Democracy was done in Burns Lake, but barely.
More people attended the Burns Lake Timbermen home opener hockey game than exercised their most recent voting right.
It typically holds true that federal elections get about 75 per cent voter turnout, provincial elections get about 55 per cent, and local government elections attract about 40 per cent of voters. The indications this year are that only about 30 per cent of eligible BC voters went to the polls in October’s polls, and in Burns Lake the lack of electoral effort was shocking: only 18.6 per cent made a mark in the active part of democracy.
It’s not like there was nothing to play for. There were choices for both mayor and council, but of the 1,505 voters who could have cast ballots, only 281 did.
For context, tiny Granisle (303 eligible voters) had a turnout of 108.
Fraser Lake is less than half the size of Burns Lake (732 voters) and only 70 kilometres down the highway. Their mayor was unopposed and three incumbents out of four ran for council. Fraser Lake still managed a voter turnout of 239 people.
“I agree that turnout was abysmal,” said Gary Wilson, UNBC’s chair of the Political Science Department and the coordinator of both the Northern Studies Program and the Local Government Administration Certificate Program.
Wilson said that one of the problems with voter turnout is a lack of quality races. Either the democratic process is upended by an acclamation, or there are uninspiring candidates.
Even with electoral drama in Vancouver and Surrey, those jurisdictions only inspired 37 and 32 per cent respectively. The contentious Prince George race for mayor and council brought out a flaccid 26 per cent of their 58, 289 eligible voters.
“One thing I’ve been noticing in general is just a lack of interest in participating in anything, including elections,” said Wilson. “That could be a knock-on effect from the pandemic or connected to the fact that times are tough and people have other priorities and things on their mind. Moreover, with increasing polarization, politics in general is becoming ugly and divisive, and some people are just turned off and tuning out. It’s frustrating in the context of local elections because local government affects our lives in important ways on a daily basis. I think there’s a general lack of awareness of what local governments do and why they are important.”
Acclamations all but killed the voting process in the Regional District of Bulkley Nechako, with an estimated voter base of 11,876 spread over seven rural electoral wards. Five districts acclaimed their representatives, meaning only two actual elections took place drawing a mere 959 voters.
The hottest action was School District 91 where only one acclamation (the Burns Lake ward) happened, and 2,774 votes were cast to elect the other six contenders.
The three SD91 wards surrounding Burns Lake had two candidate each, and brought out 203+102 (winner plus challenger) voters for Endako-Fraser Lake-Fort Fraser, 136+106 votes for Grassy Plains-Francois Lake and 62+37 votes for Topley-Decker Lake-Granisle.
The Burns Lake mayor’s race had two candidates with a winner/challenger split of 201 to 76 while the council race had five candidates for four positions. The successful councillors received totals of 210, 190, 188 and 155 while the remaining option got 148 votes. It was a tight race, proving how a non-vote does as much to decide an election’s outcome. Only four changes of mind or eight additional voters could have swapped the bottom two council candidates.
For further perspective, more people voted in the Grassy Plains-Francois Lake school trustee race than voted for the mayor or any councillor of the entire town.