“We are part of history with this election,” we are told, “this is the first time in Canadian history that a prime minister has been found in contempt of parliament.” What we are not told is that the election in 2008 was also a historic one, because it had the lowest voter turnout in Canadian history: only 58.8 per cent according to Elections Canada. What’s more, as university students, we are constantly told that young Canadians don’t turn out to vote. In 2008, the voter turnout of 18-to-24-year-olds was only 37.4 per cent.
I wasn’t eligible to vote in 2008. I turned 18 little over a month after the polls closed. At the time I desperately wanted to vote Stéphane Dion into the Prime Minister’s Office and send Harper’s Conservatives to the opposition bench. Now that I have the vote and am told I need to take part in this historic election, I don’t want to.
In the Commons, Michael Ignatieff’s Liberals have backed Harper on many issues. The greatest area of difference, I can think of, was the vote to end the gun registry, an issue that, in the grand scheme of things, is relatively minor. The same seems to be the case on the campaign trail with Ignatieff and Harper not offering substantially different visions of Canada. This is not surprising as, once in government, both Liberals and Conservatives govern from the centre. The NDP, on the other hand, offer a program of government intervention that is less than appealing to me. The only major party that remains is the Bloc, which I cannot vote for because I am not a resident of Quebec.
Is that it? Is the reason I and so many other young Canadians don’t vote simply a lack of inspiring policies? While that may be a legitimate criticism, I don’t think it is the main cause. I think there’s something much more fundamental about the world we live in and the government that tries to run it that causes so many of us to stay at home on election day.
We live in a digital age; it’s cliché to say that, I know, but it is true. Our system of government was developed when borders mattered and most people rarely saw those who lived 200 kilometres away, let alone 2,000. Now we interact on a regular basis with people from all corners of the world. Whether it is with Skype, Twitter or Facebook, we can talk to people we never would have known existed a generation ago. We can buy and sell goods via eBay, Amazon, and other online retailers.
When disasters strike in Haiti or Japan, charitable organizations gather hundreds of millions of dollars in days while governments fumble to organize. Social media has helped orchestrate popular revolutions against unpopular dictators, while Western governments pour billions into quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan. Organizations such as Wikileaks have smashed established state secrecy with a few hackers in basements around the world. That it is cliché to marvel at this is a testament to how amazing our lives are.
The world has changed fundamentally, but government has not. Government is a system of control and whether or not you agree with its actions, its fundamental nature remains unchanged. We now live in a world where control is impossible. We spend a huge portion of our time on the Internet, the content of which is unregulated. We spend most of our time in anarchy and Wikipedia looks a whole lot different than Mad Max. We see everyday what spontaneous order creates, the huge amounts of entertainment and knowledge that are amassed in that series of tubes.
Governments, however, still use the same tactics they always have to solve problems: a bomb here, an embargo there, a subsidy or a ban to fix one problem or another. These things don’t work anymore.
In all honesty, I don’t know what the proper role of government is. I could take a stab at it, but I feel like I would be applying old world answers to new world problems. I don’t know what the solutions should be and I’m very wary of anyone who claims to know exactly what is needed to solve all of the world’s ills. And that’s why I’m not voting: I refuse to hand over my authority to someone with the audacity to claim they know how the whole world should work. The world is too complicated for Harper, Ignatieff, or Layton to fix.
We shouldn’t chalk non-voting up to apathy or ignorance on the part of the non-voter. Instead, we should accept that it is a responsible reaction when one understands that in an Internet world, solutions don’t come from the top down, and we shouldn’t try and make them.
