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'Mr. Speaker, the crisis in Canadian democracy is not that
Canadians are voting more than once but that they are voting less than once.
And this bill will... increase cynicism.'
Debate on Bill C-23,
the Fair Elections Act
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After
the last few Federal Elections, I was involved in more than a few conversations
about elections and how to increase voter turnout. We talked about various ideas that we had come
across that people thought would increase voter turnout.
These
ideas ranged from penalizing people who did not vote, such as they do in
Australia to rewarding people who do vote with tax breaks or otherwise. We discussed the reasons that people don’t
vote and tried to think of ways that people could be encouraged to vote.
Bill
C-23 does nothing to encourage voting and it does nothing to make voting
easier. It does the contrary. The Harper Party defenders of this bill keep
saying that there are 39
pieces of information that can be used to allow you to vote. What they don’t tell you is that if you are living
with someone else, such as your parents, or if you are elderly, or if you are a
student living in a dormitory, you may
not have access to most of these pieces of information.
But
as Elizabeth May points out, the real issue is that not enough people are
making the effort to vote.
But
how do you counter people who think their vote doesn’t matter? It does matter, there are elections decided
by a small number of votes every election.
It
is your right and it should be your duty to vote in any election that you are
allowed to vote in. There are people
fighting and dying for the privilege of voting all over the world. But that doesn’t mean anything to some
people.
But
what is hard to defend is when an
elected Member of the House of Commons cannot rise to speak to this bill simply
because they are a Member of the House.
Because of the imposition of time allocation, only the three main
parties were allowed to speak to the bill.
The only reason that Elizabeth May, MP for Saanich-Gulf Islands,
Leader of the Green Party (a recognized federal political party) was able to
speak was that the Liberal Party gave some of their allotted time to Ms. May.
How do you encourage
people to vote when the people that they
elect are not allowed to speak in the House of Commons?
You
can’t.
And
that is a huge part of the problem. Even
if you do vote, your Member of Parliament will likely not be able to represent
your interests anyway. They vote the
Party Line and unless they are selected to be a Minister or a Critic in the
House, they don’t get much of a chance to say anything at all. When the government decides to impose “Time
Allocation” which is a polite way of saying “Closure” on a bill, your MP gets
shoved even further back into the corner… even if they are the Leader of the
Green Party.
This
is why I keep hammering at the fact that “Democracy” is not limited to the day
we cast our ballots, nor is it limited to the 30 days prior to that.
Democracy
is the whole ball of wax. Voting is part
of it. Debate and discourse is part of
it. The Media should be part of it, that is if the government will answer their
questions. And the House of Commons is
supposed to be part of it too.
Every
Member who wishes to speak in debate on a bill must have the right to speak, even if they are not the Official
Critic or Minister or Party Leader.
They
are hired to be our voices in the House of Commons. Any steps to stop them from speaking are
decidedly UNdemocratic. Time
Allocation and Closure do have their place in the House of Commons, but only if
it is a dire situation where we need to have legislation passed quickly. Budget bills and C-23 don’t fall into this
category.
If
we want people to vote, maybe we should allow our Members to speak, all of
them, to any bill that affects their constituents. If people see this, they might be more
inclined to pick one, instead of letting people like me vote for them.
Elizabeth
May gets this. It’s too bad the Harper
Party does not.
*Random
Thought*
When
news came out that the Liberals had given some of their valuable time to
Elizabeth May to speak on Bill C-23, some in the media were surprised. I wasn’t.
Elizabeth May is a very smart person and a very effective speaker. She doesn’t smother us or the House with
bafflegab, the favourite of some in the House.
She speaks clearly to the issue in ways that most of us can understand,
unless we wear Blue Sweater Vests I guess.
*Random
Thought 2*
While
Ms. May and I may not see eye to eye in all things, we are on the same page
when it comes to Democracy. Of all the
people who sit on the Hill, she is one of the few that I wouldn’t mind having
coffee with.
That’s
meant to be a compliment, I hope you take it that way Ms. May.
BC
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