Your mission, if you choose to accept it

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/10/2023 (1085 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s time for your 15 seconds of fame!

Tomorrow, if you so choose, you will enter a room where people are suddenly rapt with attention and fully prepared — waiting eagerly, even — for your arrival. Striding forwards, you will see the faces craning towards you, hanging on your every word.

That might be overstating things a bit.

But they will be eager, and helpful. Election workers will check your voting card and ID, mark down that you’ve gotten your ballot, and send you off on your perilous solo mission behind the imposing cardboard wall of secrecy.

Well, not exactly.

You’ll go behind a cardboard privacy shield perched on a table.

And then you get to take your stubby golf course pencil and mark your X for …

Well, not mark your X, actually. And not a golf pencil either.

This election, it’s filling in the circle next to your chosen candidate with a stubby Sharpie instead.

But no matter!

As the black ink quickly fills in your chosen circle, all the candidates you didn’t vote for will feel a great disturbance in the Force, and the candidate you do support will feel the brief and warming glow of success. “You like me, you really like me …” they’ll murmur quietly.

Well, that won’t happen either.

It will all be much more anticlimactic: in reality, it will be a visit to an office or community hall, probably the same one you’ve visited in prior elections, to mark a piece of paper with a single vote that, tucked in among hundreds of thousands of other votes, will in some small way help to set the direction of this province.

One small vote, but no small thing: the smaller the number of votes that are cast, the stronger each individual vote becomes. And the stakes are high: a few of the issues on the table, besides control of billions of dollars of provincial government money, are how we want to treat our children’s rights; how we want to protect health care, and what direction we should take to help the less fortunate among us — the homeless, the mentally ill, the addicted.

Voting is a right that far too many of us take for granted. So many take it for granted that in the last federal election, just 62.2 per cent of Canada’s eligible voters showed up to vote — meaning that a majority government could result by getting the support of considerably less than one-third of Canadians.

In Manitoba, the last provincial election had an even lower turnout, at just slightly over 55 per cent. It’s possible here for us to lapse into the tropes of saying “this is not the democracy that so many Canadians fought and died for …” and that would be legitimate.

But more to the point: big decisions are going to be made over the next four years, and this is your only opportunity to directly affect the direction of governments.

Politicians are fond of saying that “the only poll that matters is on election day.”

While that’s a glib way to dismiss the importance of public opinion polling results, its logical obverse is a dark window — that politicians are safe in believing that what voters think throughout the span between elections doesn’t matter in the least.

So let’s get back to your triumphant entrance tomorrow.

If you haven’t already voted at an advance poll — as many have — make the most of your polling station appearance.

Shoulders back. Stand tall.

Bask in your 15 seconds of Sharpie-wielding, ballot-box fame.

You may not get accolades at the polling station.

But you’ll get them from us.