Despite the morbid theme, Choy’s tone is as consistently and uniquely charming as anything in his body of work, including Trillium Award-winner The Jade Peony. Choy walks his reader through the ravages of illness, incapacity, and subsequent recovery like a personal museum filled with curious knick-knacks.

The writing is certainly indulgent; Choy basks in his own pettiness with candor and self-satisfaction, and even manages to evoke September 11th as a motivation during his physiotherapy. It’s enough to make you cringe—but the flip side of this navel-gazing is Choy’s accounting of the moments of joy he encounters on the journey back to health: friendship, poetry, even the small victory of relearning how to open a plastic pudding container. It’s the descriptions of his friends that provide the book’s best passages and his ammunition against the nagging and presumably lifelong disapproval he suffers under his ancestors’ imagined judgment. Through Choy’s eyes we see love that offers dignity to even the most hopeless of situations, and the value of family in all its incarnations.

Creative Commons photo by Flickr user visualpanic

The Claim

All-natural wood- and corn-based cat litter is a better, greener alternative to traditional clay cat litter. Not only is it biodegradable, but pet owners can flush kitty’s mess down the toilet without getting the guilty conscience that comes with adding a plastic bag per day to already overflowing landfills. But could cat poop pose an even bigger environmental problem when flushed?

The Investigation

Each year, cat owners in the United States alone trash over two million tonnes of clay cat litter, almost all of which is dumped into plastic bags and shipped to landfills. Even worse, clay litter is largely derived from strip mining, a disruptive industrial process that literally strips the earth’s top layer to reach underlying seams of clay. No wonder eco-minded pet owners prefer litter made out of scrap pine or newspaper pellets.

Unfortunately, they may be clearing their conscience prematurely. Sure, flushable litter won’t gunk up your pipes like clay litter might, but the cat feces we flush is contributing to the infection and death of all kinds of sea life.

Cat poop can contain a dangerous parasite called Toxoplasma gondii that causes a disease called toxoplasmosis. Only cats that have come in contact with infected birds and mice will carry the disease, but infection rates for outdoor cats are high. And when we flush infected waste, the parasite threatens ocean and sea life—the parasites are resilient, and typical water purification plants won’t destroy them.

Though researchers are still determining the extent of toxoplasma’s deadly nature, sea otters appear to be vulnerable. Studies in Morro Bay, California, showed that 16 percent of infected otters died of the disease. Dr. Melissa Miller, a senior wildlife veterinarian with the California Department of Fish and Game, says the bulk of the concern, however, isn’t coming from flushable litter. When cats defecate outside, rain can wash the parasite downstream and affect all kinds of aquatic wildlife.

The verdict

If kitty doesn’t go outside, and eats commercial cooked cat food—and not an infected bird or mouse—her poop should be safe to flush. Even so, says Miller, (who owns three cats herself), the best place to toss cat poop is with your weekly garbage. Compostable litter is the best choice in that case—and try compostable garbage bags for good measure.

Mijok Lang may not know how old he is, but he has no doubt where he comes from. He remembers, as a child, singing a familiar tribal song with friends. It was the only way, he says, that they could keep lions and other animals at bay in the jungles of Sudan and Ethiopia as they ran from would-be killers.

Mijok, now more widely known by his hip hop pseudonym Hot Dogg, is one of more than 30,000 refugee children known as the “Lost Boys,” who were victims of a civil war that overtook Sudan in 1983 and continued into the 1990s.

Today Hot Dogg—the name is a product of a cultural misunderstanding at a McDonald’s—is a hip-hop artist who has taken his harrowing journey and turned it into positive, spiritual messages expressed through the music he embraced when he first arrived in Canada in 2004.

Of his life during the civil war, he says, “That’s when I became myself; that’s when I lost my family.” Women and young girls were often raped and taken as slaves. “They have to get rid of the elders first. They took all the men. They tortured them, they killed them. When all this torture was happening, that’s the time we ran into the jungle,” he says.

