Major Strategic Mistakes May Still Lead To Lower Voter Turnout

A 70% greater voter turnout than in 2011 at advanced polls suggests that the downward trend could be reversed next Monday, encouraged by a competitive race and multiple get-out-the-vote drives. That however is no guarantee as the last election demonstrated. Additionally, there are some major developments working in the opposite direction and discouraging electors this time around – and apathy is not one of them.

The number one reason why people don’t vote is their disappointment with the party they are inclined to support, or even all parties in general. And there is plenty of that going on this time around.

Many on the democratic left are obviously disenchanted with the New Democratic leader Tom Mulcair’s turn towards the political centre with his denigration of deficit spending in times of economic stagnation, decision not to raise taxes on the wealthy and end to his outright opposition to the F-35s, tar-sands and bitumen-carrying pipelines, to name just a few policy planks he has forsaken.

The unprecedented moves pushed a group of well-known activists closely associated with the party and led by former Ontario NDP leader Stephen Lewis to put out a more leftist Leap Manifesto in mid campaign, contradicting much of the NDP election platform.

How many of them and their supporters will cast ballots on October 19 for a leader they no longer believe in, if they ever did? If not, will they instead vote for a Liberal Party that outflanked the New Democrats on the left and, according to most independent observers, includes in its platform more of what they should like, even though it surely falls short of their dream Manifesto?

Or will they imitate 2000 presidential candidate Ralph Nader in the United-States who shamelessly stated that Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush were two of the same, and hence will not vote for either party, spoil their ballot, or cast one for the Greens or some other marginalized party? I for one believe that, although by no means perfect, the world and the planet would have been far better off with Mr. Gore in the White House.

So far the NDP’s repositioning has helped the Bloc québécois in Quebec and the Liberals across Canada make important gains at its expense even before the controversy over the niqab, and the trend may not be over yet.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper on the other hand got caught up in his own contradictions. Seeing opinion polls turn in his and the Bloc’s favour while going after a single niqab-wearing woman at a swearing-in ceremony may have blinded him to the damage he was progressively inflicting on his own base of support.

Extending the ban to the public service sector, and then dismissing Sikh Conservative candidate Jagdish Grewal for allegedly writing on how to turn gays and lesbians around, sent a quiver through a number of fundamentalist communities. With the Quebec Charter of Values and polemic over a turban-wearing Sikh RCMP officer still fresh in their minds, many religious minorities could be excused for worrying what other ostentatious religious garb is next in line.

Moreover, the Conservative Party spent the last decade convincing conservative faith-based groups in different religious communities that they shared their opposition to same-sex marriage, to safe legal abortions and to other rights on their social agenda. Yet at the first sign of trouble, they dumped a candidate that professed widely held views among these social conservatives that homosexuality is a choice and a sin, and thus can be reversed with appropriate encouragement, repentance or therapy.

Not only will some members of the Sikh community feel betrayed, but so will many other conservative communities of whatever religious persuasion, not least of which is the Christian right. No wonder Mr. Harper has abandoned that line of attack in the last week of the campaign and gone back to propagating his other favoured anxieties and distortions concerning higher taxation, economic instability, supervised injection sites and marijuana.

Already disillusioned with Mr. Harper’s muzzling of social conservative backbenchers, lack of gusto on social issues dear to their hearts, and abandonment of many former Reform Party policy planks, expect a good many on the religious right to stay put next Monday.

You can add to the list of potential non voters quite a number of equally strong conservatives embarrassed by the Senate and PMO scandals and the PM’s denigration of parliamentary and judiciary institutions, sovereignists who boycott federal elections out of principle even with the BQ presence, and the general public’s distaste for unpalatable partisan politics, and we might end up with a lower turnout on Election Day than we had the last time around.

The good news, if any, is that it won’t be due to any generalized apathy. Instead it could lead to major moves within both the NDP and the CPC by opponents to gain control of their respective parties or, if unsuccessful, schisms that could lead to the creation of new ones. It may also lead to wide-scale engagement in the democratic reform process promised by the Liberals and to improvements that could bring greater participation in all aspects of our politics in the future.

Robert M. David teaches at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Ottawa and is a former federal Liberal candidate.