As a rule, I try to stay out of provincial politics, because I’m not smart enough to fight a 3-front war. I barely have the cognitive capacity to fret over Federal politics, and when I lump municipal in to the mess as well, I have trouble remembering what meeting I’m at and for what reason. But I’ll make a temporary exception to give my take on the current contempt discussion going on in the Ontario Legislature.

Background: Last year, the Liberal government cancelled/relocated 2 gas power plants that were under construction, in response to the local residents demands. One was in Oakville, the other near Mississauga. And since the initial contracts with the construction firms were being changed, the government had to negotiate a settlement with the firms to compensate them for the changes. As of last week, the Mississauga negotiations were complete, and the Oakville negotiations were underway.

The opposition members demanded that the details of the Oakville contracts be revealed publicly, even though revealing them would compromise the negotiations, most likely costing the province a considerable amount of money needlessly. The Liberal government offered to release the documents privately to the committee who had requested them. The opposition refused, even though this would have given them all of the information they needed to do their job.

It’s important to distinguish that the government did not intend to withhold the documents indefinitely. This wasn’t a case of trying to hide the cost of cancelling, it was about trying to get a fair negotiation before publicly releasing the documents.

The Speaker of the Legislative Assembly gave all 3 parties a deadline of Sept. 24th to come to an agreement on the release of the documents. And on the 24th, after the  negotiations had finished, the documents were released, fully and publicly. That should be the end of it, but the opposition is determined to continue pressing for a contempt motion. And, ironically, by refusing to stop chasing a flimsy contempt accusation, the opposition is bringing all other business in the legislature to a halt. While they yell and lecture, all other work stops. No bills, no debates, no question period.

 

The worst way to fix a problem is to start making changes before you have a real idea of the extent of the issue. Based on incomplete data, you start messing with the various components, and soon you have a bigger problem than you started with. Now you have to spend even more time fixing the new problems you’ve created, while still missing the fix for the first one.

Low voter turnout is a problem: It means that the elected officials are being chosen by a smaller and smaller subset of the citizens they represent. And as that set gets smaller, the potential for electoral manipulation changing the outcome of an election increases dramatically. To combat the low turnout, each candidate’s supporters put an incredible amount of effort into “get out the vote”, nagging and prodding voters to get to the polls to vote. And during each election cycle, there are also a handful of non-partisan groups that try to encourage voters to vote. Neither has fixed the problem. Turnout rates keep dropping.

So why don’t we start addressing the problem right at the source? Instead of trying to woo people into voting, let’s make it mandatory. Currently, the easiest course of action for the unengaged voter is to simply not vote, and there is nothing you can do to make voting easier than not voting. Not voting has no cost. But if voting became mandatory, an expectation of every eligible voter, then there is a cost to neglecting your obligation.   The actual penalty would be almost symbolic, a small fine added to your tax return if you fail to vote, but there would be a direct consequence to your abdication of your duty. People would still be free to spoil or refuse their ballot, but they’d have to put the effort in to do that. They’d have to opt out.

The recurring argument I hear against mandatory voting is that it would lead to a huge increase in uninformed “meaningless” votes. I’d like to suggest that the un-cast vote is the most uninformed and meaningless choice, a choice that frees the potential voter of the irritating sting of culpability. When they don’t vote, they avoid taking any responsibility for the subsequent decisions of their representatives and the consequences of those choices.

Yes, there will be quite a few people who are suddenly compelled to make some kind of decision at the poll that will put as much thought into their vote as they do to their choice of donut. But for the entire term that follows, they will constantly be reminded of that choice. Instead of being able to sit on the porch and complain about the mess somebody else made, they’ll have to admit that they own a tiny little sliver of the blame. And maybe, just maybe, they’ll think it through next time.

And after a few elections with mandatory voting in place, we might observe that there are still problems with our electoral model. There are a variety of other changes that we can put into place, but before we undertake the complicated solutions, let’s get as big a sample size as possible to understand the full extent of the problem at hand.