The Toronto Star recently featured the 2013 Atkinson Series: Me, You, Us, journalist and author Michael Valpy’s investigation into social cohesion in Canada — what binds us together, what pulls us apart.
In its final installment, given the decline in voter turnout, one of the suggestions put forth to advance the cause of social cohesion was mandatory voting. It is a notion that I don't personally favour, my reasoning being perhaps reductionist and simplistic: in a mandatory system, the element of resentment would be strong, and some would blithely check off the first name on the ballot just to get out of the polling station. An uninformed vote (and yes,I know there are all ready a lot of them) is worse than no vote, in my view.
Two letters from Star readers offer some interesting perspective on the problems extant in today's democracies:
Fixing the tears in our social fabric, Dec. 22
It isn’t young people not voting that’s pushing democratic legitimacy to a crisis stage, it’s the systemic failure of the political class to address our problems.
Since the triumph of global capital after the fall of the Soviet Union, all political parties fell in line with the neoliberal narrative. Free trade (really a bill of rights for corporations), privatization, offshoring, destruction of the social safety net, ad nauseam, became the bedrock of every political party.
It’s almost funny watching the Liberals and NDP desperately trying to find an issue they disagree with the Tories on. It’s a class consensus. By its nature it excludes an increasing majority.
Michael Valpy’s “solution” of mandatory voting is a pathetic attempt to ignore the cause of this democratic crisis and shoot the messengers. We should be demanding that our political class give us something substantive to vote for.
John Williams, Toronto
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The following letter makes reference to a piece that George Monbiot wrote for The Guardian. If interested, you can read it here.
Voting is not the root cause of our crisis, but out of control corporate power may well be. George Monbiot, in the Guardian, makes this case in, “Nothing will change until we confront the real sources of power.”
Monbiot begins, “It’s the reason for the collapse of democratic choice. It’s the source of our growing disillusionment with politics. It’s the great unmentionable. Corporate Power. The media will scarcely whisper its name. It is howlingly absent from parliamentary debates.
“Until we name it and confront it, politics is a waste of time. The political role of corporation is generally interpreted as that of lobbyists, seeking to influence government policy. In reality they belong on the inside. They are part of the nexus of power that creates policy. They face no significant resistance from either the government or opposition, as their interests have been woven into the fabric of all three main parties.”
Monbiot describes the U.K. situation and supports his views with 15 listed references. He ends with, “So I don’t blame people for giving up on politics,” and “when an unreformed political funding system ensures that parties can be bought and sold, when politicians of the three main parties stand and watch as public services are divided up by a grubby cabal privateers, what is left of this system that inspires us to participate?”
The U.K. situation described by Monbiot is not unique; it is the same for most countries.
Frank Panetta, Welland
