For those outside Canada, in case you haven’t heard, we’re in the middle of a general election. Canada has a parliamentary system, modelled after the British one, with a first-past-the-post system for electing representatives (members of parliament), where party with the most seats after the election is invited to form a government, and its leader to become Prime Minister. For the last few parliaments we’ve had minority governments, first Liberal, then Conservative.<\/p>\n
Somewhere along the way, many people just stopped voting<\/a>: from turnouts in the high 70s back in the 60’s, we’ve had 64.7% and then 58.8% turnout respectively in the last two elections – the last being the lowest turnout ever. There maybe many different reasons for this lack of enthusiasm, although listening to the main parties whining about each other<\/a> during this election, it’s not hard to see why so many people just don’t bother. But one thing is clear: young people are far less likely to vote<\/a> than any other age group.<\/p>\n So it was great to see last week Rick Mercer with a brilliant call for young voters to use their votes to “scare the hell out of the people who run this country”:
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