Considering that less than 50% of Canadians of the age of majority actually vote, why don't we make it mandatory to vote every time an individual files their taxes?
PS: I am intentionally leaving a lot of editorial commentary out of this post.
2 comments:
Anonymous
said...
This, and a powerful voting awareness campaign. Adding more transparency, more user friendly online services and some more tweaks here and there (ie. removing the cent) would yield a less horrid situation for us all. All it requires is enough vigor and cleverness to maneuver through dinosaurs.
Respectful of peoples' right not to vote, I guess it doesn't need to be mandatory.
Seriously though, taxpayers would save the $300 million that goes into modern political campaigns if they did a 'running average' kind of vote every time they filed their taxes. Who needs campaigns? Most of us are consistently bombarded with political news from various media sources, so being aware really isn't a problem, or a reason to spend $300 million.
Another argument for getting rid of campaigns: why should we vote based on what a party claims they might do in the future? Why don't we vote based on what a party is doing right now and what they've done in the past? In linear systems, this is called causality. There are multiple algorithms dedicated to predicting the future with a given certainty. To make a claim about what will happen in the future, the Canadian government will really need to do more scientific and probabilistic analyses than what is currently being done.
Please, let's bring back the 'science' in 'political science', because otherwise we're just going to be led by con-artist after con-artist.
2 comments:
This, and a powerful voting awareness campaign. Adding more transparency, more user friendly online services and some more tweaks here and there (ie. removing the cent) would yield a less horrid situation for us all. All it requires is enough vigor and cleverness to maneuver through dinosaurs.
Respectful of peoples' right not to vote, I guess it doesn't need to be mandatory.
Seriously though, taxpayers would save the $300 million that goes into modern political campaigns if they did a 'running average' kind of vote every time they filed their taxes. Who needs campaigns? Most of us are consistently bombarded with political news from various media sources, so being aware really isn't a problem, or a reason to spend $300 million.
Another argument for getting rid of campaigns: why should we vote based on what a party claims they might do in the future? Why don't we vote based on what a party is doing right now and what they've done in the past? In linear systems, this is called causality. There are multiple algorithms dedicated to predicting the future with a given certainty. To make a claim about what will happen in the future, the Canadian government will really need to do more scientific and probabilistic analyses than what is currently being done.
Please, let's bring back the 'science' in 'political science', because otherwise we're just going to be led by con-artist after con-artist.
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