Boisvert on low election participation
Yves Boisvert ponders the low participation in our municipal elections – Montreal’s 38.29% is sad, but Laval and Longueuil saw even lower turnouts. Even in Quebec City, where there was an interesting three-way scrum for the chair left empty by Régis Labeaume and with issues like the tramway and the troisième lien in play, only 45% of voters eventually turned out.
Boisvert looks at why people are so disengaged from the governance of the city around them, but he leaves out an important one: anyone with any interest in Montreal city affairs soon learns that Quebec has its cities on a tight leash, and Montreal in particular. This city is no apple of the Legault government’s eye, nor was it particularly prized under the recurring PQ governments we’ve had. Any mayor of Montreal can only achieve what Quebec allows them to get away with. It’s frustrating to watch (not least after blogging about municipal stories for 20 years) and people could be forgiven for feeling that it makes little difference who’s running city hall. (They would be wrong, but they could be forgiven.)
He’s also wrong that scandal brings outraged voters to the polls. In 2009, after it was already emerging how much corruption was swirling around city hall under Tremblay, we happily voted his Union Montréal party back in, and participation was just under 40%. It would be nice if scandal did motivate voters, but instead it seems to make them turn away in disgust.
Boisvert has no solutions, either, except to suggest that civic engagement might be included in the new course the CAQ is preparing to replace the religion and ethics course. Not a bad idea, but if most teachers don’t even live on the island of Montreal (and I bet a lot of them don’t), how can they fire their students up with a passion for its local governance?
qatzelok 14:04 on 2021-11-09 Permalink
I think you identified the problem in your last sentence- “Living in and parcipating in… a neighborhood” is probably the way humans learn to take their role in collective decision-making.
The burbs don’t offer that kind of education to children growing up. And neither does a car-based lifestyle.
ant6n 20:34 on 2021-11-09 Permalink
Give the city more power. Also make the system more democratic, the parties, the voting system.
I also wonder whether it would help if provincial/federal parties created municipal off-shoots..
Kate 23:01 on 2021-11-09 Permalink
The issues are simply so different at the city level that making municipal parties take on the burdens and the histories of existing federal or provincial parties as well would be a nightmare. Especially not the Quebec parties, because council would end up being an echo chamber of the endless bickering in the National Assembly over language and nationalistic issues, rather than dealing with city affairs. And there’s not much local support for either the Conservatives or the NDP, so why would they even want to spawn mini-me parties at city level?
There’s probably some fundamental flaws in the legislation over relative municipal powers that should be changed. As the environment becomes more and more fragile, you could argue that so many environmental issues are tackled best at the local level that the city needs the powers to do so. Eventually this will have to happen, but probably not till it’s too late.
ant6n 03:09 on 2021-11-10 Permalink
@Kate
That’s not true in the rest of the world. Conservative and Liberal and social and green policies do translate to local policies. And it makes it easier to identify and know what the parties stand for (certainly it’s better than the “parties” that are just centered around one person rather than ideas).
I feel like it’s a Quebec aberration that ask all three levels of government have separate parties.
Kate 10:38 on 2021-11-10 Permalink
May not be true elsewhere, but you have to admit it’s true here. I see absolutely no merit in the idea of having Montreal sparred over by a mini-PLQ, a mini-PQ and a mini-CAQ. As I’ve written before here, one of the strengths of Montreal is that it has, by and large, kept the whole Quebec nationalist circus out of city hall.
Yes, there’s no framework for forcing city parties to conform to full Westminster-style parliamentary rules. That they do to some extent is just an effect of expectations. There’s no rule about formal opposition and there’s no mechanism for prolonging the existence of parties once their leader or their initial motivating issue has passed into history. I don’t see that we’d gain by forcing the city to run a mini-Parliament. It’s closer to the people, it’s got to be more flexible over time.