After what Mijok says were months of trekking through the jungles, he and his brother Thirik found themselves in Kenya, where a measure of stability finally began to enter Mijok’s life. His outgoing, humorous personality came out and, thanks to an aid agency, he ended up studying at a private school. He did well enough to receive a scholarship.

Thirik and some other Lost Boys were given the chance to move to the U.S., but Mijok missed his opportunity due to bad timing. Hearing that the Canadian and Australian governments would be visiting a camp in the north, Mijok made his way to the camp where, miraculously, he found his sister, Nyokjak Lang.

That’s where his story takes an unusual spiritual turn. He says his prayers were answered after writing a letter to God one night, asking him why he had found himself stuck in Kenya without family. Even though he never mailed the letter to anyone, a pastor on TV, he says, responded. Mijok says the pastor, the Reverend Benny Hinn, mentioned him by name on TV and told him to sit tight because he would get good news in two weeks. Two weeks later, Mijok got word that he had been accepted as a refugee to Canada.

He ended up moving to Winnipeg, where his sister had already relocated. He enrolled in high school and began a new life. To this day, Mijok desperately wants to know how old he actually is. After much soul searching over the path he should take, Mijok says God told him in a dream to become a musician and tell the stories he had experienced in his youth.

Following chance meetings with hip-hop artists Fresh IE and K’naan, Mijok has grown as a musician and has begun receiving attention for his work and the stories he shares. He released his first album, Lost in War, in 2008, and since then he has toured Canada, the U.S. and Australia. He donates proceeds from his performances to charities doing humanitarian work in Sudan.

And in a fitting bookend to his story, Mijok recently came into contact with his mother again. He hopes his next album, slated for summer 2011, will earn enough for him to visit her.

A partial map of Canada's North, c. 1776. Province-like powers are needed to improve living conditions, but only if the negotiations are fair.

Territorial devolution is key to a successful North…

After decades at a frozen impasse, it appears the federal government’s position on devolving province-like responsibilities and powers to the Northwest Territories has finally thawed. In October, a draft agreement-in-principle between the feds and the territorial government was leaked to media, marking the NWT’s first small step toward taking control of its own land development, administration, and natural resources.

The potential benefits are huge. The territorial government estimates that over the last five years, more than $200 million in resource revenues flowed out of the territory to Ottawa. Had this money remained in the territory, it would have provided much needed funding to fight longstanding social and housing problems, which are major root causes of the NWT’s embarrassing crime rate, currently six times the national average. Plus, a devolution deal would likely move north hundreds of jobs that are now located in the south. Even a few jobs would substantially boost the territory’s poorest areas, says MLA Tom Beaulieu, who represents the tiny towns of Fort Resolution and Lutselk’e. “There would be a lot more money circulating,” he told the CBC, “and employment rates would be a lot better.”

…but not without aboriginal inclusion

Not so fast, say aboriginal governments. When news of the deal leaked, their opposition was loud, immediate, and nearly universal. Surprisingly, they’d been omitted from the bilateral negotiations; unsurprisingly, they weren’t happy about it. Many fear the agreement could transfer authority over their traditional lands to the territorial government. Of the seven groups currently party to the deal, only one has stated its support: the Inuvialuit, whose land claim encompasses the oil-rich Beaufort Delta. UPDATE: the agreement in principle was signed on January 26, 2011 by the federal and territorial governments and the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation; the other aboriginal governments did not sign and said they opposed the agreement.

Territorial officials won’t say whether they’ll continue without aboriginal support or with only a majority on board, like the Yukon did in 2003. In the meantime, Premier Floyd Roland has tried to circumvent opposition by telling aboriginal groups there is nothing legally binding within the agreement. Roland maintains the draft agreement, which he calls “a road map for future negotiations,” won’t negatively affect land claim agreements or future settlements; aboriginal leaders have told him to can the platitudes. Despite a recent meeting with chiefs—weirdly, outside the NWT, in Edmonton—Roland has been unable to break the deadlock. With a winter of discontent looming, it looks like the road toward self determination may once again freeze over.

