Vote Suppression is Systemic in Canada

So many people seem to be in a huff about the automated phone calls that were made during the last federal election in order to confuse voters as to the location of their polling station, thereby making it more difficult to cast their vote.

Scandalous. How could the Tories stoop so low? Canada’s democracy is in tatters!

Blah, blah, blah and more blah, blah, delivered with feigned indignation.

Let’s face the facts. Canada is not democratic. We are ruled by a professional political class. The way who will govern is determined is to play a winner-take-all electoral game in which the candidate who gets the most votes, even if it is less than 50% of the votes cast, is said to have won the electoral district.

Distortions of the popular vote you say? You bet! How do you think a majority government (sounds like the label came from the Ministry of Truth) can be formed with less than 40% of the popular vote?

If your candidate didn’t win, that’s too bad. Better luck next time. So your voice is not represented in Parliament? Don’t be glum. More than 50% of the electorate who even bother to vote can say the same.

If you are so concerned about the quality of democracy in Canada, change the fricken voting system!!!

Vote suppression occurs in every election that is held with the archaic first-past-the-post method.

Chances are that if you thought your preferred candidate had little chance of winning the electoral game in the last general election, you didn’t vote.

But that’s how politics works in Canada. The game is no longer about attracting voters to a political platform. It’s about trying to scare away as many voters from your opponents as possible while hanging onto the party faithful.

And if that doesn’t work, there’s always robocalls.