In yet another disturbing account of the state of politics in Canada, a new survey reveals a substantial percentage of Canadians don’t think politics affects them much, don’t trust politicians to do what is right, and simply don’t talk about politics with each other.
The online poll commissioned by the non-partisan, non-profit public interest group Samara Canada, contacted some 2,406 Canadians across the country, and based on the responses, gives democracy in Canada a grade of just “C”.
Distrust and disengagement
The report called “Democracy 360” says the grade shows that, “Canadians are not participating in politics as much as they could, they don’t believe it affects them, and they don’t see their leaders as influential or efficacious”.
It reflects also the increasingly low turnout for elections in this country. The report notes that only 61 percent of Canadians eligible to vote in the 2011 federal election did so. This compares with a previous average of about 75 percent turnout in the decades following the Second World War.
Quoted in the Ottawa Citizen newspapaper, Samara executive director Alison Loat said in an interview. “I don’t think we should be very happy with it. Canada has one of the lowest voter turnouts of any comparative western democracy. Which is a sign of peoples’ declining interest.”
In fact, most Canadians are dissatisfied with their politicians and parties and seem to have decreased faith in politicians or political parties to do what is right,
The poll showed a minority of only 40 percent trusted politicians “to do what is right” while only 42 percent said they were “very” or “fairly satisfied” with how political parties were doing their jobs. This means of course that roughly 60 percent of Canadians were dissatisfied with their politicians and with political parties.
Another significant minority, 39 percent said they hadn’t engaged in a single political conversation, online, or face to face, in the past year.
There are some other promising figures though, such as the 83 percent of Canadians who participated in at least one civic activity, whether volunteering, donating money to a charitable cause, or working with others to solve a community problem.
A related survey taken in December of 2014 showed that politics was the profession least trusted by Canadians
How people in individual provinces responded
For reasons beyond our control, and for an undetermined period of time, our comment section is now closed. However, our social networks remain open to your contributions.