I spelled Cassiopeia to earn
the astronomy badge, carpooled
to the planetarium. Concentric circles of blue
dresses. Phoebe rings, falling
star, meteorite. A girl’s right
hand on my left armrest. My gaze strung
between the Milky Way, the reef
knot moving at her throat.

Ten years later, you inherit
an Oldsmobile. Our first-aid kit a box
of toothpicks. You roll fast
cigarettes on the divided highway.
To pitch or continue, sink our corners
into tilting earth or keep
aiming for a spot that’s faultless.

A bedroom mock-up. A forest
diorama. You uncover the Adventure
badge stitched to my hip, skin
healing over thread. Belt buckles
that would bring us to the bottom
of the sea. I learned CPR by breathing
into a Styrofoam head, its mouth
wiped with alcohol between girls.

We identify nothing, give nothing
its name. Guess at what’s poison, which
stars are stars. I remember fire
starters of sawdust, wax, egg cartons,
when I used my resources
wisely. We neglect to repel insects.

Collect twist ties and hollow bottles.
Collapse the tent’s tendons, what gives
it shape, wear another layer.
The ground a bowl. Our bitten
ankles. We’re equally close
to two different towns.

Over and over, I convince myself
I want only one thing.

A ventriloquist, on what his dummy is like

He’s a bit of a ladies’ man. Hey, ladies.
He can’t help himself.
He hates the box. It’s dark.
I shimmy my hand into him
and he yelps. Comes alive to revel
in my flaws, fluent even
in the labial consonants:
you’re bald, boring, poor.
My face doesn’t move.
He travels carry-on, fits
in the overhead compartment.
A velvet drawstring bag
for his head, his most
delicate part, decapitated. He hates
the box. Imagine lying
nightly in your own coffin.
A vacant-jawed
cry. My fingertips roll
his eyes. You’re pathetic.
He gets haircuts. He is silicone
and fibreglass, full of sputters
and spit. This voice is shit. I need
a new voice. You’re fine,
I tell him. You’re fine.

Parachute

A garage band soundchecks
in the garage. Orange clouds
and I was tricked indoors to
see a dove, burbling in its cage.

Hands hold wire as a string
breaks, faint curses. Streamers
stained with footprints, cracked
cans litter a hammock. A falling
out could occur at any moment.
Moths swim to red lanterns.

There are too many people here.
The crowd rises in the house
like a tide, begins to use windows
as exits. They don’t believe
they can fly, only hope their paths
will be slow, their landings soft.

Canada's daycare scheme is in disarray. Creative commons photo by Pink Sherbet Photography

Advocates have long argued that a publicly funded universal daycare system would support low-income families, single parents, and working mothers. Support for variants of universal child care was a hallmark of the Mulroney, Chrétien, and Martin election platforms—but none of them made it happen.

Instead, in 2006, the then new Harper government made the Universal Child Care Benefit (UCCB) its first major social policy initiative, paying families $100 per month for each child under six, money intended to support child-care costs. Arguing that they were giving parents more freedom in making child care decisions, the Conservatives’ UCCB was, and remains, a rejection of the very idea of universal daycare. Five years on, the problems with the new system are clear.

The UCCB is “ill conceived and inequitable,” says Ken Battle, President of the Caledon Institute of Social Policy. He raises several objections: despite the sound-bite friendly “hundred bucks a month” concept, the UCCB is actually “virtually incomprehensible” to the average citizen. That $100 is considered taxable income, so no family actually gets $1,200 a year. Furthermore, it’s actually harmed lower-income, single-parent families, who no longer receive the annual $249 young child supplement (which was quietly abolished to help pay for the UCCB). Given the complexities and perversity of the tax system, higher-income families actually receive the highest net benefit.

Battle also criticizes the social engineering implied in the UCCB, under which not all families are created equal. Two-parent families with two parents working actually pay more in taxes than two-parent families (with the same total income) with one parent staying home. This is because that extra $1,200 in yearly income is taxable in the hands of whichever parent earns less. In practice, this means the government privileges families with a stay at home parent—and because of weak pay equity regulation, that generally means mom stays home.

