As an albertan this feels like desperate pandering to a tiny vocal minority to distract from real issues. Almost nobody wants this.
https://xcancel.com/DonBraid/status/1187052993788559360
This is about more than just money though.
Politically the west is underrepresented and the cultural difference between the West and the rest of Canada is very significant - unless you ask folks from Ontario who have never been to AB. In my opinion, Canada is too geographically and culturally diverse for a central government to have so much power.
The United States has also had this problem for a long time, imo.
These people are serious. They feel a genuine sense of grievance for how they perceive the rest of Canada has treated them. They have come to believe that there is a legitimate Albertan identity that is unique to the region and people and that is being persecuted 'by Ottawa.' They also feel that the separatist course of action is one with nothing but positives and only minor negatives. Some of them lie about ulterior motives to see Alberta join the US, while others are in denial that this could even be a possible outcome should Albertans decide to separate.
More rationally, if some 25% of the country can’t express themselves and another 25% are unsure/uncommitted one should assume their interests are best represented by the most invigorated and unified minority.
I wish I could drop an ‘/s’, but, uh, ‘/no-really-thats-this-timeline’.
Huh? 37% of the eligible voters, much less the population, voted yes according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_Kingdom_European_U...
You have to vote for what you want or at least against what you don't want. Otherwise you are an enabler.
We can't know what they want if they don't or can't vote. Putting "they voted yes" in their mouth sounds insulting to me, but I'm an outsider to the UK so maybe it's wrong for me to say that
Yes, of course, they didn’t give a shit. They couldn’t be bothered. Outcome was whatever for them.
You can say a lot of things about the majority of this group but not that it was necessarily irrelevant to the whole group
You could also just say they didn't exist if it makes you feel better. But calculating the percentage from the eligible voters gets you no where. They didn't vote. It just makes the number smaller. Whatever. It doesn't change anything. It's not first to 50% of eligible votes. It's the majority of voters.
But I am angry at everyone who doesn't vote if they can. Especially if they complain that this isn't what they wanted.
But I can see what you mean here. Just that I'd phrase it as "you will just have to live with the outcome" and not "you voted for this outcome" or "52% of the population wanted this" as it was phrased above. That is what I'd call fudging numbers to sound better than they were :p
There might be a situation where you have decide between two equally bad things. In that case not voting would be okay. But that's rarely the case.
Sometimes it's okay to just vote against the worse of the choices. That's still better than doing nothing. You WILL get one of the choices (unless there is a revolution or something). It's not like you will get none of these if you don't vote. Therefore apathy and not voting is a bad thing.
Example Brexit: You could vote remain or leave. There was no third option. Everyone who didn't vote because none of the options were what they wanted, still got leave. It didn't matter if their stance was "remain but maybe work on the terms" or anything else. The result was "leave". Functionally they accepted that. Functionally they sad "leave" because the majority of the voters said "leave". It didn't matter what they wanted. Only what they got. Just because they didn't vote.
Same goes for US elections. "I don't want either of them" translates to you get what the others want if you don't vote. Always. This can happen when you vote as well but then you at least made your voice heard. Your vote was recorded. There were more people with another opinion. That's democracy. Anything else is apathy and in my eyes you lost all right to complain.
Disclaimer: I am assuming a working voting system and the ability to vote.
If you only have 45% of your population votes, regardless of reason, you aren't actually getting the public opinion.
You seem to think that voting is a simple choice of "do it or don't" and it really isn't that simple.
You need little restrictions. For example, not every country takes away voting rights from prisoners or folks previously convicted as a felon. Some places are pretty lenient to pregnant folks, sick people, etc. When my mother was pregnant with my sister, due around voting day, they nearly didn't let her vote absentee. She argued and got to vote but how many people were just denied in this situation? It would be a non-issue in some places. It wasn't that she didn't have an opinion - she was just nearing the time for freaking birth.
When I moved to Norway from the US, I no longer had to deal with voter registration. Once I lived here 3 years, I could vote in local elections. They just send me a voting card. Voting is easy, can be done in multiple locations over a period of a few weeks. So long as I had the card, no ID needed. (most folks keep their address updated for multiple reasons, so getting it isn't a big issue for me, anyway).
Any barriers you have to voting - like the registration system in the US, inflexible voting times, or very strict voter id laws - means that some folks won't be able to vote even if they want to. Barriers that make it difficult for groups of folks to vote is just a way for the state to control the election instead of the people voting with their conscience.
21 countries have compulsory voting laws, on the other hand.
And you can't say that a voter's opinion is a strong one, just that they vote. So many folks vote by just voting with the party they chose. That's not a strong opinion. That's just voting, and no one is checking motivations to see.