As the federal election campaign picks up speed, the Citizen’s Bruce Deachman has been asking Ottawa residents to share, in their own words, some experiences and thoughts on voting. Today: Lesley Cockburn, of Leslie Park, on turning indifference into action:
“I guess I’m a new voter.
“I voted once, just after I turned 18, because my father literally forced me to. And then I voted again when Justin Trudeau was elected. And that was it. Those were the only two times I voted, until (Donald) Trump started happening in the States.
“I didn’t vote for a combination of reasons. I didn’t feel like I was informed enough. I don’t really care for politicians as a whole; I think they’re all lying about something. So voting just wasn’t that important to me. When I got off work, I was tired because of some health issues, and I just kind of said, ‘Screw it.’ Like, I really didn’t care. Sadly, it just came down to that.
“My friend Amy used to give me crap all the time. She’d say, ‘You can’t bitch about anything if you haven’t voted.’ And I just thought, ‘Well, I’m not really bitching about anything.’ I was so far removed from the political scene.
“But I did vote in the last provincial election and I’m voting in this election. Because of everything that’s happening in the States, I realized that people not voting is a much bigger problem than I thought it was. I’ve read so much about the States and the amount of people that didn’t vote, and it’s like, ‘Oh my god, I’m part of the problem if things go wrong.’
“So I like to think that my vote might make a difference. And if I can get people to vote and get out of what I was doing, I would love that.”
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