These are minor gripes, though, compared to the fact that the math just doesn’t work: with daycare costs often well in excess of $7,000 a year, $1,200 is simply not enough. Battle argues that in order for a system of cash payments to meaningfully reduce poverty and help families, the older Canada Child Tax Benefit would need to be boosted to $5,000 per child per year for low- and middle-income families. Food Banks Canada recommends the same figure as part of its larger argument that a well funded child care plan would be one of the most effective ways to fight hunger and child poverty.

It’s unlikely that the Conservatives will reverse direction, and the federal Liberals have now surrendered the issue, recently dropping their long-standing commitment to universal daycare. In October 2009, Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff called universal daycare a “legacy” item for his party: “I am not going to allow the deficit discussion to shut down discussion in this country about social justice,” Ignatieff told the Toronto Star in Februrary 2010. Last October, however, blaming the economic forecast and Conservative spending priorities, Ignatieff announced the Liberals would no longer push for a universal public child care program.

With the feds asleep at the switch, some advocates are hopeful that the provinces will step in. Organizations like the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care point to Quebec’s high-profile $7-a-day daycare system as an example to follow. In the 10 years after its introduction in 1997, the province’s child-poverty rates declined by 50 percent. The program’s problem is that it’s too popular, with a shortage of available spaces and long waiting lists. Though the Conservatives say the UCCB is all about giving families more choice, it now obstructs universal publicly funded child care—the choice that most would like to be able to make.

Calgary from the air. Creative Commons photo by Flickr user Oli-Oviyan.

Calgary is not a place to stay. A cultural wasteland with a boom-bust oil economy where hard workers can make their money before moving to a “real” city with “real” arts and culture—but not a place to stay. This is an all-too-common belief about Calgary. But skeptics should take a closer look at the Heart of the New West, because things are changing fast.

Many Calgarians, including newly elected mayor Naheed Nenshi, are committed to making this a livable city and creating a place where people will want to stay, set down roots, and build a life. What outsiders often miss, however, is that the foundation for that livable city has existed for many years, thanks to a vibrant grassroots arts community that hasn’t had much exposure outside the province, but has been churning out great work all the same. With the election of an exciting new mayor, local artists sense that the time has come to demolish Calgary’s “cultural wasteland” image.

“People have this story about Calgary that there’s nothing going on,” says Dr. Terry Rock, president and CEO of the Calgary Arts Development Authority. While the city has historically lagged on factors such as per capita funding and arts space, Rock says the slow and steady approach to building an arts community means that the city does things better—not faster. “There’s a convenience of being last to really get this going,” he says.

Calgary created CADA in March 2005 and says it’s the only organization of its kind in Canada, bundling together space, promotion, and funding for non-profit arts groups in one unified organization. CADA provides funding for both new and well-established arts organizations. In 2010, it funded 161 arts organizations with more than $3.8 million.

CADA has also been involved in the creation of six new arts spaces, including the highly anticipated National Music Centre, a project that received $75 million in government funding and will help revitalize Calgary’s East Village; and Seafood Market Studios, a temporary, and affordable rehearsal and studio space that artists can rent from the city. “At first glance, Calgary seems like a conservative place, where the focus is on the Stampede and the more traditional arts like the ballet and opera,” says Kerry Clarke, artistic director of the Calgary Folk Music Festival. “But scratch the surface and you find a very creative scene, where a breadth of mainstream and cutting-edge, underthe-radar events draw audiences that would make other cities envious.”

Now in its 32nd year, the Calgary Folk Music Festival has grown into one of Canada’s major music festivals. It started as a two-day event on three stages and is now a four-day event on seven stages, with other concerts and programming happening throughout the year.

