growing sentiment that elections carry no significance. In Daegu, South Korea, a country technically still at war with North Korea, Lim Hyang Jae feels its his civic responsibility to vote. But his peers don't share that view.
“Several of my friends think it doesn't matter,” says the 24-year-old political science student. Since the Korean War, South Korea has had an average turnout of 74.8 per cent.
If Elections Canada is seeking a model, it could do as the Romans do. Since 1945 in 14 elections, 92.5 per cent of Italians have cast ballots — the world's top turnout rate.
“Actually, I don't like politics. But at the same time, if I do like peace I can't get mad at the government if I don't vote,” says Corinna Miniati, a 22-year-old hotel waitress in Florence, Italy, who has voted twice. “It's part of our life.”
Ms. Miniati says she's not sure why Italians vote in such large numbers, but hints that it may have to do with the range of political parties they have to choose from.
“It's not like just one party on the left and one party on the right. There is different, different, different parties.”
Prof. LeDuc says different countries use different measures to boost voter participation, some of which Elections Canada has pondered.
They include postal voting, voting on Sundays and stretching elections over two or three days. Some countries have enforced compulsory voting, such as Australia, where turnout has been 84.4 per cent during the last 60 years. Others have toyed with dangling incentives such as free transportation to the polls and tax breaks.
But what about a good old-fashioned, hotly contested political race to buck apathy?
Prof. LeDuc says the current clash between Liberal Leader Paul Martin and Conservative Leader Stephen Harper, competitive as it is, may serve to show if Canadians are truly unmoved when it comes to marking ballots.
“It will be a good test.”
