Eighteen per cent.
That’s what it took to vote in a majority government in Ontario last week when the Progressive Conservatives won 83 seats, claiming 70 per cent of the 124 seats available with 40.88 per cent of the votes cast.
The Liberals gained one seat over the 2018 election, winning eight, or 23.76 per cent of all the votes cast and the NDP again forms the Official Opposition with the 31 seats they captured through 23.73 per cent of the votes.
The Green Party won a seat and 5.98 per cent of the votes.
Last week, 10.7 million people had the opportunity to vote. Only 4.6 million exercised that option producing the historically low voter turnout of just 43 per cent of eligible voters.
There were 6.1 million people who could vote that didn’t, more than those who actually voted.
That means 57 per cent of the electorate held the bulk of the power. And with that power they decided to do absolutely nothing.
The local numbers reflect that overall trend.
In Barrie-Springwater-Oro-Medonte, where PC incumbent Doug Downey upset Liberal candidate Jeff Lehman by 609 votes (according to unofficial results from Elections Ontario), or 1.6 percentage points, the voter turnout was 44.61 per cent.
The voter turnout in Barrie-Innisfil, where PC incumbent Andrea Khanjin swept up 50.25 per cent of the vote, was even lower at 39.26 per cent.
The old adage of “if you don't vote, you can't complain” no longer holds water, if it ever did. Vote or not, everyone has the right to complain. And they do.
The problem is deeper than that. The decline in voter turnout has been progressive, showing lower highs and lower lows, a concern on the federal and municipal levels as well.
In Ontario, the 2018 election produced a 20-year-record high turnout of 58 per cent, matching the turnout in 1999. Prior to 1999 it was normal to see a turnout rate above the 60 per cent mark.
We are so far from that now.
There is concern that apathy is bad for democracy and it tends to produce bad government.
Something must be done, tweeted Barrie’s mayor and the Liberal candidate Jeff Lehman, calling on the political parties for “introspection” to re-engage the public.
It’s clearly time for election reform and to scrap the current system known as first-past-the-post and opt for something else, argue others.
There’s also been musings that it’s time to make voting mandatory, such as in Australia and Belgium.
Or maybe the lower turnout had something to do with shorter election periods.
The difficulty is the numbers show that a lot of people simply don’t care. And that makes it difficult for the rest of us who look around and see that there’s so much to care about.
Marg. Bruineman is a staff reporter at BarrieToday.
