Election reflection: Right where we were before?

Because so few seats changed hands last week Tuesday, it is tempting to believe that this past election didn’t mean anything: that we are exactly where we were before the election took place. However, I think there were two big issues that suggest this election will have major implications for the future of Canadian politics: the low voter turnout, and the minor role given to issues like the environment and poverty in the election campaign.

The low voter turnout – 59.1% – is shocking. We haven’t yet seen any analysis on that number, so it’s difficult to know what factors had the greatest influence, but anecdotally it appears that voter apathy, voter dislike for all of the choices, voter fatigue (in our third election in four years), and new rules for identification at the polls all contributed to the low turnout. For a democracy, it’s a big problem when over 1/3 of eligible voters choose not to vote.

Given all the attention devoted to strategic voting before the election, and the significant use of the internet to foster strategic voting and facilitate vote swapping for the first time in a Canadian election, it seems clear that electoral reform needs to be part of the public dialogue. It likely will not be the only solution, but needs to be part of a conversation about why people feel so disenfranchised.

But of equal concern is the role of the environment and poverty in this election campaign. This was the first Canadian election in which the environment was given an important role. While parties gave it some attention, it lost that attention as soon as concern for the economy grew and took over the campaign. Ultimately, the party that won was not one of the parties that had devoted a significant amount of their platform to action on climate change. What will be the long-term impacts for dealing with the environment? Will political parties believe that the environment needs to be avoided if they hope to achieve electoral success?

Similarly, poverty didn’t seem to be an issue at all in the campaign, even though several of the parties made explicit commitments on poverty in their platforms. There was no significant debate at the national level, and the debates organized by the media consortium never made reference to poverty. The party that won made no reference at all to poverty in their platform. Will political parties believe that poverty is not an issue Canadians are willing to vote on?

On the one hand, the assumptions that these are not significant issues for Canadians are false. There was a lot of grassroots work being done to question the parties on these issues, highlight the importance of taking action, and to make sure these issues were not ignored. The fact that they didn’t seem to determine the outcome of the election doesn’t mean that Canadians don’t care about the big issues and political parties should leave them alone.

Yet, it’s a fair question to ask: why didn’t these issues seem to determine the outcome? Why were they not the “ballot questions”? Presumably, there is more going on here than low voter turn-out. Understanding the role these issues played in the election and how they were addressed will be important to understanding how to move forward and create change on these issues.

Tomorrow, I’ll suggest some ideas as to why I think the environment and poverty didn’t seem to be more important to the outcome of the election.