We’re leading the way in voter apathy
By Alison Roach
Photos by Flikr
Well guys, we blew it. Not all of us, mind you. I’m talking about the people who have been eagerly touting change in BC for the past month, waving Anti-Clark flags, or even those who said Adrian Dix was simply the lesser of two evils. The Liberals will be governing us again, and as a majority government.
True, we didn’t see this one coming. The Liberals were trailing the NDP by as much as 20 points in the polls before campaigning began. Dissatisfaction appeared to be high. Many openly declared themselves to be not huge fans of “MILF,” Christy Clark. The NDP were described as heavily favoured, but in the election lost three seats to the Liberals. So what happened?
Clark herself lost her Vancouver-Point Grey riding to her NDP rival David Eby by 785 votes, and she wasn’t the only leader to lose. Conservative party leader John Cummins lost in Langley to the Liberal incumbent. BC Green leader Jane Sterk also failed to oust incumbent NDP Carole James from her Victoria-Beacon Hill riding. Adrian Dix is the only one who managed to hang on to his Vancouver-Kingsway seat.
Maybe it’s a case of people voting for their riding, not their province. Maybe Liberal supporters have been keeping quiet, slowly biding their time. Maybe polling doesn’t work.
What matters is that this election also had one of the lowest voter turnouts in history, at a meager 48 per cent. I’m not so great at math, but even I know that’s not even half. While my Facebook feed was clogged with happy proclamations of having “just voted!” and Instagrammed pictures of the stickers they gave out at the polling stations, only 48 per cent of British Columbians voted.
One of my roommates, another 20-something student, didn’t make it out to the polls. She explained that she would have voted Green, but she thought that was pointless. At this moment, another roommate openly wondered what would happen if every eligible voter who said that actually went out and voted. The BC Green Party did manage to capture its first ever provincial seat, with Andrew Weaver — a climate change scientist — winning by a huge margin in Oak Bay-Gordon Head.
It’s discouraging to see a province so full of ennui, one that doesn’t even trust its political party leaders enough to elect them in their own neighbourhoods. The Conservative party, supposedly one of the big four, didn’t win a single seat in the entire province. When you look at the map of the provincial ridings, the coast and Vancouver Island are overwhelmingly orange, with another splash of orange near the easternmost tip of the province. The huge bulk of red is right down the middle of the interior.
So Clark will be the face for our province once again, emerging from the flames with her helmet-like hairdo intact. I have it on good authority that she’s the type of person who tries to use her cell-phone on a plane, and right after take off too (source: I’m a flight attendant), but this is who we voted for. Overall, the election seems to be saying that BC doesn’t care much about change; or rather, that we don’t care much about any of this.
