Tomorrow, Ontario voters have the privilege - yes, the privilege - to select mayors, reeves, councillors, and school board trustees who will make important decisions that affect us for the next four years. No, it’s a right not a privilege, you might be thinking.  And course, that’s how it’s presented to us. We know that the majority of us fought for that right, it having been historically granted only to white, male, landowners.* And now look at us - we are so confident we will always have that right that a majority of us don’t even bother.  

So let’s think about the privilege. We are privileged to have choice. It’s a very personal decision, with no-one ever knowing whom we chose. Some decide based on who will make the best decisions for us as individuals, in the short-term. Some select the person who will govern knowing that when the community as a whole succeeds, we will all eventually succeed. Some vote for the one who has the most compelling personality. Some slap their X beside the name they recognize.  

But an alarming number of people let others make the decision for them by staying home.  Voter turnout rates have dropped significantly in my voting lifetime.  

Voting mattered to my parents too. As immigrants from England, they were entitled to vote until the early 70s without becoming Canadians.  When this law changed (as quite rightly it did), they immediately went through the citizenship process. That had an impact on me. I knew it was an important way to ensure they had a voice in their country of choice. 

My first vote was cast in the 1985 Ontario provincial election. Voter turnout was 61.5 percent, a full 18 percent higher than our most recent provincial trip to the polls in June.  I was thrilled to cast my vote as an 18 year old, going to my local East Wawanosh Township polling station at Tillie Dawson’s house. She had coffee and cookies on offer and neighbours sat around chatting.This was a community event. There wasn’t much of a contest in the riding of Huron-Bruce - there never is.  Murray Elston smoked the competition, securing a cabinet position in David Peterson’s government. I helped him to that win (my only time voting Liberal and one of a very few times I’ve voted for a winner) but the voting part was what was so significant. It meant something.  

Later that same year, when I was attending McMaster University in Hamilton, I wrote a letter to the school newspaper on why I thought students should not vote locally in the October 1985 municipal elections. I’m not as embarrassed about this as you might think because my point was not to encourage staying home from the polls. No, I thought as students we should vote in our home municipalities where we knew something about the issues and the candidates. Then, as now, my priority was to be an informed voter. To that end, all-candidates meetings have been a life-long fascination for me. I remember even going to one when I lived in BC, even though I hadn’t lived there long enough to vote. There is no greater fun then seeing those who yearn for power squirm under the scrutiny of a sometimes-angry crowd of people who care. I watched one on Zoom last week for my local Toronto ward and cheered and booed from the comfort of my own couch. Wouldn’t have missed it.

My interest in municipal politics and the machinery of voting itself ramped up when my first job was in the elections division of the Clerk’s Department at the City of Toronto. November 12, 1991.  I was a management trainee working with the Elections Co-ordinator on issues of voter accessibility. Those living in TO at the time might remember the failed experiment of having polls in tents. I did a lot of the legwork organizing those tents. Kind of ill-advised, as it turned out, as the poll workers were torn between suffering the nausea from the fumes of the portable gas heaters we provided vs. enduring the weather which reached a high of 4 degrees C. This, however, was the first election in municipal history where every poll in Ontario was accessible, mandated by changes to the Municipal Elections Act put in place by the newly elected NDP government. We also implemented colour coded ballots for people with lower English literacy rates, multilingual information campaigns, and all manner of other measures to make voting easier for folks. I was proud to be part of it.  Voting matters.  

Six years later, in the last election for the pre-amalgamated City of Toronto, I was thrilled to be selected as one of 16 ward managers on Election Day at the age of 31.  Election work gets into your blood and I’ve often taken a day off to work the polls either for the returning officer or voluntarily getting the vote out, as a scrutineer, or a trouble shooter for a candidate.  

During all those many election days when I’ve been on the ground, each time, I’ve encountered people who are voting for the first time and for whom it matters a great deal.  And it should to you. 

Please vote tomorrow. 

* here’s a history of the expansion of the franchise federally in Canada, if you’re interested. 

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