I swear, you could announce tomorrow that Thunder Bay was being sold to Manitoba and half the city would have a 600-word opinion about it before lunch. There’d be arguments about property taxes, crime, whether Winnipeg was getting the better end of the deal, and at least one guy blaming the bike lanes. But ask people to spend a few minutes deciding who actually runs the place, and suddenly we’re looking at 40.85% voter turnout.
Seriously, what the fuck?
Look at everything going on right now. Not just in Thunder Bay, but everywhere. The cost of living is ridiculous, housing is becoming a luxury, neighbourhoods are struggling, and the political situation around the world resembles something you’d expect to find in the rejected scripts for a particularly depressing science fiction movie. People are angry, worried, frustrated, and increasingly convinced that nobody in charge has a clue what they’re doing.
You’d think this would be the perfect environment for people to become more politically involved. Instead, we’ve somehow managed to turn politics into one of our favourite spectator sports, except most of us can’t be bothered to participate when the opportunity comes around.
Before somebody starts explaining that municipal politics is boring, I know. Nobody is confusing a city council meeting with the Super Bowl. But consider how much of your actual life is affected by municipal decisions. The street you live on, the taxes you pay, the businesses that open or close, the development happening in your neighbourhood. A politician in Ottawa might spend six months arguing about something you’ll never notice. Your city council can approve something across the street that you’ll be looking at every morning for the next twenty years.
Now consider this. More than 54,000 eligible voters in Thunder Bay didn’t vote yesterday. The difference between the two leading mayoral candidates was just 946 votes.
Nine hundred and forty-six.
That’s not some enormous, impossible-to-comprehend political divide. That’s a decent crowd at a concert. There are probably more people in Thunder Bay who own three copies of Rumours than the number of votes separating the two leading candidates for mayor.
I’m not suggesting those 54,000 people would have voted the same way or changed the result. Nobody knows that. But it’s pretty incredible that an election affecting an entire city can come down to such a relatively small margin while the majority of eligible voters sit it out.
We have a new mayor, five first-time councillors, and a former councillor returning. Most of the people I voted for won, so I’m not upset about the results. I genuinely hope this council does well, because regardless of who you supported, we all have to live with the decisions they make.
What bothers me is the disconnect between how passionately we discuss everything that’s wrong and how little interest we collectively show when there’s an opportunity to influence what happens next.
We live in an age where you can broadcast your opinion about absolutely anything to hundreds or thousands of people without leaving your couch. You can argue with strangers in other countries about politicians you’ve never met. You can spend an entire evening furious about something that happened in Washington, Ottawa, or halfway around the planet.
But the people making decisions about the pothole outside your house? That’s where we lose interest.
I don’t expect everybody to follow every council meeting or memorize the municipal budget. Christ, I don’t think most councillors would particularly enjoy that either.
But with everything happening in the world, and everything happening right here in Thunder Bay, I genuinely thought more people would want a say in where we’re heading. Instead, nearly six out of ten eligible voters didn’t bother.
For a city with this many opinions, that’s a hell of a lot of silence.