In a place where public funding for the arts has traditionally been scarce or unpredictable, hardier species of arts organizations have grown and built wider, more sustainable audiences. Though public funding is still lower in Calgary on a per capita basis than many other cities in the country, attendance is comparatively high: in a population of one million, public attendance across arts organizations in 2009 was 2.5 million, meaning lots of people were making it out to events.

“The theatre is full of real people who want to see a play,” says Vanessa Porteous, artistic director of Alberta Theatre Projects, “not to be seen or to get a job.” It’s this approach, says Porteous, which drives the theatre itself. Calgarians have been particularly supportive of Alberta Theatre Projects’ Enbridge playRites Festival, a five-week celebration of Canadian playwriting. Going into its 25th season, playRites will premiere its 100th production in 2011.

With a new regime installed at city hall, arts advocates throughout Calgary repeat the same refrain: more money, more space, more arts-friendly. The most difficult period in an artist’s career is the first 10 years, and CADA’s Terry Rock would like to see money available for individual artists, not just organizations.

Zak Pashak, a Calgary entrepreneur who opened Broken City, a live-music venue, and founded Sled Island, a music festival that features local and international artists, firmly believes that the city has to be affordable and walkable to keep young artists around. If Calgary wants to foster arts and culture, he says, the city needs to be affordable for artists—which not only means a roof overhead and enough to eat, but also a supply of reasonably priced studio space and quality public transportation.

That’s not to say the cowboy ethos is totally gone from Calgary; the arts community remains independent-minded, and while public arts funding has increased, it’s still low compared to similarly sized cities in Canada. The arts in Calgary remain a labour of love by a group of people who can’t imagine doing anything else.

Vanessa Porteous, who came to Calgary 12 years ago, says, “I stayed because I had the best job in Canadian theatre and the next thing I knew, I had a community.”

We expected the world to end in fire, or maybe flood. An asteroid from the heavens, perhaps, or a drowning ocean from the melted ice caps. We expected a plague to arrive on every flight that descended into our cities, for our own bodies to rise up against us. We expected something apocalyptic. Something we deserved. We watched the skies and the seas. We watched each other. And we waited.

The first sign we had was when all the people died in that church in Nashville. They went in for morning service in their best clothes and didn’t come back out. Those of us who didn’t love God as much as they did arrived later to pick them up and found everyone inside dead. The bodies were all still sitting in the pews, still holding hymn books, collection plates, cellphones. And, despite what some of us later said, they weren’t all pointing at the Jesus hanging on the wall.

At first we assumed it was a mad gunman or a suicide cult, because it had all the signs of a mad gunman or a suicide cult. Except there weren’t any wounds on their bodies, no traces of poison or chemicals in their systems. The autopsies revealed there wasn’t anything wrong with them other than their hearts had all stopped beating at once. We searched for a reason but there was no reason.

So, as we usually did in those days, we talked of miracles and divine, secret plans. We argued on news shows and comment threads about whether this was the rapture or a freak event, a statistical anomaly. We wanted to know why they were special. We wanted to prove they weren’t.

And then the same thing happened in other churches. Detroit. Little Rock. Houston. That airport church in Toronto. The body count hit the hundreds. We stopped arguing about the existence of God and instead wondered why he was massacring his followers.

And we couldn’t get enough of it. More of us went to church than we could remember in our lives. We watched videos online of people fighting to get into services until the servers crashed, or we were the ones elbowing and kicking others aside to get through those doors before they closed. We prayed—some of us openly, some of us privately—but we all prayed. We prayed we would be next. This was the kind of time we lived in. This was when we thought there was still someone to hear our prayers.

And then it spread outside the churches.

An entire aisle full of shoppers in a Toledo Wal-Mart dropped to the floor in unison, like they were one of those flash mobs. We found the pilots of an Air Canada flight dead in their seats after the plane landed in Vancouver. A squad of firefighters went into an office tower in New York to investigate a gas leak and collapsed in a pile on the cafeteria floor. There was no gas leak.

