On The Occupiers Not Voting

Clearing the air over just what kind of people are Occupying Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal and elsewhere.

Two columns out today, one by the esteemed Chantal Hebert of the Toronto Star and another by Keith Beardsley in the National Post, both chastise the youthful protesters in the Occupy movements for not voting. Hebert is a little more nuanced in her analysis, arguing that given leadership races in both the Liberal and NDP camps, now is the perfect time for time politically minded youth to join a party and influence its future direction, but both pundits are a bit out to lunch in thinking that the same people who've descended on St. James Park in Toronto, Confederation Park in Ottawa, and elsewhere are among the 65 per cent or so of eligible youth who didn't bother to vote in the last federal election.

Our experience, at the Toronto protest at least, is that a good chunk of the protesters are the kind that dominate discussion groups in undergraduate political science classes or are writing masters theses on, say, the Yugoslavian economic model under Tito. In other words, they are very much the 35 per cent of youth that routinely vote; after all, giving up a good chunk of your weekend to chant slogans in the rain is a lot more taxing then having to walk a block or two to a voting station. It doesn't really follow that people as committed to a robust democratic system as the Occupiers are would conveniently forget to take part in the easiest aspect of that same system.

(And that's just the younger part of the crowd – many of the people we came across in St. James Park were on the north side of 40, whether they were there as part of a union or dispensing socialist literature.)

We're of the mind that such a concerted effort by young people to at least raise awareness of endemic economic problems – and in such public forums – will probably do more to encourage the apathetic masses to consider voting next time around than any column in a newspaper or half-hearted platitude emanating from Parliament Hill about how integral young people are to shaping the country's future. If the Occupy protests last long enough to get through a Canadian winter, then we guarantee their message will have resonated with at least a handful of 20-somethings who might have been more preoccupied with the NHL playoffs than the federal election. We're not worried about the Occupiers exercising their democratic rights – it's the complacent two-thirds of that demographic more content to discuss Jersey Shore or Dancing With the Stars than read a frickin' newspaper from time to time that we're concerned about. Perhaps Hebert and Beardsley would have noticed this had they actually, you know, gone to the protests instead of flinging barbs from afar.