 Welcome to the show, Ken. Nice to have you here yet again. And yes, I'm very interested in finding out how Canada compares to the US in terms of voting. Well, Canada is very different, but to me, when you talk about voting, you have to start with your definition of democracy. I like to think that the purpose of voting or voting and democracy go together. Democracy is, by simple definition, the rule by the majority, well, or rule by whoever gets to vote. And if they get to vote fairly, and if they get to vote if they're informed and so on. So you have to kind of get, what are the key parts of democracy and voting that you need as prerequisites to assess voting in one country compared to another? Certainly the United States has a better voting system than Russia or Iran, but everything is kind of in degree. Russia claims their voting is democratic. So does Iran. So does Turkey. And I am really wondering about whether things were on the straight and narrow in Turkey just a couple of days ago. Well, I think it's similar to Hungary, not maybe a little better, maybe a little worse. I don't know the details, but really you kind of need, are the voters educated and informed? Well, if you take a first example, US versus Canada, if the only news and information for a federal election that an American gets is on the Fox, oh, I'll call it propaganda channel, because I have trouble describing it as news because it isn't really news. It's such a bias that you really don't have an informed voter. You know, so your voting doesn't mean much. Your democracy is less democratic. Yeah, don't forget about radio. You get Sinclair radio with 300 stations across the country and they all have the same propaganda on them and they're all right wing. And that's just as bad or possibly worse for large stretches of the hinterland in this country. So it's not only Fox News and Newsmax, it's other media too. And if they listen to one, they probably stay in the other to be part of that bubble. But the reality is they are not educated about the truth and you can't have democracy. You can't have full and fair voting if you don't have an educated citizenry. Well, there's education and being informed about the issues and the candidates. Well, then you also have, you know, are the voters able to mobilize and work together to try to help campaign? Like how does your campaigning work? You know, like campaigning in Canada, the most campaigns are limited in the length of time. You know, you really have about 60 days maximum during which all of the campaigning is done. You know, they had a provincial election in Alberta that one of the made provinces in Canada, that was very hotly contested and where it's the province that most fights the federal government for everything under the sun. But that, you know, there was only about 45 days for all of the campaigning. But let's stay with that for a minute. If I were part of the national American media, I would say that's not enough time. I'm really asking for your reaction. That's not enough time to inform the citizenry. Canada should have long campaigns just the way the United States does. We have the benefit of examining the candidates in great detail over a period of time and testing them and letting people see how they conduct themselves. And this is valuable to the public in terms of informing the public even about the gestalt of a candidate. You know, how does he deal under the lights and the heat of a debate and so forth versus a limited period of time where you really don't get to know him? So some of the media will argue with that. Some of the media will say it's better to have long campaigns. And you know, in this country, we have campaigns that start on the day of the previous election. So there's a real issue there about how much money you spend on these campaigns. Comment? Pardon me, laughing at your generalization. I couldn't help but think of George Santos in the context of everything he just said. You know, that is, you know, the party selection in the US, you know, leaves no other choice. And you know, there's, in Canada and the US, there's very much voting for the party rather than voting for the candidate. But- So what's the benefit of having a short election cycle? I mean, a short campaign period. Well, you know, are you talking an election for a president or for a congressional person or whatever? Like in your US, in the presidential thing, you know, you're picking the runner, usually the president's running again. You know, you very rarely seem to have two candidates neither of which is the residing president. But in Canada, the party's, the leader of the party is elected by the party members that have been internal elected. You know, so your leader of the opposition in the Canadian parliament or in the British or Australian parliament, everybody knows about them because of the way they behave in opposition of what they have to say. I mean, if you're informed then you're watching reasonable newscast. But, you know, that sort of the first item in that regard is really there. But what that campaign period is one thing. But another factor that affects voting is registration. You know, in Canada, registration is a non-existing item almost because if you pay income tax or you have a driver's license, you get automatically registered. If your immigration department, you know, has a similar type of automatic feature. So that, and you know, we have no rules about you cannot register if you blah, blah, blah. I mean, if you're a Canadian citizen, you can vote, period. I mean, even prisoners, like people who are in prison can vote the U.S. prohibits prisoners even if somebody's got some minor change for, you