The 2015 federal election: what students need to know

In October, Canadians can vote for the party in their riding that they believe should run the federal government. However, there are some changes this year, and students should be sure they know about them.

The Fair Elections Act, introduced by the Conservatives, makes alterations to the way voters identify themselves and where they live. Analysts, scholars, and politicians across the country have spoken out about how the changes make it more difficult to vote, and, in turn, discourage voter turnout.

“The lower your socioeconomic income and economic background, the less likely you are to vote,” says Camosun College Political Science instructor Dan Reeve. “Paradoxically, those with lower income are more dependent on the whims of government. Every time you make it more difficult to vote, whether the registration seems more arduous or difficult, it really affects those people.”

A campaign called This Time We Decide, which encourages youth to vote, stresses the importance of taking advantage of advance voting, which is happening from October 9 to 12. This way, if there are any discrepancies with voter identification, the person voting has time to return to the polls on October 19.

“The Elections Act really makes it harder for certain demographics to vote. It appears to be a way to suppress the vote in Canada,” says Canadian Federation of Students-British Columbia (CFS-BC) chairperson Simka Marshall (Marshall is also involved with the This Time We Decide campaign). “Students can really change the outcome of this election, but it’s hard to get to the poll when you’re not totally sure of what ID you need.”

Some skeptics of the Fair Elections Act claim that making it more difficult for people to vote was a strategic political move by the Conservative government, who don’t typically get a large youth vote.

“The rules, they’re deliberately not that clear, because Harper wrote the rules, and he doesn’t want young people voting,” says Green Party of Canada leader Elizabeth May.

Conservatives claim that the Fair Elections Act prevents voter fraud, but Reeve thinks the threat was nearly nonexistent in the first place. Studies of the last federal election, for example, show only four cases where voters may not have been who they said they were.

“The reason the Conservatives gave for making it harder to vote was this bogeyman, someone voting for someone else,” says Reeve. “They put up barriers that will affect the people who need to vote the most, in order to prevent a small amount of fraud.”

But Elections Canada-BC spokesperson Dorothy Sitek doesn’t think the changes to the Elections Act will affect student voters, as long as they register early. (If there is any confusion or inquiries, elections.ca is a resource to register and find voting information.)

“It’s important to ensure that voters have as many options to vote as possible, and that has not changed,” says Sitek. “The important thing to remember is to prepare in advance as much as possible. Register ahead of time, make sure you get a voter information card in the mail which has important information on where and when to vote.”

Students who live at home with their parents part time and live somewhere else while studying need to decide which address to use while registering. Voters need to bring government-issued photo identification with their current name and address to the polls.

“Students need to remember, wherever they choose, those are the candidates that are relevant to that student,” says Sitek. “Also, the vast majority of Canadians will use their driver’s licence. If students are voting with their home address, and that’s where their licence is valid, that will work for them.”

Of course, for students new to the province, or moving within the province in early September, it may be difficult to get photo ID that matches the address used when registering. Those voters need to bring two pieces of documentation.

“If the address on their driver’s licence is different from their home address, they need two forms of ID,” says Sitek. “One form will need to have their name and their current address, and the second one just has to have their name, and that could be their student ID, or a utilities bill.”

Another main concern with the Elections Act is that restrictions have been removed on how much money parties can accept from outside supporters. Money now plays a larger role in this year’s election; Reeve says it is a more Americanized way of doing things.

“The idea was the less big-money played a role in politics, the better democracy we would have,” says Reeve. “The Elections Act really turns our election into a more American style. More money, more free spending. If you’re a big company and have millions of dollars to contribute, they don’t think governments should stop you, and that is a very American sentiment.”

The candidates

Not only do students need to figure out how to vote, they also need to decide who to vote for. It’s a matter of finding a party that aligns with the voters’ personal values, and placing trust in the political system. Platforms on issues students are concerned with are outlined below, but voters are encouraged to visit party websites for complete platforms.

The Green Party

The Green Party is making a promise of free tuition for all by the year 2020. They’ll need to come a long way, as Elizabeth May, the leader of the party and candidate in the Saanich Gulf-Islands riding, occupies the only seat they have in the House of Commons. She says the funds for education will come from the money saved by no longer tracking down students to pay their debts.

“It’s a completely broken system,” says May. “We’ll start with free tuition for everyone that has a financial issue, where they really have no family support and need help to get post-secondary education, decided by a needs-based test.”

The Green party also wants to tackle youth unemployment and promises to implement a job corps program that should encourage employers to hire more youth.

“This will create job opportunities for young people, whether they’re students or not, by providing money to local and municipal governments to hire young people,” says May. “That is great to really help get that first leg up to have experience, to have that first job on your resume.”

The Greens are also offering a universal child-care program, but May says their program differs from the NDP’s program, as the Greens are also offering tax breaks for companies and corporations who provide child-care facilities in the workplace.

“We are strongly in favour of workplace child care because it enhances the parent-child bond,” says May. “The amount of enhanced child care increases when the parent can drop in during the work day, and there’s tons of data showing that workplace child care increases employee productivity.”

The party, as always, has an extensive environmental platform, and May hopes they can win more seats so they can start to take a stand against climate change.

