The Breakdown of the Democratic State

A functioning democracy requires an informed and involved population. Both of these parts are equally crucial to a democratic system of government. Currently, with unnerving regularity, these are being compromised, and we only have ourselves to blame.

It is far too simple to say that the media is at fault for the lack of adequate and relevant information presented. I don’t personally believe this. We operate on a capitalist economic system and the same supply-and-demand structure regulates how media organizations function since they are nothing more than an established private business. It’s true that they can sometimes offer a significant amount of detracting discourse, however it is the responsibility of the population to demand the relevant information. It is inarguably more important to be more concerned about society than entertainment, but we have become so withdrawn that we accept – and expect – the opposite. Entertainment will not - and should not - define a nation's actions.

In Canada, voter turnout has been in a reasonably consistent decline, from 69% in the 1993 Federal election to 64% in 2006, with dips to 61% in-between. I think that the majority of voters agree that their vote doesn’t make any difference, but at what point does this actually happen? Does your vote make a difference when you’re the only one voting? Of course it does. So what about when there are two people? A hundred? A million? At what number do you unilaterally decide to remain silent and allow the government to operate without your consent? And what if the majority of these non-voters voted the same way? It’s not that farfetched when you consider that non-voter disenfranchisement could be directly linked to their political beliefs.

Here’s a hypothetical situation. There are ten people lost in the forest; four of those people want to wait for help to arrive, three want to start building shelter and gathering food, and the remaining three don’t vote at all. So the majority has decided that they wait, and in the meantime the whole group suffers because there is no help coming and the people that could have made a difference decided they couldn’t. Multiply this by several million and this is what is happening in our country. If you aren’t involved or informed, you’re just waiting for things to get worse. That's how you've voted.