know, insulting their wife so harshly that they got penalized for abuse or whatever. The, you know, we even allowed the worst of criminals to vote. Very interesting. So how's the turnout? Well, oddly, you know, that's one item that Canada's weaker on than the U.S. Like the U.S. makes such a fuss about registration and makes it so difficult to register and very difficult to vote. Like, like you'd never see, you know, a lineup at a Canadian polling station, no matter what the election is, you know, unless there's like a hailstorm or something going on. Like the U.S. so that we have more voting places to vote and you can vote early and you can even register to vote on the day of you're gonna vote. So you don't have all that politicization of voting as a right. You don't have a provincial legislate, legislatures making rules that are racist in nature and they try to suppress voting. I assume, by the way, in asking that, I assume that the various provinces do have some legislative control over who can vote. No? Actually, for a federal election, the federal government decides, period. How about the provincial election? The provincial, each province does their own, but they really piggyback on the federal system and the federal voter registration system. And well, you really have, a variety of different things where, you know, the provinces don't really have much role in determining the districts. When you have a provincial election, they get to, you know, set some of the particulars. However, they don't get to gerrymander the districts and they don't get to restrict who can vote. And they don't get to restrict who the candidates are that, you know, can run against the party in power. You know, really the, you know, in the United States where the state legislatures tend to be setting the districts, you get ridiculous gerrymandering. Now, Canada resets their electoral districts, whether it's for municipal, federal, or provincial every 10 years, as does the U.S. But we have an independent commission that appoints independent people to do set the voting districts. And then a district isn't really set finally until after public hearings have been held. And they have significant adjustments based on whatever the public hearing results. It's, you know, it's a much fairer system. Well, it's not politicized. Right. Now, you know, I take the concept of gerrymandering, you go a couple of steps further. The concept, like the U.S. Senate, you know, is really not very democratic. You know, when you have Wyoming with the same number of senators as California, you know, where California has, I don't know whether it's 60, 70 times the population. And so that you really end up where you can have and the U.S. now does have what I call the rule by the minority. Yeah. So the whole thing about the Senate and the two seats per state, that doesn't exist in Canada? No. Senators in Canada are appointed by the existing government. You know, when there's a vacancy. So you can say, well, gee, they picked some friendly party guy, but the first choice is always the ex-premier of a province, you know, or the ex-attorney general of a province. You know, so, you know, in the U.S., you know, if you took former governors, you know, there's some fantastic governors, like, you know, the governor of Washington state, you know, they just, what a gem. I mean, I liked him as a candidate for president, but the, you know, that's what most of our senators are. You know, they have phenomenal political experience by running something. And it's just, and it's the same as the British system, you know, where they started with it called the House of Lords, you know, and they kind of inherited the title, but after a while, it really, they became similar to the Canadian ones. Well, What about candidates who have had run-ins with the law? What about some of these, you know, governors of the provinces who may have been indicted, tried, who knows what? Did they disqualify or can they run also? I don't know of any Canadian premier having ever been indicted. You know, you really have, in a sense, historically, Canada's had more honest politicians than Americans. We have no Spiro Agnews in our closet. We have no, you know, Richard Nixon's, you know, we don't have any Donald Trumps. We have some maybes, you know, like people, the premier that just got elected in Alberta, you know, that she, this is a lady, and she had, the previous premier retired when it was through, well, his term was not finished. So of course, the elected representatives got to elect from their members who would be the premier of Alberta and this gal was premier for less than a year. And then, you know, the time for an election was, you know, where she had to re-stamp and it was supposed to be a little closer than it turned out to be, but it was a case where the press very correctly said, you know, she's a little bit too Trumpish. It's a question of whether they're gonna vote for the party despite who the leader is, you know, but the leaders in Canada don't have quite the same power as they do in the US. Are there other contests, Ken, like for example, you know, a lot of this comes out of Trump anyway, you know, I want to re-vote. I don't believe the, you know, the data. I don't believe who you say won. I want to go to court. I want to go to the Supreme Court and contest every step in the system because I believe that the only person that could have won this election is me. Do you ever have that? We have challenges, but only when they're really, really, really close voting telling, and it's really to require re-vote. That's it. I don't know of any, you know, objections like, you know, we've had the US, but of