I used to not vote...

The following may look familiar to loyal readers who've read my blog from the beginning...All one of you.

For a rhetoric assignment, I had to write about a time I changed my mind, so I wrote about changing my mind about voting. Here it is, an old topic revisited:

To vote or not to vote?by Kat Code - Wednesday, 8 August 2007, 09:26 PM

The first time I passed up the chance to exercise my democratic right to vote, it was easy. I was almost 19, and the election was soon I returned to Gibsons after spending four months in Australia and Indonesia. Surely four days wasn’t nearly enough time to sufficiently educate myself about the candidates running in my riding and the parties they represented.

After that, as I learned more about Canadian politics, I didn’t like what I learned. The sphere is full of liars and manipulators, of corruption and floor crossing, of broken promises swept under the rug. I shirked away from the Conservatives, Liberals, and NDPs, unable to support parties that continue to cater to our dominant ideology. Parties that let education, health care, and public transit fall apart and the private sector gain greater access to so much of our lives. The Green Party, in my opinion, had a lot of the right ideas, but lacked the clout to really do anything.

Not voting, I told myself, was my way of demonstrating my dissatisfaction with the establishment, itself a democratic right.

One of my last classes at UBC, Ethnography of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, was accompanied by an eye-opening reading list. I will be forever in the debt of the late Dr. Michael M. Ames for bringing the works of John Ralston Saul, Antonio Gramsci, Pierre Bourdieu, and Paulo Friere, among others, into my universe. The ideas of these authors, and others, like Plato and Kant, Foucault and Marx, Ghandi and Habermas, sat with me and made me conscious not only of my life but my life as I live it in the world I was born into. Gradually, a dissatisfaction with my decision to not vote set in.

In 2006, two years after that last class at UBC, I had one semester left to complete in a two-year professional writing program at Douglas College. I found myself blogging about politics for my blog assignment, where I gave voice to my growing dissatisfaction in my first entry:

I am not fond of politicians, and I am even less fond of the games they play. I
have never voted in a Federal election, and that kind of pisses me off, because
gosh-darn it, it's my right as a Canadian citizen to vote for someone that I
believe will do a good job running the country. The problem is, I have yet to
see a candidate and a party that I can believe in.

A federal election was only 10 days away at the time, and as I followed the election closely in the ensuing week and a half, I had a good look at not only the parties in my riding but the candidates running. In addition, I explored more deeply my decision not to vote and what that meant with regards to the personal philosophy I was starting to figure out. Furthermore, I gave up joking about what I would do if I was Prime Minister and started giving serious consideration to one day running for public office.

With that consideration in mind and Saul’s writings about consciousness heavy on my mind, I decided it would be quite unethical for me to not vote. The only problem that remained was overcoming my revulsion of the dominant political parties enough to check the box next to the name of one of their candidates. I was in a quandary right up to the day of the election – would I put a check by someone’s name, or purposefully spoil my ballot? – when I told my friend Kate about my dilemma.

Kate made no bones about the importance of voting, and even told me who she was voting for and why. That evening, as I approached the poles, I heard her words echoing in my head: "Vote with your head."

So I did, and I put a check next to the name of the candidate who I believed would do the most good for my riding.

I still don’t like the major political parties; I still think the Green Party needs reorganization. I still dread the difficult decision of having to choose which candidate is best for my riding in the next election. But it’s a decision I’m prepared to face time and time again in order to feel I am being an ethical, responsible Canadian.