“The key issue for the country is to address climate change as not just an environmental issue, but as an economic issue, as a sustainability issue, as a survival issue; we have to address it,” says May. “We can work together as a minority government. I don’t care if a PM [Tom] Mulcair or PM [Justin] Trudeau wants to take credit, as long as we have a real success for climate.”

New Democratic Party

The NDP is all about change. Murray Rankin, the Victoria candidate for the party, paints a grim future for students under the current government. With increasing debt and unemployment, and an inability to purchase real estate or plan a family, young people need some help. He says the NDP will start by implementing a $15 minimum wage for federal employees, and hopes the trend spreads to provincial governments in the future.

“I want to be clear on this: obviously, as a federal government, we can only deal with the federal workplace,” says Rankin. “It will still affect hundreds of thousands of people that work for shipping companies, telecommunications, banking. We hope that if the federal government does it, it may persuade the provincial government to do it as well. Leading by example is how confederation works.”

As far as tuition goes, Rankin stresses that education is also the responsibility of the provinces. What the NDP promises is steady, reliable funding for provincial governments to spend on colleges and universities. The federal government can affect child care, and the NDP plans on implementing a maximum $15-per-day child-care program, as the program has been very successful in Quebec.

“If you’re wealthy, the benefit’s taxed back, and if you’re not wealthy this is an enormous opportunity. There are 70,000 more women working since the affordable child-care program was introduced, which is great for the economy,” says Rankin. “It’s self-financing, and it’s really important to students, or people who are just getting started in the work forceŃthey don’t have to make a sacrifice with their career goals and it takes away stress from people’s lives.”

The NDP is strongly opposed to pipeline development. Rankin was a legal advisor to groups against Enbridge and thinks that Kinder Morgan is far too political to do thorough environmental reviews.

“Climate change can be an opportunity, not just a challenge, for our economy. Think of all of the great jobs that we could create in clean technology,” says Rankin. “As for Kinder Morgan, this particular project does not have a climate change lens in the review, doesn’t involve First Nations, hasn’t had a fair process to involve communities. It’s just not going to work.”

Liberal Party

The Liberal Party is focused on families and increasing the number of people who are classified as being “middle class.” Cheryl Thomas, the Liberal candidate in the Victoria riding, says that they will start by offering $16,400 per year, tax free, to families with children.

“We don’t need change, we need things done better,” says Thomas. “That money will literally pull families out of poverty. The money will come from the difference in the way we’re taxing people, and taking the money that is already being used for the Conservative plans.”

The Liberal party has been criticized for their support of the pipelines. Thomas defends that decision and stresses that we can’t just stop using petroleum products immediately. The Liberals have developed a thirty-year plan in order to invest in environmental research and decrease our reliance on fossil fuels.

“We try to be pragmatic, and one thing that the Liberals offer is we’re not ideologues. Do you like the car you’re driving? Do you like your computer? These are all petro-chemical products. The bottom line is, we are still reliant on fossil fuels, and the pipelines are the safest way to transport it,” says Thomas.

The party was also under fire earlier this year when the Conservatives introduced Bill C-51, an anti-terrorism bill that puts the privacy of Canadians at risk. The Liberals voted for the bill despite nation-wide opposition.

“The Liberals thought that there were pieces that we needed to support,” says Thomas. “We knew if we just opposed it, the Conservatives wouldn’t listen to anything we had to say about amendments. We fought for those amendments, and we got four of them, which were really important in protecting people’s privacy.”

Like the Green Party, Thomas knows that marijuana legalization is an important issue for Victorians. The NDP promises to decriminalize it, but Thomas doesn’t think that’s enough to tackle the real issue.

“We want to control the quality, and control access to it. The NDP will tell you decriminalization is all that’s needed. That just means that police won’t be charging as many people, but it’s not going to help the whole situation.”

The Conservative Party

Conservative representatives did not respond to multiple phone calls and email requests to comment for this story by deadline.

Your vote matters

Youth not voting creates a cycle: governments think youth don’t care, and so don’t design platforms to meet their needs. In turn, youth feel ignored and think that it doesn’t matter whether they vote or not; they feel their voice won’t be heard. The Green Party’s May acknowledges that today’s young people are burdened with more debt than previous generations, and  that they need to get involved.

“I finished university with a very small student debt, and it wasn’t interest bearing. The current situation for young people is completely outrageous, and one reason young people keep being ignored by political parties is that it is assumed that young people don’t vote,” says May. “We have to tell young people that it does matter, every vote counts.”

Camosun’s Reeve hears all kinds of excuses from students as to why voting isn’t for them, one of them being that they don’t feel that they can trust politicians to implement their promised policies.

“No party is all lies,” he counters. “It’s an easy way out. You don’t have to marry a political party, it’s a friendship, and sometimes your friends do something you don’t agree with, and you can call them on that. You can’t be mad because they didn’t follow through, because things change.”

The issue isn’t necessarily to get students to vote, as they tend to vote more than youth who aren’t in school. It’s a matter of showing students how to vote.

“Because of the record of this federal election it seems that there are a lot more people that are just fed up with the way the environment is being treated, or how high poverty rates are across Canada,” says CFS-BC’s Marshall. “BC has a really important role to play in the next federal election. There are going to be a lot of ridings that are going to be really close in BC, and the student vote can really change the outcome of that.”