course everybody in the world is learning from, you know, Bolsonaro and Trump and, you know, and the guy in Pakistan, Imran Khan, you know, saying, you know, well, if I lost, there must have been some problem. Yeah, they're learning from Trump and you anticipated my next question. My next question is to hear you have Canada and the people in Canada who have a certain culture around voting and democracy and we can examine that also, but they look across the border and they see this craziness happening in the US about people, you know, people having their votes are suppressed about having state legislatures do visibly racist things to prevent certain groups from voting. You have all these contests and all the denials of the validity of the system. They must look across the border and have a certain reaction. When I say they, I mean, you and your friends and the people you talked to, what is the reaction of the Canadian, you know, citizenry about what has been happening in the US on these voting issues? The outlook's very negative towards US attitude of suppressing who can vote and the discrimination but one of the things that's important in that regard is to put in context that the US has a lot of racial problems because you're sitting where I don't know whether it's nearly 50% of the US population is either brown or black. You know, in Canada, I think our largest non-white people are still the native Indians but like it's only less than 5% of the population. So we don't have enough non-white people to create the same racial mess. But you have diversity, you have been diverse accepting tolerant of, you know, of immigrants much more than the US has at least in recent years, say after World War II. And, you know, Canada is filled with different cultures, languages, diversity. And it's one of your great points. We've talked about that. So, you know, I just wonder are you saying that that diversity in all of its, you know, issues that does not lead to racial prejudice? Well, the various machinations that give rise to prejudice, you have to put in the context that for the most part, Canada gets to pick its immigrants. You know, the United States, when you think of slavery, you started with the black population. You didn't allow them in for the purpose of being normal voting citizens and with equal rights. You know, they were just there. Now, you have a lesser native population than we do proportionally because, you know, you just wiped most of them out. The Trail of Tears, the Cherokee Indians, for example. Well, it doesn't matter how you describe it. We had some massacres, but not to the same degree, especially in places like British Columbia. Now, you also have, you know, the brown population or mainly, you know, the Mexican and South Americans that, you know, are pushing at the border, but they're, you know, very large in number. You know, you'll have 60 or 70 million Hispanics. You know, in similar number of blacks, you know, where we really just don't have that. I mean, in the city I live in, probably the largest minority other than natives. Like we have a pretty good native population in British Columbia, but probably Punjabi, you know, from India and Pakistan. You know, and they're great citizens, but, you know, we got to pick them. Like they applied for immigration. They were normally, you know, a well-to-do family in India and well-educated or whatever. Like we have a medical profession, you know, it's just loaded with doctors from India and Pakistan and Bangladesh and any place that could speak English, then particularly they used to be in the Commonwealth. Do they vote? Oh, yeah. Do they hold political office and aspire to positions of political leadership? Tons of them. Oh, yeah, it's, you know, like the most conservative, like, you know, I think of the negative racial things in the US to me, they seem to be more slanted for the Republican side or the small C conservatives seem to be the most racial. Well, Alberta is the most conservative province in Canada or it and Saskatchewan or flip up. I mean, they're in the same league of Texas for most things. And yet the most conservative city was Calgary, you know, it's about a million and a half people and they had a mayor that was gay and a musler and overweight. You know, like if you get a picture of somebody, you know, you'd have, you know, the handsome guy like Bill Clinton, you know, is a favored candidate mainly because they look like a nice person. Like, you know, movies start rumbling, raking and Clint Eastwood would get elected more easily than somebody who's, you know, not physically attractive. This reminds me of an article in the paper about a small town in Germany, which, you know, has had racial problems and has had since around 2015 or so, you know, huge numbers of migrants coming in and being welcomed, you know? And in this small town, which small towns are conservative and this small town was conservative, there was a young migrant Syrian, as a matter of fact, who decided to run for mayor of this town that he was a nice looking, happy looking, articulate guy. He had mastered the language and all that. He ran for mayor and he won handily and he's now the mayor of a small conservative German town. So maybe we're into something here. Maybe things are changing. Maybe Canada is on the forefront to allow people who are essentially cultural minorities to take office. Yes, I mean, you had a vice president. You know, like that, that's pretty outstanding. You had a president that was black, you know? So, you know, there's possibilities. Like I, you know, I think of the German one, reminded me of when I was at the University of Alberta many, many years ago. And there