The last federal election cost $443 million. But we shouldn't, Susan Delacourt writes, get too exorcised about the cost:
That’s about $5 more per person than the cost of the 2011 election, but last year’s 78-day campaign was more than twice the length of the last one. It was also more of a box office success: nearly three million more voters than in the 2011 election.
All of those new voters means that democracy won the last election:
The political parties of all stripes are saying — with some justification — that the increase in turnout is a result of their increased sophistication in getting out the vote with data and analytics. But while that is no doubt true, it can’t be the only explanation. Nor is it enough to say that Canadians were motivated to vote last year because it was a “change” election.
Big data and big change aside, Elections Canada itself probably played a major role in upping voter turnout. And that is a particularly sweet ending to a decade in which this institution was demonized and demoralized by the government in power.
And given how the Conservatives tried to hamstring the people who Stephen Harper once referred to as "those jackasses at Elections Canada," that number is remarkable:
Recall, for instance, how former democratic reform minister Pierre Poilievre introduced the Fair Elections Act in 2014, and how he defended the measures reining in Elections Canada’s authority to promote voter participation.
“Clearly the public advertising and outreach campaigns of Elections Canada have not worked,” Poilievre said in a CBC interview after introducing the legislation. “Since they came into effect, voter turnout has actually plummeted.”
Poilievre may have wished that voter participation would plummet. But, in the future, Mr. Poilievre should be careful what he wishes for:
Last fall, Elections Canada went ahead and gamely tried to get the vote out anyway, especially among people who hadn’t shown a big interest in voting in previous elections — youth and aboriginal people in particular.
Elections Canada set up 71 “satellite offices” for voting at select university and college campuses, YMCAs and friendship centres, and gathered more than 70,000 votes this way, most at the campus locations. Another pilot project in hospitals produced 22,000 votes from people in acute or long-term care.
Elections Canada also introduced an online voter registration service, which 1.7 million people used to see if they were on the voters list. More than 300,000 people in Canada got onto the voters’ list through this new online route, according to the report issued last week. As well, voters were permitted for the first time in 2015 to apply online to cast a special ballot if they were unable to vote at advance or election-day polls. The number of people voting this way more than doubled over the 2011 special ballot figures.
Elections Canada did its job despite Conservative attempts to shut it down. One wonders what lies ahead for Pierre Poilievre.
12 comments:
About 4 years of yapping from the back benches?
At least, Anon. Perhaps, in the future, he'll have to yap in private.
This account of the government deliberately undermining elections in a democratic country like ours by such extremes is scarcely believable.
True Anon. But, after all, when it comes to elections, the Conservatives have a long record of breaking the rules. They knew they only had the support of 30% of Canadians. They had to find ways of getting around that problem.
If PP were a professional hockey player he would be the kind that every manager would love to have on his team and every other player on all the other teams would love to hate.
He was/is annoying, conniving, deceitful, unscrupulous, cunning, conniving, scheming, calculating and treacherous which in the con world are good things.
He would be 'better' as a businessman than a politician.
Even Ottawa Tories mock that little weasel. When his former riding of Nepean-Carleton was redistricted, Poilievre was thrown a lifeline. He managed to avoid having to face the voters in the urban riding of Nepean where, I'm told, his prospects of winning were terrible. Instead he jumped to the new rural riding of Carleton where, like the Verchere gang that kept returning Vic Toews to Ottawa, the locals would vote for a dead man if he was running for the Tories.
It's interesting that even Tories hold Poilievre in contempt, Mound. It's well deserved.
The word is that Poilevre is a hockey player, ron. And he plays like he talks.
.. just thinking .. that Stephen Harper relied on Pierre Poilievre & his one time paramour Jenni Byrne for some of his most unctious and despicable needs.. gives me a racing & uneven, skipping hearbeat .. That Ray Novak & or Nigel Wright shared some of those 'missions' is even more disheartening ..
Harper had his own Cadre of the Committed, salamander. Everything they did was a search and destroy mission -- and, ultimately, they self destructed.
The law of unitended consequences is not always a penalty.
True. Steve. Who knows? Perhaps Poilievre will run for the leadership of the party.
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