In honour of the Canadian Federal Election coming up in the next week, this article is going to talk about how voting works! YAY! Previously, I wrote an article about why voting is important, the link is here, and you should definitely check it out if you’re a first time voter! This article will be less about the importance of voting and why you should vote (which you should!) and more about the logistics. The logistics being: how to vote, how to register to vote, how does the Canadian system even work etc. For everyone wanting to learn a little more about how the Canadian political system actually works, keep reading!
Registering to vote in Canada is actually quite simple, you can register online at the Online Voter Registration Service. However, online registration must be done by October 15th, (six days before the election). What is also convenient is if you forgot to register before voting, you can go to your voting station and register right there! Since the voting process isn’t really explained to anyone before they’re 18, there’s this connotation that the steps to be able to vote are difficult. It’s important to remember that the government wants you to vote, which means that they’ve made voting and registering very easy so that there aren’t any complications when it comes to voting.
After you register to vote, you get a ballot (voting card) in the mail which means that you’ve registered and you’re legally allowed to vote. To vote, you can go to Elections Canada (Voter Information Service) to find your closest polling station. There’re many polling stations across Canada, so your voting station won’t be very far (mine is right across the street from my house!). All you need to bring with you when you vote is some form of identification that has your name and your address on it. Make sure you know the name of the representative for your region/district as usually the voting card doesn’t say the party the MP (member of parliament) is associated with – this can easily be found by a quick google search.
The last important thing to know before voting day, is how does the Canadian political system work. What happens to the party that I vote for if they don’t win? To start, the Canadian political system is a representative democracy. A representative democracy means that you don’t vote for the leader, instead you vote for a representative (MP) to represent you and your opinions in office. You are essentially choosing someone to act on behalf of you. The leader of the party that wins (you guessed it) becomes the Prime Minister, while the party that comes in second place becomes the opposition (the leader being the Leader of the Opposition).
Depending on the number of votes a party gets, the party can either have a majority or a minority government. If it’s a majority government (like we have now) this means that the party that wins controls more than 50% of the seats in the House of Commons. This means that that one party has a majority vote when it comes to decisions. If it’s a minority government, the winning party has less than 50% of the seats in the House of Commons and passing laws and making decisions is much more difficult, as the other parties can actually veto that decision by voting against it.
What this means in the big picture is that even if the party you vote for doesn’t win, this doesn’t mean that your vote is a “waste” because more votes = more seats and more seats = more voting power. There’s a lot of “my vote won’t make a difference” talk when it comes to voting in an election, however this is so far from the truth! Your vote can be the difference between a majority and a minority government or how much influence that party has in the House of Commons. With that being said, make sure you cast your vote on October 21st! Every vote makes a difference!