Our waning democratic impulse

Our waning democratic impulse

Oct 14, 2008 04:30 AM
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Martin Regg Cohn

Will your vote really make a difference today?

Are you motivated enough to turn out for the likes of Harper, Dion or Layton?

If your local candidate is way ahead, why bother casting a ballot?

Let me count the ways.

There are 192 countries in the world. Only two or three dozen are deemed healthy democracies, according to research groups like Freedom House and the Economist Intelligence Unit that rank electoral freedoms.

Canada – the country – scores high on the list of democracies.

Canadians – the people – rank poorly as democrats.

We should be proud of our country's democratic tradition. But embarrassed by our apathetic inclinations as a people.

A 2002 study by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance ranks Canada 83rd in election turnouts, well behind most European democracies. But even that ranking was based on the years 1945-2001, when turnouts still averaged a respectable 74 per cent.

Voter turnout has been steadily declining in Canadian federal elections since the 1960s, flitting between 60.9 and 64.7 per cent in the last two elections. The provincial numbers are even more discouraging, dipping to 52.6 per cent last year. Municipal turnouts are utterly depressing, typically plunging as low as 33 per cent.

As Winston Churchill put it, "Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." Sixty years after he uttered that memorable phrase in the British House of Commons, the world is still dominated by repressive regimes that make our vote all the more precious.

I take this issue personally.

As a young political reporter covering Queen's Park and Ottawa, watching fatuous politicians up close, I counted on the revenge of the voter at the ballot box. After 11 years as a foreign correspondent, chronicling people's struggle for democracy overseas, I've become even more fanatical about it.

Covering the transformation of Indonesia – the world's most populous Muslim country – from dictatorship to democracy showed me how far people were willing to go to risk their lives on the streets for something Canadians still take for granted.

In a dilapidated second-floor Rangoon office watched by military spies, I interviewed Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi, the opposition leader who briefly emerged from house arrest in 2002. It had been 12 years since she'd won a landslide election, which the military regime simply ignored.

"Our people are very resilient," she told me with a steely laugh. "In a sense, you could say we are battle-hardened."

Which is why I shudder at Canadian complacency about our democracy. I could go on with Third World horror stories, but it's a First World case study that resonated most with me as a Canadian.

From my base in Hong Kong, running the Star's Asia Bureau, I watched a remarkable grassroots democracy movement gain strength in that former British crown colony. No one could have predicted more than 500,000 people would stream through the city's streets for at least two anniversary protests marking the 1997 handover to Beijing.

In a place where the per capita income is higher than Canada's, the people had seemed utterly apolitical and obsessed with property prices. Suddenly they were marching for that most basic human right: One person, one vote.

People power displaced purchasing power as Hong Kong's leitmotif. Unfortunately, Beijing ruled late last year that full democracy won't be permitted until 2020.

The 7 million people of Hong Kong will have to wait another 12 years to exercise the full franchise that we Canadians can enjoy today, on voting day. Right up until the polls close at 9:30 p.m.



Martin Regg Cohn, a long-time foreign correspondent, is deputy editorial page editor.

http://www.thestar.com/FederalElection/article/515978