Opinion
Hazel Woodrow
Canadian Anti-Hate Network
Since the writ dropped on March 23, I’ve been thinking a lot about how people, especially young people, are less likely to vote when they feel they are just electing more of the same.
Right now, everything feels terrible and unstable and unpredictable. No one is running the kind of campaign that will stop the polycrisis of climate change, democratic backsliding, growing inequality, and unregulated artificial intelligence in its tracks. No one is coming to save us, and it’s easier than ever to get caught up in unproductive catastrophizing (“nothing matters, nothing will get better, might as well just give up”) and all-or-nothing (“anything less than total revolution is not worth the time or effort”) mindsets.
It’s hard to think clearly and rationally, and that is, to a degree, by design. In Donald Trump’s first term as president of the United States, his then-chief strategist Steve Bannon described the administration’s tactic of “flooding the zone” with a relentless barrage of extreme, conflicting, frequently false information in order to disorient the media and the people. It is a kind of propaganda originating in Putin’s Russia that relies on volume and extremity of information to make people feel overwhelmed, disillusioned, and believe that the truth is unknowable.
“Flooding the zone” has also more recently been used to describe the intended effects of the president of the United States signing 73 executive orders during his first 30 days in office. These executive orders frequently do contain falsehoods, but the volume and extremity is the primary tactic being used to overwhelm people’s ability, willingness, and conviction in even the possibility of fighting back.
When I say that the confusion and disorientation and anxiety we feel is by design, I don’t mean that Trump is trying to play mind tricks on Canadians to make them vote a certain way. What I mean is that as he detonates a bomb under American democracy, we are in the blast radius. Tariff whiplash, random border detainments, and the sheer neverending deluge of devastating news out of the US are making it very hard for us to think clearly and stay focused on work, school, relationships, organizing for the world we want to live in, and now—elections.
In my work with the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, I deal a lot with issues that are challenging to think about, and that have to be held in tension. One tool which I use frequently are Vent Diagrams. These are graphics that look like Venn Diagrams—two circles that overlap in the middle. But in a Vent Diagram, the middle part is left purposely unlabelled, which creates space for imaginative and non-binary thinking.
We can use Vent Diagrams to help us practice holding two true things at once in tension and expanding our thinking about complicated and heavy subjects.
Candidates want us to feel excited about voting for them—that’s why they hold rallies, kiss babies, and make promises. Civil society organizations want us to feel good about voting period—that’s why they run get-out-the-vote campaigns, give away merch, and hire influencers to help with messaging.
The celebratory energy created by these persuasive tactics can make us feel that if we can’t get on board with the fun, if none of the parties or candidates excite us, or give us hope—that we shouldn’t bother voting. This kind of branding can also make us cringe and feel even more cynical about the whole process.
Voting, we may feel, is for people who feel good about their votes.
I don’t think this is true. I think we can vote begrudgingly, frustrated, disappointed, and discouraged. I think we can vote with resentment that the system is inequitable and deeply flawed. People are having a hard time meeting their basic needs because corporations and the rich get richer and everybody else has to do with less. The far-right thrives under these conditions with conspiracy theories that misplace the blame on groups in our community rather than the system of capitalism under which we live.
Some people may feel that voting is an act of complicity in this inequitable and deeply flawed system. Opting out of democracy may feel like a way to take back the power that we lose when we are coerced into participating in capitalism. But I think there are more powerful ways to reassert our autonomy than to refuse ourselves a right that millions are denied, and millions more have been killed fighting for.
Similarly to the previous Vent Diagram, politicians run campaigns that characterize themselves as our friends and allies. They say we can trust them and they’ll look after us.
This might be true for individual candidates, in which case we can vote to pick our allies—MPs who will vote in Ottawa in ways aligned with our values, and who will support our local efforts to counter and prevent hate.
Or maybe there’s no local candidate that we have confidence in. It can be easy to feel cornered when we have to pick a candidate that we don’t feel good about, in order to prevent a worse candidate from winning. In this case, we can try thinking about this vote like picking a goalie for the other team—who are we most likely to score a goal on? When we vote to pick our adversary—who we want to go up against when we organize, who we feel most likely to win under—we can think more clearly and strategically because we’re not being clouded by shame and fear. Voting to pick our adversary will never feel as good as voting in an ally, but it can be even more important when the other options represent an even more repressive threat to the work we want to do.
Either way, we are voting for which government under which people will protest, organize, and lobby to affect change.
When we vote to pick our adversary, we can think about this choice as reducing the harm that the system they are part of will inflict. It is a simple fact that even among a slate of unsatisfying, and even harmful choices, that candidates and parties are not all the same, and that being governed by them would not be the same. Capitalist, colonial, racist, patriarchal systems have harm and violence built into their bones. Voting won’t erase that. But it can be an opportunity to select people to govern us who will be less enthusiastic than others to weaponize those systems against us.
At the same time, there are ways that voting can perpetuate harm. Some Indigenous people view voting in Canadian elections to be antithetical to their sovereignty. As Andrea Landry wrote in CBC, “I am not Canadian — I am Anishinaabe, and it's the reason I will not participate in a colonial political system or vote in this year's federal election.” It is important that regardless of what settlers’ opinions (including my own) are about voting, that we respect the decisions of First Nations, Metis, and Inuit people on these issues.
Fascism does not erupt out of nowhere during an election night. It takes years, even decades, for the right conditions and intentions to coalesce. In the United States, the Christian nationalist project that undergirds the Project 2025 plan that Trump is carrying out, is an intergenerational project.
Unlike our neighbours to the south last November, we are not voting for or against an actual fascist—this time. We need to commit to creating a society that never puts a fascist on the ballot. There are lots of ways to do that. The principle of “everyday antifascism” calls on us to “increase the social cost of oppressive behaviour to such a point that those who promote it see no option but for their views to recede into hiding.” On April 28, one way to do that is to use your ballot to deny a platform to any candidate or party that spreads hate, scapegoating, and conspiracy theories and to make it clear that those kinds of tactics lose elections.
In the circles I run in there is a lot of shame attached to decisions about voting. It makes inaction seem like the safest option. I have been wrestling with all these points for a long time now and the best way I have learned to sort out a way forward is in community. That means having conversations with trusted friends and family that allow space for both the hope and hopelessness of this moment. It means letting go of purity and perfection in favour of openness and humility.
I don’t believe that there is a singular philosophy or reading group or mailing list or political tendency that will get us to the other side of this. The path forward is not a superhighway —it is a cobblestone road that we are all responsible for building brick by brick to a utopian horizon we cannot see, but must believe in ferociously anyway.
