THUNDER BAY – While candidates are busy trying to get voters fired up and out to the polls, many others are simply turning away from the election.
In Thunder Bay on June 2nd, a group of people are planning to gather to share a message of not voting.
The group states, “The steady decline in Canadian elections turnout (the lowest turnout in the history of federal elections was reached in the 2008 elections with 58.8%, and the lowest turnout in the history of Ontario elections was reached in 2011 with 49.2%) surely indicates that a large portion of the masses have lost their faith in Canadian bourgeois parliament as well as in the different parties who have sat there for nearly 150 years. For most of the masses and the poorest among them, this disaffection reveals a real sentiment: elections will not change their lives”.
“This lack of interest is also the result of the repeated lies, of broken promises, of abuses of power, of more and more corruption, of the unabashed wealth of fraudsters who remain unpunished and of privileges and preferential treatment for the bourgeois class and its political elite, while a significant portion of the population suffers from poverty. Even when they have access to a little more, the majority of people continue to struggle to pay for basic necessities of life including housing, food and clothing for their families at the same time as the wealthy minority live lives of grotesque, and environmentally damaging, excess”.
“We call to transform this disaffection, from a ‘passive” boycott’, to a dynamic and constructive one. We call to make it a movement that truly expresses the kind of democracy we want, a people’s democracy and most importantly, the kind of society we want, an egalitarian society free from all forms of oppression and from class exploitation.
