Today is the start of the wonderful joy of another Dalton McGuinty term. I'm not overly happy about that. I didn't vote for him or his party. I would have thought everything we've endured as a result of the last eight years of Daddy Dalton would have woken people up, but oh well.
Then again, I looked at the map for the breakdown by riding. Northern Ontario, with the exception of two ridings, is NDP. he two ridings that voted different both were Liberal. Central and Southern Ontario were predominately Conservative, except for a couple pockets of Liberal and NDP. And here's the fun part.. Toronto... Pretty well all of the ridings in Toronto are Liberal. So that makes me wonder. It makes me wonder what makes the viewpoint on the same matters so different based on region? Then... I looked at the numbers for voter turnout..
49.2% Less than half of the eligible voters actually got up and exercised their Democratic Right to Bitch. Less than half of Ontarians bothered to make their voice heard. So already we know it's a minority since we have 50.8% of the people sitting on their asses doing nothing yesterday.
CBC has an article online right now asking why there was such a low turnout. Everything from inconvenience to "they don't hear us" to too many elections this year were brought out as excuses. One thing that they were encouraged about though was the advance polls were used more often than last election.
So what can be done to change voter apathy? The same CBC article talks about bringing in a law where people can complain to someone about the politicians lying... (What's a politician who doesn't lie? Unemployed!!) Another thing mentioned was changing the style to proportional representation. (Wasn't that brought up and voted down in a referendum already??) So what's my solution? Get rid of the Three Stooges we have now, each of them with about as much charisma as a bucket of sand, and replace them with people who can speak, who know what they're talking about and most of all... Will Listen to the people.. Drop the lying weasels we've had rotating for ages and get someone new in.
We have voter apathy simply because Canadian Politics is like a PBS pledge drive... The same exact thing, but in a different voice..