was only, to my knowledge, only one black student in the entire university. Wow. And he ran for an office. Yeah. And everybody voted for him just to prove they weren't biased. Okay, there you go. There you go. We have lived in interesting times. Yeah, like it was an opposite reason, not because he was the best candidate or, or, or, it was simply to show, you know, that we're not discriminatory in the University of Alberta student body at that time. I want to examine one more thing with you Ken. Early on today, you said that the turnout is not that great. Not, not as great as you might hope. And certainly we have problems in turnout. Two people are really turned off by what happens. And there's another phenomenon and I want to see if we can connect them. And the phenomenon is the Canadians look across the border and they see all this trouble and it affects them. And not only in terms of their philosophical reaction, you know, or their emotional reaction, but also in terms of, you know, making their own arrangements, making their own institutions, taking political paths, what have you. So my question is, why is the turnout low in Canada, which is so diverse and so tolerant? Why is the turnout low in Canada? In the face of that, you would expect it to be much better. You, I would expect you to tell me that, oh, the turnout's great. People care about government, they care about participating, they care about democracy. But at the other side of the coin, I say, well, maybe they look south over the border and they say, maybe we should get some of that virus, the Trump virus and be turned off by the voting system. And therefore we don't care. Is there that, why do they not turn out in droves? Well, the turnout is not much different than the US. That is, in Canada, I think you have about 98% of the people who are 18 and over and eligible, whatever demographic you could describe to say, they could possibly, they could legally be a voter. About 98% are registered to vote. But really only a little less than 70% actually turn up to vote on most elections, using a federal election in particular was where I saw something like 68% where in the United States, because of so many restrictions on getting registered and everything else should really only have less than 70% of people who are of the age to vote are actually registered to vote. And I don't know in the US, when you get a voter turnout percentage, whether it's the percentage of those who are registered to vote or the percentage of those that are 18 years of old and if they were in Canada or Britain would be able to vote. That's a really good question. I don't know the answer. I can tell you that in Hawaii, we have really dismal figures on turnout. And the last time I looked was like 40%, which is ridiculous. For a state which is otherwise progressive and to find out they don't care. And you can't have the same quality of government with a low turnout, that's my view of it. And the question I put to you finally is, what's the dynamic on this, Ken? Which way is it going? All the factors you've talked about, is it getting more democratic, a better educated citizenry? Is it getting higher turnout, getting more tolerance, more acceptance of everyone to vote or is it the other way? Well, I tend to think it's the other way. I kind of list of one of the reasons why the public is apathetic. Well, if you watch Jim Jordan, you don't just say, that's such a disgrace. How could Ohio even contemplate them? I mean, why isn't he impeached? From the Ohio caucus or whatever it is, Ohio Republican Party is just, now, the US political result, such as this vote on the debt ceiling, you know, like the public must be, like I use the term, American public seems to be dumber than the Canadian public, even about US affairs. I mean, I could talk to, you know, my nearest 10 neighbors and absolutely every one of them would know that the US debt ceiling, you know, really is not the same as what the Republicans are asking for in budget cuts. You know, the debt ceiling has nothing to do with the budget. You know, those are, the debt ceiling is last year's expenditures, which Trump and friends approved most of, or the last 10 years worth, they certainly contributed to the deficit. Yeah. So that I still think though that the Canadian voter apathy, you know, it's really, you know, well, does my vote really make a difference in what's gonna happen? You know, they're gonna fumble along anyhow. Now there's less self-enrichment in the Canadian, from Canadian politicians, you know, and we've had some recent scandals that, you know, you know, Canadian Prime Minister indirectly was, you know, somebody was paying his mother to give speeches. And anyhow, though, the apathy towards the voting is, you know, there are no, you know, in one election like, you know, in British Columbia where it's a fairly close provincial race, your turn out's much better, you know, because people think, well, gee, my vote may make a difference. Yeah, that's so interesting that you have, you know, the way the press presents it affects the turnout. I guess we always knew that, but it's troubling if the press is not presenting an accurate picture and that enhances the turnout. There should be a turnout intrinsically by people who care, who are informed. Well, Ken, thank you very much. This is an interesting comparison. I must say in the comparison, I am in no way more optimistic about the direction of the American experience, but hopefully understanding the difference will help some people understand there is a better way. Dr. Ken Rogers, retired businessman in Kelowna, Canada, thank you so much. The bars isn't perfect, but it's better than yours.