Polls, pizza and other privileges

Voter turn-out in Ontario’s provincial election Wednesday was embarrassingly low. Only 52.6 percent of us got ourselves to the polls in time to cast ballots in favour of our preferred candidates. Our poor performance as citizens has been a popular topic in the days after the election, and there’s been plenty of print-, broadcast-, and blogger-delivered finger-wagging on the topic already, I know.

But before we move on from this discussion, I’d like to address why it’s so important that we, as parents, exercise our democratic right. Yes, we are extremely busy on weekdays. We have to get up at 5 a.m. to take our kids to freezing cold arenas, then to daycare/school, then ourselves to boardrooms/laundry rooms/craft-committee meetings. When we’re done catering to the whims of tyrannical bosses, adult or pint-sized, shoe-horning our to-do lists into stolen moments between diaper-changes and deliverables, we make after-school or after-work sprints through traffic, extra-curricular schedules, dinner prep, homework and bedtime. We’re drowning in unwritten thank you notes, permission forms, bills and poopy sleepers. Our gym membership cards have more than a little in common with the single, unopened condoms that hopeful teenage boys carry around for years in their wallets. We need haircuts, and it’s been such a long time since we planned a date night that our “teenage” babysitters have since acquired MBAs.

But if we want to complain about crumbling school infrastructure, access to family doctors, wait lists for operating rooms, clean energy sources and all kinds of other issues that make us concerned for our children, then we need to overcome our busy days and vote for the party we think will address our concerns best. As long as people somewhere in the world are getting themselves slaughtered in a struggle to obtain the right to vote, then, by God, we can get our apathetic asses to the polls between daycare and the dry cleaner’s!

The thing is, there’s a pretty tidy solution to any “the day just got away from me” problem. It’s called the advance polls. I’m not sure what it’s like for voters in Kenora or Cornwall, but where I live the advance poll was at our local library, which is easy to get to. It was open from 12-8 p.m. each day for the entire advance voting period, which included a couple of Sundays. There was no line-up. There were efficient polling station workers who had me out of there in minutes (and even with all that extra work to do voting in Ontario’s first referendum since 1921!).

Voter apathy is a sad by-product of living in such a privileged time and place. It’s only because we don’t know what it's like to carry out our days under the rule of some psycho dictator that we can tolerate the idea of just not getting around to voting. If we had a better view of that life, we’d have to admit that a bad day getting to the polls is still better than a good day in Burma.

If none of those reasons move you, then maybe this will: What do you tell your child when she starts to learn about government in school and asks you who you voted for in the last election? So next time, take your kids to the polls and involve them in the process. Exercise your right to duck out of work early to do so. Vote on your day off. Order pizza that night if it buys you the time to get to the polls. Do it because some people’s kids have a heck of a lot more to worry about then who’s going to drive them to Kumon and karate.