Abandoned Stuff by Saskboy

It’s been viewed well over a million times, in many different languages. Severn Suzuki, just 12 in 1992, speaks with more force and honesty than many government representatives combined. I hope you show this to your friends, and family because it’s important for every human to realize that if you can’t fix it, don’t break it.

Yesterday I got to hear the grown up Severn speak to a crowd at the UofR. While she was no where near as angry or urgent in her delivery last night, she’s still working on getting humans to us systems that don’t rob children of the luxuries we enjoy. Another speaker last night put it so well when she quoted a Mi’kmaq elder as saying that we have inherited the earth, and also borrowed it from our children. Like the credit crisis going on now, I don’t think we’ll manage to pay our children back, and we’ll leave it to them to bail themselves out. History will not be kind to my generation.

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When Severn had given her lecture last night, she took questions, and also asked one. I was one in the crowd to answer why the sometimes “radical” and “left leaning” population of Saskatchewan had gone Conservative in the last elections. (I took her question to mean the Sask Party victory, and not the Conservative victory, so my answer was tailored to last year’s election.) I explained that there was a rural population backlash at having been ignored by government, and that with First Past The Post, a slight shift had tipped the scales in favour of conservatism. Daniel in the audience mentioned that the ridings were possibly gerrymandered in a way that favoured the Conservatives (the seats includes both a rural and urban population). An older gentleman opined that apathy was the key factor, and that it affected urban and rural voters.

Larissa Shasko was in the audience, and said that as a candidate for the Green Party in the last two elections, she’d spoken with a large number of people in Palliser, and the overriding cause of low voter turnout was due to most people being totally disengaged in the political process. Elections and politics is not on their personal priority list, and they don’t see it as relevant. She said the Saskatchewan chapter of Fair Vote Canada will be active in bringing Proportional Representation (PR) to the province, which should restore some of the willingness people have in casting votes. This was met with applause from the crowd.

And another interesting point raised by an older woman was that First Nations traditionally don’t cast votes. She said elders had told them that voting legitimized the system that did not make them citizens of Canada until “1962″, and had them managed under the department of “Immigration” (to which the crowd chuckled at, due to the absurdity of treating Aboriginal people as immigrants to their own country). She said she’s changed her mind about voting over the years, because the overriding concern of her community has been to protect treaty rights (as small as they seem, she said), and the best way is to vote. She was critical of the Conservatives, who she said want to take treaty rights away.

So there you have many explanations of why Saskatchewan votes Conservative MPs and Sask Party MLAs into power, and why voter turnout is so low.