Political apathy on the rise in Canada

Poll sheds light on waning faith in democracy and a growing dissatisfaction with the government

- RAISA PATEL

Ahnaf Zahin, 20, knows at some level that federal politics impacts real people, even if it's hard for him to see how those goals and machinations affect him.

On the face of it, Ahnaf Zahin and Taylor Stuart don’t have much in common.

Zahin, who arrived in Canada from Bangladesh when he was a child, just turned 20 and is about to start his third year as a neuroscience and physiology major at the University of Toronto.

Stuart is 37, grew up in Kamloops, B.C., and is an air ambulance pilot in Vancouver.

But although they don’t know each other, each feels similarly about Canadian politics: they rarely pay attention to it, they don’t follow news coverage, and they feel that over the course of their lives, the people streaming through Parliament Hill haven’t done a whole lot to make things better.

“I just have a sense that (politics) doesn’t really affect me much, or at all,” said Stuart, who said he also doesn’t feel particularly empowered by a system rife with toxicity and red tape.

Zahin, meanwhile, knows at some level that federal politics impacts real people, even if it’s hard for him to see how those goals and machinations affect him.

“The easiest thing to do is just keep to myself and not seek it out,” he said. Stuart votes, and Zahin thinks he probably will, too, now that he’s of age.

Even so, they both can be considered politically apathetic: people who feel, for various reasons, uninterested in political and electoral affairs. Some may believe their vote never makes a difference, that the system isn’t working for them, or that the issues are too complex to understand.

In today’s increasingly untamed information environment, others are repulsed by the way politicians attack each other online, suspicious of or ensnared by misinformation, and becoming more disconnected due to low levels of trust in government and the media.