The electoral campaign is launched. The echo of ready-made phrases is already being heard: every vote counts, voting is a duty, if you don’t vote, you lose the right to complain. However, the question arises: in what context are we being asked to vote?
First, we are told to take an interest in politics, whereas we are usually asked to let the elite do their thing, which makes many of the decisions that shape our society, our environment and our future. In non-election times, we are invited to focus on the car, work, sleep routine (to which we should think about adding cleaning, meals, children, sick or aging relatives) and to consume to keep the economy rolling. So, between two elections, who has the time and energy to meddle in political affairs?
In addition, we are asked not only to restart a mechanism that has rusted because it has not been used for four years, but to run it at full steam for a period limited to around thirty days. We must follow the campaign promises, read the electoral platforms and watch the debates. These debates which reduce the discussion on our societal choices to a zero-sum game with winners and losers. These debates where the impressions on the performance of the heads of the parties take precedence over their policies, with all the sexist, racist, ableist biases (and so on) that this poses on who looks like prime minister.
These electoral platforms, drowsy reading if any (even for a political science graduate like me), which make it difficult to compare ideas, and even less to contextualize them. Each party undertakes to improve, to promote, to work towards such a measure with means, if they are specified, the magnitude of which is difficult to assess for ordinary mortals. Multiply the exercise by the number of measures affecting issues as different as the environment, health, education, improving human rights and the vision of the economy. Thirty-six days, top time.
Then, we are told that every vote counts and that, if we do not vote, we lose the possibility of criticizing the power in place. However, in the Quebec electoral system, it is rather a few ballots that count, that is to say those in the ridings where voting intentions are tight. Similarly, this vote presented as a supreme democratic act remains a more than imperfect act in a representative democracy. This reduces our power to choose from time to time people, who most often come from the social and economic elites, to govern us. Considering the discrepancy between the discourse on the importance of the ballot box and the real power granted to us in this democracy, it is not surprising that we often experience disappointment, even cynicism towards politics.
Democratic setbacks
Besides this limited ability to delegate our power every four years, let’s not forget that our era is marked by democratic setbacks. Spaces for participation are reduced: abolition of French-language school elections, reduction of citizen participation in the health system, stagnation of trade unionism. Similarly, the means of democratic expression of the population (other than the sacrosanct individual vote) are delegitimized: repression of the right to demonstrate, limitation of the right to strike.
This trend must be reversed. Democracy should be able to be lived everywhere: at work, at school, at the care centre, at the seniors’ residence, in the neighbourhood, the village or the region. Our mechanism must be stressed daily if we want to avoid rust.
In this context, on October 3, I will not judge the people who do not go to vote. For my part, yes I will vote, but not in the hope that a party will make good decisions in my name. I will vote for the party which, in my view, will form the weakest opposition to the social, feminist and environmental movements which will have to negotiate with it to obtain the profound transformations which our society ardently needs.
When I leave the polling station, I will return to occupy the democratic spaces created by my fellow citizens on the issues that particularly concern me (we can’t do everything!). Through these, we will work to regain power over the decisions that concern us. We will not wait for the next election campaign.