I never got the “not voting” thing.
If you don’t vote, I’m not judging. I’m not here to vote-shame everyone. But I was an adult before I realized that a lot of people don’t vote.
I’d always assumed that everyone voted because my parents always voted. During an election campaign, they discussed their options. Politics was allowed at our dinner table.
Based on these discussions, I learned very early that when it comes to choosing a candidate, it’s best to keep one’s expectations low. As a child, it seemed to me that elections boiled down to picking the least bad option. As an adult, I know that observation was correct. Some things change. That hasn’t.
I often tagged along when my parents voted. I found it very exciting. The little curtain, the pencil, the ballot. Granted, this was before cable TV and video games.
My guess is that my parents, during their sixty-plus years of marriage, have cancelled each other’s votes out more often than not. But still they have always gone through the exercise. As have I.
I may be a little hard-core. In 1997, I was working in Nova Scotia but still a resident of Newfoundland. I flew home for the day just to vote in a referendum. It cost me three hundred bucks to mark an X to end the denominational school system in Newfoundland. Worth the cash.
But that’s an extreme example. Every other time I’ve voted, it’s been relatively effortless and free. And now, with the advent of advance polls and mail-in ballots, there really is no excuse for not partaking.
But I get it: for a lot of people, voting is conceptual. It’s like talking about your feelings with your spouse. You know you should do it, and you know people who claim they do it, but it’s a pain in the ass and it’s easy to avoid. And really, what difference does it make? Then you blink, twelve years have gone by, you’re getting divorced and Idi Amin is your mayor.
I have met people who don’t believe in voting, and I’ve met people who have made a conscientious decision not to do so.
The Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t vote because it’s against their religion. They believe Satan controls all democracies, including your local town council, your condo board and the entire House of Commons. They may be on to something. I’d hate to have to debate them on that one.
And I know a former chief political correspondent at CBC News who once casually mentioned to me that, despite covering politics for over twenty years, he had never voted in a federal election. He said he was afraid that doing so would impact the way he reported on politics. He said, “I never wanted a team to root for.”
I thought that was patently absurd, but at least he had put some thought into his reasons for staying on the couch.
Knowing the casual disregard so many people show for the actual act, I couldn’t help but become intrigued when I heard that a couple of teenagers in Edmonton had shown up on a municipal election day and tried to vote.
Talk about hard-core. A municipal election?
They were turned away because they were sixteen.
Being typical slacker teenagers, they found a lawyer and sued the municipality to try to get the age limit overturned. They lost, appealed, lost again, and went all the way to the Supreme Court. Where they lost.
I admit I had never given much thought to the notion of sixteen-year-olds voting until I heard about these kids. And I liked it.
They had their day in court, but not much attention was paid to the story. My guess is, in newsrooms across the country, the view was that sixteen-year-olds wanting to vote was like ballroom dancers wanting to able to compete in the Olympics. The issue was met with indifference.
So I ranted.
My rant that week was all about them. And I made the point that “if stupid people can vote, if criminals can vote, why not sixteen-year-olds?” My argument was that if “we allow sixteen-year-olds to vote, they may find they like it. They may do it again, next chance they get. They may get addicted to democracy. And that would be good for all of us.” I said, “It’s called getting them while they are young. If the cigarette companies and the beer companies have that figured out, why can’t the Government of Canada?”
Well, honestly, people went ballistic. The original court case didn’t get much attention, but the rant did. Many people didn’t like the notion of anyone legitimizing the cause, even if it was just some guy running around in an alley talking to himself.
I had no idea that, in the eyes of many, our democracy was so weak and fragile it would be destroyed if sixteen-year-olds were allowed near the ballot box.
A common refrain was “their brains aren’t fully formed.” I thought this was a strange thread to pull on. And what of the brains of our members of Parliament? Have you ever seen a backbench? I’ve known seals who were better critical thinkers.
