Five months later, we're still hearing it.
You know the tired old line ... "63 per cent of Canadians did not vote for Prime Minister Stephen Harper" on Oct. 14, 2008 - meaning, supposedly, he has no right to slip dirty tricks into his economic statement, no right to prorogue Parliament, no right to name all those unelected senators, no right to bail out the auto makers, no right to grin like a Cheshire cat just because he's walking through Times Square. ...
I suppose it's only natural in a country like Canada, where we far prefer tossing people out of office than throwing them in, that thinking like this would surface every now and then.
But if we insist on giving more measure to votes against something rather than for, could it not be equally argued that the last federal election was really won by nobody?
Just do the math.
The Conservatives took 37.6 per cent of the actual vote, leaving them just short of a majority government. Slightly more than five million eligible voters thought Stephen Harper should remain prime minister.
But nearly 10 million voters - 40.9 per cent of the potential vote - chose to turn their backs on the election and not vote at all.
By the weird reasoning that goes into 63 per cent of Canadians voting against Harper, it seems equally possible to argue that the true winner of the 2008 federal election was ... nobody.
You could even say, if you wished to be silly about it, that more than 40 per cent of the House of Commons should reflect this reality - a minority government of empty seats.
Hmmmmmm...
There are a great many Canadians concerned about the drop in voter participant to all-time lows. Some see it as a disconnect - Canadians simply deciding to turns their backs on a process that seems increasingly irrelevant to them - and some see it as a direct reflection of an increasing anger in the country.
In other words, not voting is a deliberate act.
John Ralston Saul, the best-selling author and resident political philosopher, thinks Canada should "count" even the votes that are deliberately not cast. He believes this would be possible if only Canada were to go for the "forced vote" that Australia has: If you fail to vote, you have broken the law and are subject to a fine and even the possibility of jail.
Ralston Saul says only by having everyone actually vote will we be able to separate those who have lost interest from those who have lost faith.
"If you don't vote," he argues, "people will say you're lazy. But if you deliberately don't vote, it says you're angry. A spoiled ballot is a vote. Nobody can say you don't care if you spoil your ballot.
"You would announce the spoiled ballots as part of the vote."
Australia put in compulsory voting in 1924 to put an end to the "apathy and indolence" that had turned Election Day into a bit of a joke, with less than half even bothering. The argument was that voting, like paying your taxes, is a civic duty - and you should be no more able to avoid the one than the other.
Australians regularly debate the value of forced voting and the country still gets its non voters, but precious few, and turnouts are well into the 90 percentile.
Australian law, however, also stipulates that the ballots not be spoiled. Ralston Saul, on the other hand, says Canada should count them as a legitimate form of protest. You could argue that a spoiled ballot that is counted represents freedom of speech.
Peter MacLeod, the Toronto-based principal of MASS LBP, an organization dedicated to encouraging public participation, wouldn't go quite so far - but he still would like to see a change in attitude.
MacLeod says the problem isn't lack of public interest - not when his Citizens' Assemblies were able to get 8,000 people volunteering every second weekend for nearly a year just to study the possibilities of electoral reform.
"We don't have an apathy problem," he argues. "What we have is an engagement problem."
He says the old notion of electing someone to speak for you because you didn't have the education or the mobility or the connections is passé. "People want to speak for themselves," he believes. "Put another way, the troops want to lead the generals - they're not really interested in sanctioning the generals to call the shots. For better or worse, the trust and deference on which this old agreement was based has largely eroded."
Before considering forced voting, and without true electoral reform coming yet to Canada, MacLeod would recommend a few adjustments to the imperfect system that currently exists.
Voting, he says, should be moved to weekends, with the polls open for two days.
The voting age should be lowered to age 16 so it becomes part of the high school experience. And having your kids interested and voting is going to push more parents to take an interest and vote.
He'd also like to see a return to the old style of enumeration, citizens going door to door to count voters. It's time-consuming and labour-intensive, but MacLeod says it works.
What having a permanent computerized registrations does, he says, is make registering as simple as not bothering to vote at all.
And at 40.9 per cent, we've had just about enough of that.