Avalon

At the height of the Cold War, when his book was published he is reported to have said, “You Bolsheviks are finished – there are no two ways about it.” And they were, they were gone in fifteen years, the Soviet Union had collapsed. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ started the end.

Solzhenitsyn was born a year after the revolution in 1918. He was indoctrinated into the ‘moral superiority’ of Marxist/Leninism as a young man eventually serving as a twice-decorated commander in the Red Army. History changed in February 1945 when he was arrested at the front for criticizing some of Stalin’s war policies in a private letter. He was interrogated, beaten, sentenced in secret to eight years in various labour camps and internal exile for life. He survived. He was rehabilitated after Stalin’s death and spent a Herculean decade secretly researching and compiling ‘Gulag’ based on his and other survivors’ experiences in the camps. It circulated as samizdat (underground literature) and was smuggled out and published in the West in 1974 giving us a new word in our political vocabulary, gulag.

‘Gulag’ exposed the massive governmental repression against its own citizens in an archipelago of hundreds of camps scattered in the Arctic and sub-Arctic and in particular discussed the system’s origins from the founding of the Communist regime, with Lenin himself having responsibility. ‘Gulag’ was the final nail in the coffin for those who believed in the ‘moral superiority’ of the communist system. After ‘Gulag’ no supporter of Leninism/Marxism/communism/Maoism whether a party or individual could escape the question, how would they handle inevitable ‘counterrevolutionary activities’ under their proposed system? Now everyone knew the inherent contradiction of such systems and so collapse of the Hard Left (and the Soviet Bloc along with it) became only a matter of time.

Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 for his writing including ‘One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich’ but was not allowed to accept the prize. Despite harassment of him and supporters he refused to recant his political beliefs so the Soviet authorities exiled him abroad. He finally returned a hero in 1994 to his beloved Russia and died there August 3, 2008.

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, Twentieth Century Titan.

There is an interesting but pointless debate in Nova Scotia. Liberal Leader Stephen McNeil has introduced a bill into the provincial legislature to lower the voting age from 18 to 16 in conjunction with an increase in civics and history education in response to the historically low provincial and federal voter turnouts. Premier Rodney MacDonald has mocked the suggestion and NDP Leader Darrel Dexter considers it a ‘drastic’ action while refusing to state where he stands on the issue.

Let’s take a step back. This voting age muddle is a perfect example of why people don’t vote. A party leader introduces a bill with no hope of passing. The merits of the bill will not be freely debated in the Legislature. The bill is intended to be window dressing for the current political process by simply raising turnouts without getting to the root of the problem. Even in ‘dressing the window’ the bill seems ill conceived since youth tend to have the lowest of voter turnouts. But since there is no free debate on the subject voters will never know, all voters have is ‘spin’ in the media. Why would voters pay any attention to any of this?

Raising voter turnout requires real substantive changes to invite the citizen back into the governance system but that means diluting the power of the parties and the leaders, but the parties and the leaders control the system and change is not in their interest. So no matter which way we turn we are back to where we started; a system that cannot fix itself and is divorced from its citizens. Why would voters involve themselves in any of this?

The Hansard Office is the provincial government service that reports the debates and proceedings of the legislature and its committees. It reports the current bills, bills passed, and the debates involved, and this makes it a vital part of our democracy. The name Hansard comes from one of the early English compilers near the time when reporting the British Parliament’s debates was illegal. Each provincial legislature has a Hansard service as well as the federal Parliament and each can be accessed via the respective government’s web site.

As important as Hansard is it is not sufficient for Atlantic Canadians. The Hansard service can be thought of as raw data, what is needed is a second step to interpret this data to make it easier for use by citizens. At the federal level such a service exists, it is a not-for-profit web site called How’d They Vote? (www.howdtheyvote.ca). It extracts information from Parliament’s Hansard service and collates the information by representative so you can see speeches, quotes, voting history, dissensions, and absences!

Atlantic Canadians need such a service at the provincial level to help us oversee our representatives. Does the representative slavishly follow party line? Are they often absent? Do they seem to understand the bills they vote on? Do they take part in the debates? Have they made any important speeches? It is important that such information be made available, how else do we know that our representatives are doing a good job?

Currently Nova Scotia has a Select Committee on Participation in the Democratic Process looking into declining voter turnout. The hearings finished last night at Province House. No doubt one topic that will be discussed is compulsory voting. Australia uses it and has very high turnouts, so why not try it here?

We often hear that voting is a ‘civic duty’, but it is more accurate to say that voting is a ‘civic right’ and no free and independent people such as Atlantic Canadians should ever allow a government to force them to exercise their rights no matter how wonderful the goal. Put simply, it is no ones business but the individual whether they vote or not.

People should be free not to participate if they believe not voting is important. Jehovah Witnesses, for instance, believe that any form of political involvement is wrong so they typically do not vote. Not voting is also a valid method of dissent against governance and is why totalitarian states that maintain a veneer of democracy are always careful to manufacture near 100% turnouts. Any government that interferes in that freedom is acting the tyrant.

Coercing citizens to vote only masks the real problem. Our declining voter turnout indicates growing dissent with a political system that needs reforms; separation of powers with an independent and effective Legislature, fair elections, direct election of our leaders, recall, Citizen’s Initiative. Introducing compulsory voting will only paper over the defects and delay needed reforms.