People were also very concerned that teachers would somehow indoctrinate students and influence their vote. Someone emailed me to tell me that if sixteen-year-olds could vote, education-related issues would dominate provincial elections. I admit I had not considered that horrifying possibility.
Regardless, I decided to stick to my guns, and I became one of those people in the establishment who advocated for the voting age to be lowered. It was a fun issue; it got people going, but I also knew it was never going to be a ballot-box issue. There was no political will anywhere in the land to act on it. None of the political parties supported lowering the age, despite the fact that all three major political parties in Canada allowed sixteen-year-olds to join their party with full voting privileges when it came to choosing the executive and the candidate to represent their riding.
I didn’t revisit the subject of voting directly for another three years. In October 2008 Canada once again found itself in a federal election, and the subject of voting was theoretically in the air.
For people who pay attention to the dark art of campaign strategy, one thing about the campaign was new. Taking a page out of successful presidential campaigns south of the border, all the parties were micro-targeting voting blocs in ways that had never been done before. I had someone who worked for one of the campaigns explain the entire process to me. It was fascinating stuff for a geek. However, when I asked him how they targeted youth, he looked at me like I was asking him how he was targeting space creatures.
“We don’t,” he said. “Waste of time.”
I won’t tell you which of the three major parties he worked with, but the truth is it could have been any of them.
So I ranted.
So here we are, the final stretch before the big vote. And all the political parties are busy courting every special-interest group in the country, no matter how small. If you’ve got one leg, two kids and you work on a farm? The parties all have a pitch for you. Unless of course you happen to be a student, in which case you are completely off the radar.
Not a peep on the subject from any of our leaders. Education was not even mentioned in the debate.
I’m not saying any politician would ever come out and say they don’t care about the student vote. When they are pushed, they can all talk about education reform and crushing debt until the cows come home. But then, at the ten-minute mark, they will stop and lean in as if telling you a secret and they say, “You know, it’s a real shame, but students in this country just don’t vote.” Which is code for “We don’t care about students. We never have, we never will.” . . .
There are a million students in this country, if you showed up to vote, believe me, elections in this country would never be the same again. Education would never be left off the agenda.
I ended with some simple instructions on how to vote. Which you might think is basic, but Elections Canada were running ads that year on how to vote that made it seem like it involved quantum physics. And they were pushing confusing messaging about being “registered to vote.” I reminded students that they didn’t need to be registered. “Men died on beaches so you could vote,” I said. “All you need to do so is a piece of official mail and your student ID.”
And then, as an afterthought, “Your real ID, that is. Not your fake one.”
The response to my rant? Well, you need only look at what happened one week later, when the election was held. Voter turnout among young people continued its downward spiral and plummeted to 37.4 percent. The political leaders in Canada were right: young people don’t vote. Stephen Harper’s Conservatives were re-elected with a minority government.
As history has shown, Harper’s second term was marked by daily doses of joy and prosperity. During those four years, the air smelled of apple blossoms and the sun shone every day.
However, all good things come to an end, even minority governments, and once again in 2011 we were headed to the polls. Stephen Harper’s rationale? Canada needed a “strong, stable majority government.”
Also, he liked to remind us that “danger is lapping at our shores.” Whether the danger was sharks, inflation, the green movement or youth, he never elaborated.
And once again I attempted to goad students into voting.
I figured if the desire for good government wasn’t enough to motivate them, maybe spite would.
I ranted.
So here we have it, we are heading into an election—or, as Stephen Harper calls it, a dangerous and unnecessary exercise. Because as we all know, Canada is one of the world’s greatest democracies, and the greatest threat to that democracy is that we get to vote.
But vote we will, so that means if you live in a retirement home, prepare to be targeted. Because these days, it’s all about targeting the vote. All the major parties have well-publicized plans to target the ethnic vote, the women’s vote, the blue-collar vote, the corporate vote. If there were more than five paraplegic lesbian Inuit women in Labrador, they would be a target.
