1 week Ago By Brandon Sun
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Today’s the day. Read unlimited articles for free today: Already have an account? Opinion Today’s the day. Perhaps not the day you’ve been waiting for with bated breath.
(If you are one of the more than seven million people who voted in the federal election advance polls, well, it’s just another Monday). It’s polling day. And there’s one thing you have to do.
We’ll get to that in a minute. But first, there is a long history of crabby older men at newspapers — honestly, historically it’s been mostly older men, and their crabbiness is the stuff of legend — sitting down at their typewriters (and later, their computers) and telling readers what’s best for them at the ballot box. Telling them who to vote for.
Insisting it’s the right and only choice. There will no doubt be other newspapers in this country that will tell their readers how to vote. In fact, the owners of the largest chain of Canadian newspapers in this country — Postmedia — issued, as it has for the last few elections, a head office missive backing the federal Conservative Party in all its papers.
But that’s not our job. If newspaper editors, publishers or owners were meant to be the final arbiters of who should be the government, they’d be the only ones with a vote, wouldn’t they? If those editors were the sage judges of which politician should govern a country, those same editors would deserve to get at least a handful of votes, instead of just one, right? Well, they don’t. Voters get a vote for one reason — to present their own personal judgment on who they want to represent them in their federal riding, and who they want to form the government.
The hope is that people have spent time considering their local candidates, along with the national party platforms and leaders, to decide what each voter feels is the best path forwards for the country. It is, we admit, an aspirational view of voting. Plenty will vote the same way they always have, regardless of candidates or policies.
Others will vote without bothering to take the time to take anything like a deep dive into the issues. Still others will vote one way or another, based simply on their visceral feelings about a particular candidate for prime minister. And all of that is all right: voters are granted the right to vote as they wish.
It is part of the process. (Even consciously choosing not to vote is legitimate if it’s done as an act of protest, if you decide to do that. By and large, it’s less effective than supporting a candidate.
But not voting because you just can’t be bothered is, well, civic laziness). All that can be asked of voters is that they actually get to their polling station and do the job that many in the world would love to have the opportunity to do — to have their voice heard in a fairly regulated and dependable election process. And we’re lucky to have that system — many countries don’t.
Elections Canada doesn’t care who wins. It doesn’t answer to a party or a government: it doesn’t rig elections or tamper with the process. It works every year to improve its methods and processes.
And at the end of the day, after the counting is done and the numbers are known, we can all sit back and consider what comes next. Those who have voted can be proud that they took part in the democratic system, that they have a voice in the direction the country is going to take, and that they used that voice. And that they voted with their own convictions, not just following convention or the printed instructions in their daily paper.
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