elections.ca<\/a> is a resource to register and find voting information.)<\/p>\n\u201cIt\u2019s important to ensure that voters have as many options to vote as possible, and that has not changed,\u201d says Sitek. \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cStudents need to remember, wherever they choose, those are the candidates that are relevant to that student,\u201d says Sitek. \u201cAlso, the vast majority of Canadians will use their driver\u2019s licence. If students are voting with their home address, and that\u2019s where their licence is valid, that will work for them.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf the address on their driver\u2019s licence is different from their home address, they need two forms of ID,\u201d says Sitek. \u201cOne 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s election; Reeve says it is a more Americanized way of doing things.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe idea was the less big-money played a role in politics, the better democracy we would have,\u201d says Reeve. \u201cThe Elections Act really turns our election into a more American style. More money, more free spending. If you\u2019re a big company and have millions of dollars to contribute, they don\u2019t think governments should stop you, and that is a very American sentiment.\u201d<\/p>\n
The candidates<\/strong><\/p>\nNot only do students need to figure out how to vote, they also need to decide who to vote for. It\u2019s a matter of finding a party that aligns with the voters\u2019 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.<\/p>\n
The Green Party<\/strong><\/p>\nThe Green Party is making a promise of free tuition for all by the year 2020. They\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a completely broken system,\u201d says May. \u201cWe\u2019ll 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis will create job opportunities for young people, whether they\u2019re students or not, by providing money to local and municipal governments to hire young people,\u201d says May. \u201cThat is great to really help get that first leg up to have experience, to have that first job on your resume.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Greens are also offering a universal child-care program, but May says their program differs from the NDP\u2019s program, as the Greens are also offering tax breaks for companies and corporations who provide child-care facilities in the workplace.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are strongly in favour of workplace child care because it enhances the parent-child bond,\u201d says May. \u201cThe amount of enhanced child care increases when the parent can drop in during the work day, and there\u2019s tons of data showing that workplace child care increases employee productivity.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe 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,\u201d says May. \u201cWe can work together as a minority government. I don\u2019t care if a PM [Tom] Mulcair or PM [Justin] Trudeau wants to take credit, as long as we have a real success for climate.\u201d<\/p>\n
New Democratic Party<\/strong><\/p>\nThe 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI want to be clear on this: obviously, as a federal government, we can only deal with the federal workplace,\u201d says Rankin. \u201cIt 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you\u2019re wealthy, the benefit\u2019s taxed back, and if you\u2019re 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,\u201d says Rankin. \u201cIt\u2019s self-financing, and it\u2019s really important to students, or people who are just getting started in the work force\u0143they don\u2019t have to make a sacrifice with their career goals and it takes away stress from people\u2019s lives.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cClimate 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,\u201d says Rankin. \u201cAs for Kinder Morgan, this particular project does not have a climate change lens in the review, doesn\u2019t involve First Nations, hasn\u2019t had a fair process to involve communities. It\u2019s just not going to work.\u201d<\/p>\n
Liberal Party<\/strong><\/p>\nThe Liberal Party is focused on families and increasing the number of people who are classified as being \u201cmiddle class.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t need change, we need things done better,\u201d says Thomas. \u201cThat money will literally pull families out of poverty. The money will come from the difference in the way we\u2019re taxing people, and taking the money that is already being used for the Conservative plans.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Liberal party has been criticized for their support of the pipelines. Thomas defends that decision and stresses that we can\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe try to be pragmatic, and one thing that the Liberals offer is we\u2019re not ideologues. Do you like the car you\u2019re 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,\u201d says Thomas.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Liberals thought that there were pieces that we needed to support,\u201d says Thomas. \u201cWe knew if we just opposed it, the Conservatives wouldn\u2019t 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\u2019s privacy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Like the Green Party, Thomas knows that marijuana legalization is an important issue for Victorians. The NDP promises to decriminalize it, but Thomas doesn\u2019t think that\u2019s enough to tackle the real issue.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe want to control the quality, and control access to it. The NDP will tell you decriminalization is all that\u2019s needed. That just means that police won\u2019t be charging as many people, but it\u2019s not going to help the whole situation.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Conservative Party<\/strong><\/p>\nConservative representatives did not respond to multiple phone calls and email requests to comment for this story by deadline.<\/p>\n
Your vote matters<\/strong><\/p>\nYouth not voting creates a cycle: governments think youth don\u2019t care, and so don\u2019t design platforms to meet their needs. In turn, youth feel ignored and think that it doesn\u2019t matter whether they vote or not; they feel their voice won\u2019t be heard. The Green Party\u2019s May acknowledges that today\u2019s young people are burdened with more debt than previous generations, and\u00a0 that they need to get involved.<\/p>\n
\u201cI finished university with a very small student debt, and it wasn\u2019t 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\u2019t vote,\u201d says May. \u201cWe have to tell young people that it does matter, every vote counts.\u201d<\/p>\n
Camosun\u2019s Reeve hears all kinds of excuses from students as to why voting isn\u2019t for them, one of them being that they don\u2019t feel that they can trust politicians to implement their promised policies.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo party is all lies,\u201d he counters. \u201cIt\u2019s an easy way out. You don\u2019t have to marry a political party, it\u2019s a friendship, and sometimes your friends do something you don\u2019t agree with, and you can call them on that. You can\u2019t be mad because they didn\u2019t follow through, because things change.\u201d<\/p>\n
The issue isn\u2019t necessarily to get students to vote, as they tend to vote more than youth who aren\u2019t in school. It\u2019s a matter of showing students how to vote.<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause 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,\u201d says CFS-BC\u2019s Marshall. \u201cBC 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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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. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11041,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,151],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-september-23-2015"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11040"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11040\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11080,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11040\/revisions\/11080"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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