Everyone is targeted except for one group: the youth vote. There are more than three million young, eligible voters in this country and as far as any of the political parties are concerned, you might as well all be dead. In fact, in some elections—in Quebec, for example—the dead have a higher voter turnout.
It is the conventional wisdom of all political parties that young people will not vote. And the parties? They like it that way. It’s why your tuition keeps going up.
So please, if you are between the age of eighteen and twenty-five and you want to scare the hell out of the people that run this country, this time around do the unexpected: take twenty minutes out of your day and do what young people all over the world are dying to do.
Vote!
Three days after the rant aired, I heard the term “vote mob” for the very first time.
It was when I got a cold call from a reporter for the Canadian Press.
This wasn’t entirely out of the ordinary. I have few skills, and one of them is that I can blather on at great length on many subjects whether I know what I am talking about or not. And I was one of those people the press would occasionally call on for a remotely colourful comment on a quiet election day.
I thought the reporter might want a comment on Michael Ignatieff’s inability to talk to people without sounding like a poncey university lecturer. But no. She wanted to know what I thought of the “vote mob” at the University of Guelph. I pleaded ignorance because I was, as is often the case, ignorant.
“How can you say you don’t know about the vote mob?” she said. “It was your idea.”
Being in a conversation with a reporter, on the record, and being asked about something to do with a “mob” that you may be responsible for is not ideal.
I responded, “I can’t hear you. I have a bad signal. Bloody Rogers…” And then I hung up.
When in doubt, blame Rogers or Bell.
Within seconds of hanging up from the reporter, I googled “vote mob” and “Guelph,” and all was revealed. A video called “Vote Mob—University of Guelph” was trending on YouTube. It was already a day old. When I hit play, the first thing that came up in big, bold letters was the statement “Rick Mercer encouraged young people to vote—Rick, this one is for you.” And that is how I saw my first vote mob.
It was a music video, sort of. There was music. And it was cut very well. The video featured hundreds of kids at the University of Guelph, holding signs and saying loud and clear that in the coming election, they would be voting. They were dancing and singing and waving Canadian flags. There was nothing partisan in the message. There were no Liberal, Conservative or NDP signs. The message was simple: we are voting.
It turns out the vote mob was the brainchild of two brilliant young women from Guelph, Gracen Johnson and Yvonne Su. They were whip-smart, involved and passionate. And when it came to the issue of young people being taken for granted during elections, they were very pissed off. So they were getting their message out with this really cool, upbeat video. They were targeting a demographic that was being ignored by the major parties.
The number of views continued to ramp up; suddenly, the video was being shared on Facebook pages across the country and Twitter was on fire with the hash tag #votemob.
And then a wonderful thing happened: it began to spread. It was viral before viral was a thing.
Gracen and Yvonne holed up in one of their bedrooms, and instead of studying for their finals they began to plan Guelph’s second vote mob. But that became nearly impossible because so many students across the country began to reach out to them for advice.
Within days the University of Victoria, then McMaster and Memorial University in Newfoundland and Labrador all posted vote mobs. By the end of the week there were forty-five vote mobs online, from every province and territory. Every newscast in the country was featuring local vote mobs, which begat more vote mobs.
Suddenly, the political parties were being asked what they were doing to reach out to young voters and encourage young people to vote. Their answers were uniformly pathetic. None of them knew what had hit them. All of them were somewhat embarrassed that they hadn’t thought of targeting the youth.
John Baird, spokesperson for the Conservative Party, handled it particularly badly. Baird is an accomplished politician, and rarely did he make things worse during a campaign. But when he was asked about the vote mobs, he said he found “the entire thing disconcerting.”
Note to Mr. Baird: Never sneer at students. It’s a bad look.
