For the Canadians out there:

[theweaselking]

The federal election is coming up fast. If you haven't received your registration card in the mail yet, contact your returning officer and find out what happened to it. For information about your riding, click here and follow the links.

Also on this page are the names of all the people registered to run in your riding. Take those names, pop them into Google, and their official website will be the first or second hit for all the serious candidates. It may not work for the Marijuana Party or the Communist Party, but it works for the Liberals, NDP, Green, Bloc Quebecois, and National Socialist parties, and those are the only ones you really need to worry about.

For example, my riding has Paul Dewar, Richard Mahoney, and Keith Fountain. There's no Bloc candidate, because the Bloc officially considers me a second-class citizen, unworthy of representation. My obligatory snideness requires me to point out that the candidate from the party working hardest to shed their western, white-supremacist, English-only history is the only one WITHOUT a bilingual website.

From there, it took one click on the CPC and Lib site to get to the "Issues" page that the candidate feels are most important. It took 3 on the NDP, but the links were clear when I looked.

This is important. It's probably the easiest way to clearly see what the party and candidate want you to think about them. It's certainly the lowest-effort way.

And it's important to educate yourself on your options, and discuss the issues you feel are important. Mail your candidate - they will respond, and you'll get an answer or a non-answer, and both of those are good. Educate yourself.

Voting is not important. Voting WHEN YOU KNOW THE ISSUES is important. If you don't know your candidates, their platforms, and their party's platforms, you're not fulfilling your civic duty by voting. You're just added random noise. Educate yourself, think carefully, and vote for the person you think is best. All of these steps are necessary. If you're going to skip any of them, please just don't vote.


For non-Canadians who've read this far: Canada's election system means that the individual does not cast a single vote for The Great Leader. You vote for your local MP, and the leader of the party with the most MPs becomes Prime Minister. (Yes, the PM is an MP. Yes, it's possible for the Prime Minister to lose his seat in the election and not be allowed into the House Of Commons - it's happened before. Three times, if I lazily recall correctly.)

Comments

[everbloom.livejournal.com]

A lot like Australia! Everyone here has to vote though, so we register once for life.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

All the Commonwealth countries work pretty much the same way. The explanation is mostly for the damn foreigners from the land of Yurp and those strange religious lunatics down south where the land isn't frozen and winter isn't the nicest ten months of the year.

[kjn]

The foreigners from Yurp generally know your system, or at least the one you stole^Winherited it from.

Do you still have the system where a candidate must give a sum of money to the voting authorities, and gets it back if he/she gets a certain amount of votes?

[torrain.livejournal.com]

It took me two clicks on the NDP; one to select "English", and one to click on the issues.

Of course, now is probably a bad time to be doing the reading.