We didn’t know why they weren’t all taken at once, why instead they died over the course of the summer. Some of us who were experts on the subject—and we didn’t know we had experts until then—went on the news shows to say God was waiting for us to confess our sins before he took us. Or waiting for us to finish our good deeds on Earth. Or waiting for us to finally accept Christ into our hearts. Others of us said heaven was likely a bureaucracy, a government office for souls, and it took a while to process everyone. So we accepted Christ into our hearts even if we didn’t believe in him, and we confessed our sins in the sanctuaries of our bathrooms, and we smiled at each other in the motor-vehicle licensing branches and tried not to get upset about the waiting.

But then it spread to those of us who weren’t Christian. Buddhist monks dropped in the streets in Thailand. An entire parade ground of soldiers fell dead in China in mid-salute. That’s when we worried it was some new disease, a new bird flu. We put on the surgical face masks again, although some of us had never taken them off. Then a hundred men in a mosque in Iran bent to the floor in prayer and didn’t get up again. We ran photos of them in the Iranian state media, row after row of them slumped with their heads to the floor. Forever frozen in prayer. We said it was a Jewish chemical attack. We ran the same photos in the Israeli media. We said it was proof the Iranians were experimenting with chemical weapons. This was back when we still had governments.

But there was nothing wrong with these people who had died either. Our autopsies on the monks showed no signs of bird flu, or any other flu, although many of the monks had undetected cancers related to air pollution. We released medical reports that showed the men in the mosque died just like the others, of failed hearts. We argued about secret weapons and poisons, about state assassinations, until that night when every single person in Jerusalem dropped dead.

We wondered if our gods were fighting and prayed for them to stop, or prayed for them to hurry up and end it all. We prayed to each other’s gods, just in case. Those of us who were still atheist held street celebrations in cities around the world on the same day. We called it Judgment Day. We said the gods were finally taking their own and leaving the world a better place. At last, peace on earth, we said. But when all the atheists dancing around the Burning Man effigy on that Seattle street dropped dead, even the ones dressed like Jesus, we went home and didn’t celebrate anymore.

We grew desperate in our search for a cause, for something to explain it all. We speculated it was a new disease. An AIDS of the new century we hadn’t discovered yet. A new Ebola. We argued about vectors and viral memes. We seized the bodies of the dead, sometimes with legal papers, sometimes with soldiers, and cut open their brains. We couldn’t find anything different in them. Their dead brains were the same as the rest of ours. There was nothing in them.

We were dying and we didn’t know what was killing us. We occupied the abandoned auto factories in Detroit. We cried out that maybe if someone brought the jobs back the dying would stop. We rioted in Paris and burned the Louvre. We shouted in the streets that it was the end of history. We staged coups in Africa and fought border skirmishes in South America. But none of us truly believed some government was responsible for what was happening. Our generals and presidents appeared in the media and apologized for not being able to attack anyone. We launched missiles in random directions into space anyway, in case it was an alien attack. But we ran out of missiles.

A ferry drifted into a harbour in the Philippines with everyone aboard dead.

Passenger jets flew past their destinations and no one responded to our attempts at communication. The pilots of the fighters we scrambled reported no signs of life inside the planes before they went down into the clouds and crashed into the ocean.

Our research bases in Antarctica stopped sending us messages. We didn’t dispatch anyone to investigate. We’d find out what happened to them later. If there was a later.

We kept on praying, even though we’d lost faith in our gods. We prayed to the forgotten gods: Anubis and Shiva and Zeus. We prayed to Gaia, to the Earth itself. We prayed to the made-up gods: Cthulhu and the Thetans. We prayed to Stephen Hawking and all the dead astronauts.

And then the statisticians and mathematicians among us produced the models that confirmed that whatever was happening was random. We didn’t want to believe the first reports, from the group in Moscow, especially after they turned up dead themselves in their respective apartments. But our autopsies showed there was nothing mysterious about their deaths. They’d been poisoned with radioactive isotopes placed in their tea by some of us who belonged to a security force that was the latest in a long line of security forces. None of us were particularly upset about the killings. We didn’t want to hear the message these dead men had been trying to tell us. We didn’t want all the other deaths to be random. We didn’t want them to be meaningless.

