Editor: On May 2, I will become another 20-something who doesn’t vote.
There are a lot of theories as to why young people don’t vote; the most common being that we don’t care. This is the theory thought up by middle-aged and senior voters. The majority wouldn’t try find out the real reason.
Instead, they prefer to see the stats after the fact. While some youth may not care, the majority of youth I know see flaws in a system the older generation has been conditioned to believe in.
In the Grade 11 curriculum, Parliament is described as the place where MPs gather to represent their riding’s views on policy. The youth then head out to the real world, and see the paradox. No matter which party you vote for, you are voting for a party, not a representative.
In the ideal world, candidates present ways they would try to bring their riding’s voice to government. In the real, special interest-driven world, groups of like-minded individuals form a business called a “party.” These parties then present their product, their policy views, to voters in an election, and force them to settle for “good-enough.”
We’re supposed to elect MPs to represent our interests in Parliament. What we have is a system where MPs represent their party’s interests, and then defend said party from us. In Canada, our system of government actually works opposite to how it was designed,
Youth don’t vote because we have a fresher memory of the way things should work, and we refuse to support a system that doesn’t work by participating in it.
Jordan Braun,
Langley