VOTE

Why vote? It’s a question many people ask themselves when elections roll around. While voter turnouts for Cree elections and referendums are healthy, our participation in federal and provincial campaigns is dismal.

Most Cree are eligible to vote in the riding of Ungava. But most of us don’t and that’s a shame, because we have the power of numbers to determine the winner. The last Quebec election in 2012 saw only an 1153-vote difference between the two top candidates. So when you ask if your vote means something the answer is overwhelmingly, yes, it does.

Simple mathematics shows that we could easily make the difference in Ungava. In 2012, almost 8900 Crees were eligible to vote, but only 1195 ballots were cast in the nine communities.
That’s only 13.5% of us, which may explain why the Ungava riding as a whole had by far the lowest turnout in the province – far lower than the provincial average of 74%.

Now think what would happen if two-thirds or more of us had cast a ballot. Our numbers would easily overcome the 1153-vote difference between the two top candidates in 2012. Back in 2012 the entire number of eligible voters for Ungava was 26,098. Crees represent 34% of that number.

So the Cree vote does count. Only 10,663 people voted in Ungava in the 2012 Quebec election. If the 7500 Crees who stayed home had showed up, we would have easily been able to make our choices count.

Calling on people to exercise a hard-won right isn’t enough. Almost unbelievably, Aboriginal people in Quebec did not have the right to vote until 1969. It’s often said if you don’t exercise a right then you are in danger of losing it. The past doesn’t really influence people to head out to the polling station though so I’ll try to provide a few important reasons to make the effort.

I’ve heard people complain that politicians don’t really listen to the Cree. Well if we don’t bother to vote then our voice will not be heard by the person elected to represent the Ungava riding. It’s a fact that politicians look at who votes and what they say. So if we don’t vote then we are basically telling them that we don’t care what they do while in office. That is not a safe thing to tell them.

Taking time off work is allowed by law and putting your mark on a ballot tells candidates we think and care about decisions that affect our lives and region. This is democracy in action and voting allows us to express our idea of how things should be done.

Perhaps in the next election a Cree could take a page from Romeo Saganash’s notebook and run in the provincial election. An increase in Cree voter turnout would make things interesting but that’s four years away.

We need to begin now to make our voices heard in the only way we can and that’s by voting in this election. Given our numbers any elected candidate will listen closely to our concerns. It was best expressed 2000 year ago by the Greek philosopher Pericles, who said, “We do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business: we say he has no business here at all.”