I am not a democracy geek. I am a professional theatre artist who believes deeply in social justice, and speaking from a social justice perspective, I have three points to make about electoral reform.
One, to increase engagement in voter turnout, I support lowering the voting age to 16. I know this is controversial, but hear me out. When I was 16, which was much longer ago than I would like to confess, a federal election was upcoming, and despite the fact that we could not vote, my social studies teacher had us bring in newspaper articles that discussed party platforms which we would analyze and compare with the platforms of other parties. We discussed the impact of those policies on ourselves, our families, and our communities.
We looked at our local candidates, and given what we had learned from our research, we decided on which candidate we would have voted for if we had been eligible to do so. From the moment I turned 18, no matter whether I lived in Victoria, Toronto, Vancouver, and no matter whether it was a municipal, provincial, or federal election, I have voted in every single election in which I was eligible to vote.
I believe that this kind of critical thinking and electoral literacy is a stellar way to create a young and an engaged citizenry that crosses socio-economic barriers, geographic divides, and racial and gender biases.
Two, as some of you may be aware, an Ottawa police officer posted the following online comment, as reported by the Ottawa Citizen newspaper, on the tragic death of Inuk artist Annie Pootoogook: “Because much of the aboriginal population in Canada is just satisfied being alcohol or drug abusers, living in poor conditions etc….they have to have the will to change, it’s not society’s fault.”
The problem is not so much that this police officer is a racist, the problem is that he's not alone in thinking this way. Canada has a well-documented history of disenfranchising women and racialized minorities, and institutionalized systemic racism and sexism continues to effectively disenfranchise women and racialized communities today.
First-past-the-post and winner-takes-all models reinforce systemic racism and sexism. Therefore, I am 100% in support of some form of proportional representation.