I live in a riding where there is always a Liberal win, so In Theory it doesn't matter whether I vote. BUT I have three reasons why I push my lazy bottom out to the local high school:
(1) I have to imagine--what if everyone voting Liberal thought like me and stayed home? I have to take responsibility for my part.
(2) I can't overlook how hard women worked, generations ago, to win the right to vote. Imagine if you chained yourself to fences and spent time in jail and were force fed, and then found out your great-granddaughters didn't care! Ouch. (In Quebec that right only came in 1940, so we're not talking ancient history here.)
And it's not just about those who protested, but about the way women were ridiculed for the centuries leading up to this right--how they were treated like children and told they didn't have the brain capacity to decide how the country should be run. Grrr!
(3) Finally, I think about all the people in the world who still can't vote. Just as we take our clean streets, garbage disposal, constant electricity, taxes, democratic process, freedom of speech, newspapers, paid for schooling, and a million other little things for granted, we take voting for granted. It seems disrespectful, to me, to pass up the opportunity.
:-) If you want to know if you're on the electoral list, or where to vote, or when, or ID needed, or anything else... go here.
Or you can vote by mail!
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CBC video about Nellie McClung's "mock parliament" speech where she reversed the roles and talked about the horrors of men voting. (Or watch the Historica Minute recreation.)
BBC "In Pictures" slideshow.
And another.
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Nellie McClung as *Prime Minister*:
"If men were as intelligent and as good as Mr Skinner and his worthy though misguided followers we might consider this matter [of the vote], but they are not. 7/8 of the police court offenders are men, and only 1/3 of of the church membership. You ask me to enfranchise all these. ...
Men were made to support families. ...Shall I call man away from the useful plow and harrow to talk loud on street corners about things which do not concern him! Politics unsettle men, and unsettled men means unsettled bills!"
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From a recent article about young women and voting:
According to a 2006 paper by University of Calgary researchers Melanee Thomas [whom Miss Mabel attended school with, and who is a supa-smarty] and Lisa Young, young women are among the least-engaged groups in formal politics.
"The best-educated generation of women in Canadian history – those who are currently under the age of 27 – are in fact less interested in the formal political arena, less knowledgeable about it, feel less political efficacy, and are less involved in the formal political process than their male peers or previous generations of women," they wrote.
They found that in the past 20 years, young women with university educations consistently had lower rates of voter turnout than their male counterparts.
