Voter turnout: the danger of not making your mark

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 19/12/2024 (319 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There was a lot happening on Monday — Chrystia Freeland, the federal finance minister, was quitting, a fall economic report card was being released and even some Liberal MPs were calling on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to resign — so you might have missed it.

Far to the west, in Vancouver, there was a federal byelection to fill the Cloverdale-Langley City seat of a Liberal member of Parliament who had stepped down to run provincially.

On the face of it, the byelection was an outright trouncing. In a seat that has traditionally swung back and forth between the Liberals and the Conservatives, the Conservatives came out with a resounding win, capturing 66.3 per cent of the vote.

At least, that’s the headline of the byelection. Digging down, there are some things that are a little unsettling about the contest.

Out of the riding’s 92,061 registered voters, 82,130 did not vote for the new member of Parliament for Cloverdale-Langley City. Only 14,979 people, or 16.3 per cent of voters, even bothered to show up to cast a vote.

That means just 10.8 per cent of eligible voters elected the winner.

Obviously, the turnout for byelections generally tends to be smaller than that of general elections, and the results of byelections can be, well, less than representative of the electorate’s feelings as a whole. Sometimes, byelections are treated as an opportunity to try and tell a government to wise up — without having to go so far as to toss it out of office. It’s a great spot for a protest vote. It’s also a spot to sit it out and wait for the real thing, a general election that will come by the fall of 2025.

The stakes of a byelection are smaller.

As well, there’s the timing of this particular byelection. Coming right in the lead-up to Christmas, it’s fair to say that most Canadians have a lot to get done, and little time to do it. Going to cast a vote for an MP who will be in office for less than a year before the next election might seem like a waste of important time.

Still, it’s disturbing that so few wanted their position on record at the ballot box — especially during a time that we’re told a large proportion of the population is absolutely fed up with Trudeau.

There are other issues that surfaced in this byelection as well — and one is the approach taken by the Conservative candidate.

The new Conservative MP for Cloverdale-Langley City, Tamara Jansen, said through a spokesperson that she would not be giving media interviews after she won the byelection. Perhaps that’s not surprising; she also didn’t attend an all-candidates meeting — which every other candidate went to — organized by the Cloverdale District Chamber of Commerce and the Surrey Board of Trade.

And that’s been a trend in recent federal elections — federal Conservatives who eschew media interviews and profiles, along with candidate forums. Not everywhere, and not every candidate, but plenty.

There’s a problem with that.

The less we know about candidates, the less there is to vote for — or against. And that means a small pool of dedicated voters has the power to take over and set the political agenda.

There are many ways to win an election.

You can lay out your policies and what you see as needed.

Or you can soil the whole idea of government so that the whole process looks like a waste of time, and more and more Canadians stay away from the polls.

Think of it this way: if you don’t vote, you have no right whatsoever to complain about the actions of the government you end up getting.