OTTAWA
– Canada’s dismal rates of voter turnout may be rooted in negative experiences
with politicians and public servants, according to a new report.
The
findings suggest non-voters may not be ignorant or uninformed, but simply
frustrated by failures in the political system that have impacted them
personally.
“It’s
almost a learned disengagement,” said Alison Loat, executive director of
Samara, a nonpartisan research organization.
During
the last federal election, 61.4 per cent of Canadians cast their votes, up
slightly from 2008 when 59.1 per cent of people voted. Still, there has been a
downward trend in voter turnout since 1993.
Loat
says unlike typical research on apathy, which asks questions of voters, this
study took the matter to those who don’t vote.
The
report, entitled "The Real Outsiders: Politically Disengaged Views on Politicsand Democracy," interviewed 56 non-voters in a series of eight focus groups in
an attempt to determine what keeps them away from the ballot box.
The
focus groups included segments of the population that are least likely to vote
including lower-income Canadians, Aboriginal Canadians, women in Quebec, new
Canadians and Canadians living in rural areas. Another focus group made up of
regular voters was also included for comparison.
The
researchers found that these non-voters weren’t so much apathetic or ignorant,
but that many of the participants were strong believers in democracy.
The
problem lay in the fact that the politics they experienced weren't in line with their views on democracy.
“Democracy
is great, but it’s politics I hate, that was sort of the message,” Loat said.
Nearly
all of the research participants reported that they had tried to participate in
politics, access a government service or request help from the government only
to be ignored, put on hold or discounted.
An
Aboriginal woman told the researchers that she waited for five months to get
her grandson into daycare, even though she called politicians and wrote
letters.
“Nobody
did anything… it took me four or five months before we got him into another
daycare, and we had to put him in the Catholic daycare and we’re not Catholic,”
she said.
Another
woman described her experience in an Employment Quebec program saying that she
was enrolled in a retraining program to become a cook. In the seventh month of
the training, administration moved her from the kitchen and gave her a serving
position. The woman said she was discouraged and dropped out.
The instances tainted their experience of politics
and its importance. Loat said that respondents did not distinguish
between failures of the public service and elected officials.
To
a lesser extent, younger respondents displayed a sense of‘politics don’t
take individuals in to account, so why should individuals care about it?’
An
Elections Canada survey done in the wake of the May 2011 election suggested
that young Canadians don’t vote because politicians aren’t able to connect to
the issues that matter to them. The survey also showed that political knowledge
and interest were major factors when it came
to voting.
Eighty-eight
per cent of young people who voted said they were interested in politics, while
just 28 per cent of youth who didn’t vote were interested in politics.
The
survey suggested that possible solutions may lie in increased information on
how to vote and promoting alternative ways of voting such as absentee and
mail-in ballots.
Samara’s
research points to responsiveness as the solution.
“They
weren’t asking for overhauls of the system or revolution. They weren’t even
asking for major changes to make governments more participatory,” Loat said. “A
lot of it was really just having opportunities to have their voices heard and
having the services they received be a little more responsive to their needs.”
The
study is first part of a larger project meant to develop an annual index to
measure the health of Canadian democracy.
© Shaw Media Inc., 2012. All rights reserved.