But then the special team assembled by Stanford and Cambridge said the same thing as the Russians did, and Google revealed its Black Lab had come to an identical conclusion. We looked at the patterns and they all said there was no pattern.

And that was the worst thing of all. Worse than when we first started dying. Worse than when day and night around the world turned into twilight and remained that way, when we realized time had frozen in place. As if the universe’s operating system had crashed. Worse than when we realized we didn’t need to eat or drink or sleep anymore, which meant we didn’t need to worry about buying food, about securing shelter, about any of the things we had always done to make meaning of our lives. Worse than when we realized no one was dying now, even when we beat and stabbed and shot each other and ourselves, and we realized no one was ever going to die again. This was the way it was going to be from now on, and there would never be an escape.

It was just random. Nothing we’ve done has mattered. Some of us were taken, but we remain. And now everything is over. We rest in our ruins and wait for a rescue that will never happen. All we can do is relive the past and what might have been. Perhaps we deserve better, or perhaps we deserve worse. But we deserve something.

We continue to pray. We turn our gaze to the empty sky. We pray for something to happen. We hide in the empty build- t ings. We pray for anything to happen. We call out to each other, f a chorus of voices around the world. We pray for the dying to start again. We dig our own graves and wait. We pray for someone to hear our prayers. We would weep, but we have no tears left.

We expected the world to end.

That's a turnout: Election Night, June 8, 1908, on Bay Street, Toronto.

From the Second World War until the end of the 20th century, roughly 75 percent of eligible voters consistently cast ballots in federal elections. During the Jean Chrétien era, however, that number began to drop and has been declining ever since.

There are many theories as to why this is the case: the increased frequency of elections, less civic obligation, increased skepticism about government’s efficiency, proliferation of negative campaign advertisements, decline in socialization, and administrative changes, like the move from voter enumeration to a permanent electors list. Each exhibits empirical validity, but none entirely explains the downward trend.

It’s not just Canada—voter turnout has declined around the world, and it has been declining steadily by generation. This is particularly troubling because we know that voting is a life skill which needs to be learned early. Disengaged youth today become disenchanted taxpayers tomorrow.

Changing voting rules to allow multiple ballots, transferable ballots, or proportional representation are frequently advanced as improvements Canada should consider. Each has merits and each would improve voter turnout, but only modestly.

It’s time to consider a more drastic move: making voting mandatory.

During the 2000 election, when turnout dipped to 61.2 percent, the chief electoral officer was asked if he would consider proposing to Parliament that voting be made compulsory, as it is in several jurisdictions around the world. He said at the time that he did not support the idea, but if voting dropped below 60 percent he would reconsider his position. In the last federal election the turnout was 58.8 percent. It’s time for a public debate on the idea.

Voting is compulsory in a number of countries, including Australia, which shares our basic political system, constitutional framework, and colonial history. We already make a large number of civic duties obligatory, such as jury duty. So why not voting? There is no reasonable argument that a few minutes out of a citizen’s day every four years or so to make them visit a local polling station is an unfair burden for living in a democracy.

It needs to be clear that what is compulsory is not voting; only spending a few minutes at a polling station. Voters are free to destroy their ballot. In fact, in most countries with compulsory voting, there is a box one can check to state “none of the above”.

With the introduction of compulsory voting in Australia, the turnout went from less than 60 percent to over 91 percent overnight.

Public opinion polls suggest Canadians do not currently support the idea of making voting compulsory (though there is evidence that resistance to the idea is lessening), but the majority of Australians also said they were opposed prior to its introduction. Now, a majority of Australians say they strongly support the law.

Nevertheless, Canadian politicians may be reluctant to lead public opinion. That is why, in 2002, I suggested an alternative: offering a tax credit for voting. Use a carrot instead of the stick.

