Will anger triumph over apathy when B.C. voters head to the polls this fall?
If the current public mood reflects how people will be feeling by Oct. 19, some B.C. politicos will be in for a battering at the ballot box. The level of exasperation and downright rage at the current crop of candidates, MLAs and leaders seems — even by B.C. standards — remarkably high for a campaign that hasn’t yet officially started.
(Unofficially, of course, the campaign is going strong. Either that, or our politicos have just become awfully fond of the media and have chosen to express that fondness with a seemingly neverending barrage of press releases and public appearances.)
The looming question right now, of course, is where public anger will be directed come voting time.
Will it be David Eby and the BC NDP who bear the brunt of dissatisfaction with how things have gone for the past four years?
Will it be Kevin Falcon and BC United who pay the price for their performance (or perceived under-performance) in Opposition?
Will it be John Rustad’s BC Conservatives who come out the worse for wear after voters weigh their local choices?
Will Sonia Furstenau’s BC Greens manage to cut through any of the noise swirling around the rest of them?
Then again, perhaps the real question is none of the above.
Perhaps the real question is whether people will remain angry enough, long enough to still care about any of this four months from now.
It’s one thing to scroll news headlines in the spring and yell angrily at your cellphone or type an irate letter to the editor about your pet issue of choice.
It’s another thing altogether to channel that irritation into action.
How many of today’s grumblers will follow through by finding out more about their local candidates, researching their stances on the issues, attending candidate meetings — and, most importantly of all, actually heading to a polling station to mark their X?
If anger proves to be a motivator, we could be in for record turnout at the polls. At the very least, we could reasonably hope to better the lousy voter turnout in 2020’s pandemic election, when a paltry 53.86 per cent of voters bothered to cast a ballot.
Then again, all the noise of this pre-campaign period could turn out to be no more than sound and fury, signifying nothing.