Michael Taube, Stephen Harper’s former speech writer, was apoplectic that students across the country were assembling and threatening to vote. In a special column for the Ottawa Citizen, he wrote: “A few weeks ago, there was no such thing as a ‘vote mob.’ But an idea hiding in a deep, dark corridor of comedian Rick Mercer’s brain has, quite by accident, unleashed this holy terror onto unsuspecting Canadians.
“Do you really think that any of the major leaders care that some 18-to-25-year-olds who wouldn’t ordinarily vote have suddenly been convinced by a comedian’s rant on TV?”
It was very odd to see such a highly placed Conservative, and one so close to the prime minister, become so unhinged in print. He ended by saying, “If vote mobs are ever considered to be a viable method of increasing political participation, I would much rather keep the numbers as low as they are.”
As voting day got closer, another problem presented itself to the organizers of the Guelph mobs. Because the school year was ending, students who wanted to vote were leaving university and heading back to their home ridings. As a result, thousands of students all over the country were in flux, stuck between the ridings they lived in to attend school and the ridings their parents lived in. Many students were leaving for summer jobs in areas where they weren’t qualified to vote.
The simple solution, the organizers believed, was to hold advance ballots on campus. The argument being that there are advance polls in senior citizens’ homes all over Canada, so why not on campus?
Elections Canada set one up on campus in Guelph, and it was a huge hit. Workers were nearly overwhelmed by the number of students that showed up. Hundreds of them lined up.
When news of the huge turnout made it to the various political campaigns—and one in particular—panic hit. The communications director for the local Conservative Party candidate, a young man by the name of Michael Sona, raced to campus and ran up and down the line, declaring loudly that the Elections Canada polling station was illegal. He then attempted, according to numerous eyewitnesses, to do something unheard of in Canada: take the ballot box.
It took a gaggle of large athletes to convince Sona that he would not be confiscating their votes. Sona left and the voting continued.
For Sona, it was a good day at the office. Not only did his willingness to disrupt a polling station land him on the front pages of newspapers all across the country, but it caught the attention of the people running the Conservative campaign. That boy has moxie! Sona was offered work as a staffer in the office of the parliamentary secretary to the minister of national defence.
Sadly, his career came to an end when he was sent to jail for nine months after being found guilty of running a call centre whose objective was to stop people who identified as Liberal or NDP from voting. It was, of course, in Guelph.
I attended only one vote mob during the election. It turned out to be the nation’s largest, and it took place in London, Ontario. Thousands of people, not just university students, showed up to wave flags, announce they were voting and encourage others to follow suit. The video is filled with the infectious joy of disaffected youth. It remains one of my favourite YouTube videos to this day.
That election was a game changer in Canadian politics. When the dust settled, Stephen Harper was not only still the prime minister, but he had achieved a majority government. The NDP, for the first time in history, had taken second place and would form the official Opposition. This was a historic victory for the party of Jack Layton. As for the Liberals, the party that likes to consider itself the “natural governing party of Canada?” They too made history, of a different sort. They were suddenly sucking hind teat and were in third place. Their worst result by far, ever.
But the biggest change of them all? The bright light? The silver lining? Voter turnout among young people, which had been on a precarious downward trend since 1975, was up for the first time in well over 35 years. That was a victory for everyone.
I think the vote mobs were the most exciting thing that happened during that election. I loved every single one of them. And I was beyond chuffed when I got the credit. But the vote mobs started in Guelph with Gracen Johnson and Yvonne Su.
My rant about young people voting aired just two days before that first vote mob. Clearly, they had the thing mostly organized by then.
When I suggested to Yvonne and Gracen that they were planning to do them all along, they would only say they appreciated the rant.
My guess? They had no idea how the initial mob would go, and so they slapped my name at the top of the video. That way, if the whole thing went sideways, they could duck.
Well, I was glad to get the credit, and even prouder to take the blame.
But more than anything, I look forward to voting for Gracen and Yvonne someday, and if I’m not eligible, I’ll show up and knock on some doors.