Electoral strategy and tactics the Conservatives have developed under Prime Minister and party leader Stephen Harper (Calgary Southwest, Alta.) since 2005 produced election gains won largely because of low voter turnout, elector alienation, and the Conservative focus on electoral districts where margins had grown increasingly tighter, analysts said in interviews with The Hill Times.
If Canada were to adopt a type of compulsory voting that the Liberal Party included in a policy choice survey of Liberal supporters and party members, as well as the general public through a posting on its liberal.ca website, the party that could lose most from the new system is the federal Conservative Party, the experts said.
“They benefit when votes are suppressed, so something that says ‘No, no we’re going to compel people to vote,’ the Conservatives, I’m sure as long as they’re in power, there’s no way they’re going to jump on this idea,” said University of Prince Edward Island professor Peter McKenna.
The Liberals likely had done the political calculations when they unexpectedly launched the survey on the idea last week, Prof. McKenna said in an interview.
“I would think this could very well show up in the party platform in 2015, but I think the target audience is the young vote, I think that idea would appeal to younger people,” Prof. McKenna said.
“They’ve been tuning out and turning off for a long time now, and this forces them to get engaged and compels them to become politically more educated, and I think hopefully to participate more deeply, and I think the Liberals are strategizing that with Justin Trudeau at the helm they would be able to tap into that vote,” he said.
University of Ottawa political scientist Robert Asselin, an adviser to Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau (Papineau, Que.) who first outlined a proposal for mandatory voting for a look-forward policy initiative called Canada 2020, said compulsory participation in elections would be a long-term solution to weaknesses in Canada’s current federal electoral system, including the fact that for the past 17 years voter participation has trended downward.
The first drop took place in 1997, after Elections Canada fully replaced the previous door-to-door system of registering voters through person-to-person enumeration to register electors with a permanent national voter registry compiled primarily through collection of citizen vital data from federal and provincial government records.
Voter turnout reached a low of 58.8 per cent in 2008, from levels of around 75 per cent for decades prior to 1997, save for a dip in 1980 before the first Quebec referendum on separation and Pierre Trudeau’s dramatic return as Liberal leader following his 1979 resignation.
Prof. Asselin agreed, along with the other experts, that the lower turnout rate not only has given an advantage to the Conservative party in targeted ridings but is also now a result in part of Conservative electoral strategies, including the use of wedge issues that force electors to make choices they might not otherwise select, and negative partisan attacks that alienate young voters, as well as older Canadians, from the electoral system.
The Conservative Party’s reliance on a comparatively narrow base of supporters it has carefully maintained has also been crucial to its success, as well as fundraising based on negative portrayals of other party leaders.
“It is actual evidence,” Prof. Asselin said in an interview Tuesday. “It’s not partisan to say it has been good for the Conservatives that fewer people have voted, because they have concentrated on their base, get out that vote very effectively. In some regions of the country, it’s been a huge payoff for them.”
Another prominent political and economic analyst on the national scene agreed the Conservative Party has employed tactics that have alienated segments of the voting population, particularly youth, but disagreed that compulsory voting is the solution.
Don Lenihan, a senior associate at the Public Policy Forum, said voter decisions to not cast ballots are a sign of discontent with the electoral system and the brand of politics that has developed over the past decade, and improvements will come only if the dissatisfaction continues to be expressed through refusal to participate.
“Why aren’t people voting, why aren’t young people participating?” said Mr. Lenihan. “One of the reasons might be is they just look at politics and say ‘what a pile of crap,’ right, who believes in this?”
“In that case, their refusal to participate is a really strong and powerful message and it ultimately will have consequences, especially as there is further decline, it will put pressure on people like the Conservatives,” Mr. Lenihan said in an interview.
Carleton University journalism professor Elly Alboim, an electoral expert and veteran media political analyst, said the Conservative Party originally turned to electoral successes in the U.S. as models for the kind of strategies and tactics it employs in Canada—with a focus on divisive approaches that put the Conservative base to its best advantage in electoral districts won by the slimmest of margins.
In the May 2, 2011, federal election that gave Mr. Harper his first majority Conservative government, the Conservatives made their most important gains in 15 Toronto and Greater Toronto Area ridings where Conservative candidates won by less than 10 per cent of the vote. The party won five of those ridings by less than five per cent, and in four of the districts, the Conservative candidate won by less than 1,000 votes, successfully targeting demographics that had previously tended to vote Liberal.
Mr. Alboim, in an earlier interview discussing the recent resurgence of the Liberal Party under Mr. Trudeau, said the slim margins in tight races have been crucial to Conservative success.
“I think they understood modern politics earlier than other people may have, the other thing they did is they specialized in wedge politics and then assembling a constituency that’s just large enough to win, they’re not interested in 50 per cent constituencies, they want 38 to 41 per cent constituencies,” Mr. Alboim said, a former adviser to former Liberal prime minister Paul Martin.
“When you look at a base of 30 per cent, which is what they have, they’ve got to convince one in 10 [others] to support them,” Mr. Alboim said.
Mr. Asselin told The Hill Times, in explaining his mandatory voting proposal, that while making life difficult for the Conservative Party, if not forcing it to change its electoral strategies to appeal to a broader swath of the voting population, compulsory voting would eventually transform the way campaigns are run.
“I’m not saying the current governments we have are not legitimate, but it would make them more democratic,” Prof. Asselin said.
“It would force people and parties to reach out to more people and to have many more consensual platforms, and maybe it would unite the country more in terms of regional differences, urban versus rural voters,” he said.
“I think what is really worrying is you get a huge portion of the population, let’s say the youth vote, which is known not to vote a lot, those people are basically left out and their choices don’t count, so it means that if all the youth vote would come out, I’m not sure you would have a Conservative government, and I’m not saying that in a partisan way, it could work both ways, but I think it would be a very different outcome if everybody would vote,” Prof. Asselin said.
Australia, which has had compulsory voting since 1924, is most often cited as an example where the model is in force, but a range of mandatory voting is used in more than 20 other countries, under a range of degrees and penalties for non-compliance. Several countries, such as Chile, Venezuela and Netherlands, have abandoned the system.
Original Article
Source: hilltimes.com/
Author: Tim Naumetz
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