Murray Mandryk: We need healthy democracies to emerge from an unhealthy pandemic

By Murray Mandryk

If we only learn one thing from this pandemic, it should be why we need healthy democracies.

That our democracy needs to be healthy is always a given, but COVID-19 should have given us greater insight into why that’s so crucial.

For more than a year now, government decisions have had a more profound effect on us than at any time.

Never before in our adult lives have most of us been told where we can and cannot go and what we can and cannot do and even what we can and cannot wear.

Never has it been more important for us to follow a set of rules, but also never has it been more important to question those rules … or at least, question government decision-making.

This should be heightening our need to be active participants in democracy and fully engaged in what goes on at the legislature.

But the book is still out on whether this pandemic has made things better or worse.

Consider the 2020 election, although perhaps less from the perspective of the outcome than how voters viewed this exercise.

The unhealthy aspect was the voter turnout, which as grown increasingly unhealthy in the last four decades.

Long gone are the days of the 1982 election when we saw a similar large majority of Grant Devine’s Progressive Conservative candidates elected after a decisive 75- to 80-per-cent turnout in most ridings.

Not wanting to go out and physically cast a ballot during a pandemic was surely a factor, but we have long been on a downhill slide when it comes to the numbers voting.

This needs to change and that change actually begins with a few things that went on in the 2020 election and before. Making mail-in ballots easier was a good step, but, given where snail-mail is going, we need to move towards safe online voting.

It’s time to make casting a ballot easier — not harder — because a vote is an investment into the process that should automatically lead to greater interest and awareness in what’s going on.

That Saskatchewan — and especially rural Saskatchewan — overwhelming wanted Premier Scott Moe’s Saskatchewan Party to return for another four years is not a comment on the health and viability of our democracy.

What it really is, is a comment that a majority of voters simply viewed combination of the Sask. Party record and what it was proposing to be better than any other option including the governing party’s nearest rival, the NDP.

We need to remember that the voters are always right. When we forget that, we get what happened at the U.S. Capitol Building on Jan. 6.

In order to avoid that, we surely have to recognize not only the value of our institutions but the absolutely critical value of reason and grounded democratic debate where all sides are heard.

That the October provincial election saw the rise of new political alternatives like the Buffalo Party — there were more votes cast for the 17 Buffalo Party than new votes gained by the NDP — should actually be seen as good thing.

Less good is the party’s premise that prairie separation are viable. The notion that if you don’t get way in a democracy, you start your own government is pretty unhealthy.

But that shouldn’t mean that any messages of frustration and discontent amidst a pandemic can be ignored.

While coming from a completely opposite direction than the NDP, Buffalo Party voters did share a discontentment with government.

We get into trouble when we start to accept that everything government does is beyond question because we might generally agree with the governing partys philosophy.

A political party is healthiest when it goes out and earns support every day.

The same should be said for a democracy.