U of Guelph votes will count!

Elections Canada has released a Solomonesque public statement on the University of Guelph voting controversy. Of greatest interest is the fact that the student votes will be counted, and are considered to have been cast in a manner that respects the Canada Elections Act. The short version of the statement is that it appears that this special ballot station, although it was not centrally approved by the Chief Electoral Officer in advance of the election, is something that has often been done in a number of circumstances and was organized by the local Elections Canada Returning Officer. Such special ballot stations are usually pre-approved before an election. Similar on-site special ballot collection initiatives will not, however, be permitted for future cases during this election. Voters may, however, obtain individual special ballots from their riding's returning officers.

The statement treads a careful path between the competing party interests, staying away from explicit commentary on the other allegations (the alleged attempted box snatching, partisan material near the polls, the scrutineer question), and focusing on the central issue of whether the votes will count. For now, this is what needed to be addressed.

I remain, however, very concerned that amidst concerns about perceived irregularities, it was not until after the casting of ballots had taken place that active Conservative efforts were made to have the students' votes set aside. The details of this special ballot were well-publicized in advance in Guelph and around the university. Heck, the President of the university publicly offered to have his face painted Avatar-blue if enough students took part! In the absence of serious issues that might actually have led to actual fraud, all parties should be thinking in terms of encouraging youth votes, rather than actively cancelling them.

To any students/youth reading this post: Keep up your efforts to have your voices heard and votes counted!

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Guelph Conservatives continue to try to exclude youth voters

It's really quite mind-boggling to think what must be going through the thinking processes of Guelph Conservative candidate Marty Burke's campaign team. First, they make a point of keeping members of the U of Guelph vote mob away from Harper's rally. Then, he failed to turn up at this week all-candidates debate at the university. And now, in a move that I find jaw-droppingly stupid, his agent is trying to exclude the 700 votes cast at a special advance ballot held at the university yesterday. According to the article in the Guelph Mercury, such special advance polls are routine to try to encourage voter turnout among segments of the population that often have lower participation rates. Certainly youth qualify, with a less than 40% turnout in the last election.

I hope this incident gets nation-wide coverage. The Conservative Party of Canada doesn't want students to vote, and will take special measures to exclude their ballots. This is absolutely reprehensible, and yet completely unsurprising in light of how this campaign has gone to date. For shame.

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Voter engagement. (or Week 2 wrap-up)

Last week, just before the beginning of my second- and third-year Canadian history courses, I played the following Rick Mercer clip:

Youth voting has plummetted over the past couple of decades, and falls well below the national average. Indeed, Canadian voting rates on the whole have been declining in recent elections, leading many to ponder the causes of the decline and to propose solutions. Some of those proposed solutions relate to making voters feel more informed about the issues (perhaps via leaders' debates), and others about re-working the entire process so that individuals feel their votes matter more (such as electoral reform in the direction of a form of proportional representation). I was therefore pleased to see that a group of students from my own university attracted extensive media attention for their "Vote Mob" rally when Stephen Harper swung through Guelph.

However, the past week has not been encouraging in terms of the signals that some of our politicians and media outlet owners have sent about voter engagement - or at least about engaging certain types of voters. The Vote Mob rally got so much media attention at least in part because of last week's string of incidents involving students being ejected or barred from Conservative rallies. Although Harper's team has since backed down, the early signals from his team was that non-Conservatives were not welcome to hear the Prime Minister speak. The use of Facebook as a method of screening out voters, rather than engaging them, was not quite how most people probably envisioned the potential of social media to draw in voters during an election.

Indeed, I'm still rather disappointed in the failure of some parties to make full use of a now relatively-old medium for engaging voters - particularly the iPhone and Blackberry-toting youth demographic. In my own riding, Liberal candidate Frank Valeriote is on Twitter (and responded promptly to a question I had about a lawn sign - I'll admit my own leanings in this election), while the local NDP candidate (whose party I voted for in the last federal election) Bobbi Stewart still doesn't even have a candidate bio on the Guelph NDP's website! It hardly draws people in to vote for a candidate when a basic internet search doesn't turn up information about you!

And then today, we learned an important lesson about voter engagement. Because the first game of the first round of hockey playoffs, involving the Montreal Canadiens, has been scheduled for this coming Wednesday, Bloc leader Gilles Duceppe asked to have the date of the French-language debate changed, a request now granted by the broadcast consortium. I can understand the logic of both the request and the decision. Lots of Canadians (not including me) are Habs fans, and will want to watch the game. Rescheduling the game opens the possibility that they might tune in to both the French-language debate and the hockey game. I might not like the fact that hockey will trump politics for many potential voters, but I recognize the realpolitik underlying the decision.

But if you're one of the over 937,000 voters who supported the Green party in the last election - the only party, incidentally, to increase its total number of votes from 2006 to 2008 - or one of the many young voters who might want to hear what this party's leader has to say in an exchange with the other party leaders, you're still out of luck.

The lesson from these decision-makers for Canadians: It's more important to engage hockey fans in the electoral process than environmentalists, youth or Green supporters.

Tune in next week for commentary on polling trends, debates and the fate of the nation (after I get a big stack of exams graded).

P.S. - Although my blogging has been irregular and will likely continue to be so, you can follow my efforts at pithy commentary on Twitter. Follow me at @mhayday.

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Ontario Budget: "A whole new University of Guelph!" What about the existing one?

You'll forgive me if I'm not branding Dalton McGuinty the "Post-secondary Education Premier" after today's throne speech. Lt-Governor David Onley's throne speech made reference to a commitment to increase university and college spaces by 20,000 this year, likening this to "a whole new University of Guelph".

Meanwhile, the actual University of Guelph, where I work, is suffering from the last few years of Ontario budget cuts, which failed to deliver on promised inflation-matching funding increases, and turned off the taps on graduate funding, after encouraging the university (and others province-wide) to hire new faculty. What we're faced with now is a non-existent budget for sessional instructors, curtailed funding for graduate students, growing undergraduate class sizes, and faculty retirements that there is no budget to replace.

Here's an idea, Dalton: how about restoring core operating funding to Ontario's colleges and universities so that they can deliver quality education to the existing student base, rather than pumping more undergraduates into overcrowded classrooms?

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