Especially because it sends money to the party you vote for, which the OPC has upheld: https://news.ontario.ca/en/release/1005286/all-parties-in-ontario-legislature-support-extending-per-vote-subsidy

All the more impactful because we have limits on campaign finance so rich people have to try a teensy bit harder to influence the process.

https://results.elections.on.ca/en/graphics-charts has a chart at the bottom for “Historical Voter Turnout”. It goes back to 1866. What I see in this is that giving up so hard on our democracy that you don’t engage with it in the simplest way is a pretty recent thing:

1929 set a new all-time low of 57% that didn’t get beat until we hit 52% in 2007. And we’ve been lowering the bar since then:

2011, the next election hit a new low of 48%.

2014 at 51% wasn’t much better, in 2018 we at least got 57% to tie the record low that held since 1929.

And last time in 2022 it was 44% and we talked about it a lot. Because that was depressing af. I really hope enough of them heard so we never lower the bar beyond that. And hopefully we can start getting it above 57% on the regular like we managed to do for 78 years.

neutrality/cooperation with China and Russia,

the reality of Russia’s claims of self defense

…WTF? There are way too many Canadians with ties to Ukraine, myself included, that would be offended at the very idea of anything but utter condemnation of Russia’s inhumanly brutal invasion. How can an invasion ever be “self defense”, that’s absurd.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crimes_in_the_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine

How can abducting children, laying siege to residential areas, rape, torture, etc. be self defense? It’s not. It’s abhorrent. Russia is worse than Trump.

Cory Doctorow thought that through: https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/15/beauty-eh/#its-the-only-war-the-yankees-lost-except-for-vietnam-and-also-the-alamo-and-the-bay-of-ham