This is a very Canadian approach, as we have a long history of using taxation to encourage behaviour, including the funding of political parties. A tax credit would provide an incentive to vote. More importantly, it would offset some of the costs associated with voting that disproportionately affect lower-income Canadians. It could be means-tested, and thus paid only to those whose income level is likely to be a barrier to civic participation.

Working people used to be paid to vote by their employers, who were obligated by law to give time off work on election day, but this obligation has been lessened due to the staggering of hours for polling stations. Even when it was provided, paid time off to vote never helped people whose employment was piecemeal, shift work, temporary, or casual—the least affluent members of our society.

There are tangible costs associated with voting, such as transportation, hiring a babysitter, and time spent collecting information and following the issues. These costs affect people differently based on their socio-economic circumstances. In the U.S. mid-term elections in November, for example, it was found that the economic situation had deterred a large number of low-income African-Americans from voting simply because of the administrative costs associated with registration.

To date, the Liberal party of Alberta is the only political party to adopt my idea of a voter tax credit, and no political party in Canada has endorsed compulsory voting.

It is probably a safe bet that the Conservative party of Canada will not introduce compulsory voting on its own, given its fear of all things compulsory (like the long-gun registry and the long-form census), or support a voter tax credit because it will be afraid it might benefit another political party. But there is no evidence that compulsory voting benefits either side of the ideological spectrum.

A higher turnout lends the elected political leaders legitimacy. Low turnout leads to divisive elections and a dissatisfied populace.

The turnout in U.S. mid-term elections is usually around 40 percent, one of the lowest for an industrialized democracy. The disproportionate impact of the right-wing Tea Party movement is only possible because of this low turnout.

In ancient Athens, voting was compulsory and people were financially compensated for taking time off to participate. This became the largest item in the government’s budget, but it was a new experiment in government in which they believed strongly—clearly more strongly than we do 2,000 years later.

Nine months later, you’ll find Nelson busy planning ways to feed his new-found “obsession” with French-Canadian culture. Nelson credits the program for his change of heart. However, he’s not too impressed with Katimavik now. Like many, Nelson’s concern centres on recent “drastic changes” to the program. Starting this year, Katimavik is taking fewer volunteers, working in fewer communities and, for the first time, charging its participants.

Admittedly, Katimavik has been on the brink before. Launched in 1977 by Pierre Trudeau’s government, Katimavik was originally designed to solve Canada’s unity problem. Groups of youth from across Canada were cycled through three different communities, where they worked at non-profit organizations, lived together, and learned about the country’s cultural variety. Katimavik received its first blow in 1986, when Brian Mulroney’s government completely dismantled it. Jean Chrétien restarted it in 1994.

The program now has a three-year funding agreement with the Conservative government. Currently in its first year, the agreement will eventually cut Katimavik’s budget by a quarter, resulting in a yearly $4.7 million yearly shortfall. “Katimavik is certainly not as strong, and it is certainly not as able to create powerful Canadian citizens the way it could,” says Justin Trudeau, the opposition critic for youth, citizenship and immigration, and a former chair of the Katimavik board of directors.

The money isn’t the only thing that’s been cut. In order to balance its budget, the new funding agreement has forced Katimavik to cut back in many ways: it has reduced the number of participants to 1,000, down from 4,000 in the early ’80s; the program length has been cut from nine months to six; and, instead of being free, participants now must pay fees of up to $535, $350 of which is refunded upon successful completion of the program.

Trudeau doesn’t like the new fee structure. “It was something that was supposed to be accessible to all young Canadians,” he says, “regardless of social or economic status, regardless of education.”

Publicly, Katimavik has stated the cuts aren’t all bad, as they now have secure fiscal support, and are encouraged to diversify funding and look for new financial partners. But some former participants, such as Nelson, aren’t buying it: “I think we are seeing the beginning of the end for Katimavik, honestly.” For Trudeau, the changes are just another step away from his father’s vision. “Katimavik continues to fail to live up to it,” he says. “We haven’t had the capacity in this program to respond to the demand, to give opportunities to the tens of thousands of young people who would love to do this program.”