ROCK THE VOTE is a non-profit organization Lobbying for the rights of Students , Writers , Artists and Musicians ( S.W.A.M. )

involved in politics, social activism and environmental issues.

Creating Political Power for The Culture Class.

Rock The Vote

 Lobbying for N.O.T.A.

Endorse THE N.O.T.A. OPTION

"None of The Above"

On All Voting Ballets

The People's Veto

Statement of Principle: All legitimate consent requires the ability to withhold consent; "None of the Above" gives the voter the ballot option to withhold consent from an election to office, just as voters can cast a "No" vote on a ballot question. In Canada we have options of returning a ballot, or spoiling it and though the numbers of spoiled ballots are counted there is no recourse to the lack of support of our elected prime ministers, Mayors and Premiers.

If "None of the Above; For a New Election" receives the most votes, no candidate is elected to that office and a follow-up by-election, with new candidates, is held. Follow-up by-elections are far less costly than electing unacceptable candidates to office.

"N.O.T.A." Would end the "must hire" elections where voters are often forced to vote for the least unacceptable candidate, the all too familiar "lesser evil." The meaning of elections should become more clear, since voters would no longer be tempted to vote for a presumed losing candidate, with whom they really do not agree, as a protest vote.

N.O.T.A. should reduce negative campaigning by encouraging candidates to campaign for their own candidacy rather than against their opponent's candidacy. Additionally this will mean a return to issue based politics, with a strong power in place to punish those who do not fulfill election promises. Many voters and non voters, who now register their disapproval of all candidates for an office by not voting, could cast a meaningful vote.

Campaign contributors who give to all candidates to insure "access" would no longer be sure they backed the winner; in general, buying elections should become a more uncertain enterprise.

Office holders, knowing they face "N.O.T.A." in the next election, would be encouraged to insure their re-election by focusing more on doing a good job in office and less on attempting to prevent the emergence of an effective opposition candidate or gaining contributions from those who have a vested interest in controlling the political system.
When pre-election polls include "N.O.T.A.", the feedback from voters should help guide candidates and parties. Even when "N.O.T.A." does not win or is a non-binding N.O.T.A. the reported NOTA vote would help identify those offices for which voters might be more receptive to new candidates in a future election as well as limits the winner's mandate.

Lastly, opportunities for election fraud should be reduced because fewer blank votes for an office would be cast.

Rock The Vote is dedicated to enacting Voter Consent laws.

Canada should Support Quebec students and message against austerity

No wonder those Quebec student protestors have been spooking the English Canadian establishment. If they get their way, the same ideas could catch on here, leaving the best-laid plans for austerity in tatters.

What seems to particularly gall some English Canadian commentators is the

fact that the Quebec students — who reached a tentative deal with the province on the weekend after a three-month strike — have been protesting tuition hikes that would still leave them with the lowest tuition in the country. Why can’t these spoiled brats be grateful, and go back to watching video games and keeping up with the Kardashians like normal, well-adjusted North American youth?

It’s that old problem about Quebec. Somehow people there manage to shake a bit loose from the rigid corporate-imposed mindset that has gripped North America in recent decades, convincing us that we as a society must cut back on things — like university education and old age pensions — that were somehow affordable in days when our society was a lot less rich.

The Quebec students, more attuned to the outside world, have figured out that this self-denial has more to do with dogma than with some new reality allegedly necessitated by the global economy.

How else to explain the fact that many northern European nations manage to keep university education easily affordable — even free in Scandinavia — while managing to compete very effectively in the global economy?

The Norwegian embassy in Ottawa confirmed yesterday that, in addition to free tuition, Norway provides a stipend to cover much of a student’s living expenses. (Of course, Norway is blessed with ample oil reserves — almost as blessed as Canada.)

The Scandinavians — and the Quebec students — consider higher education a public good, essential to democracy.

Many Scandinavian countries demonstrate their commitment to this concept — and to genuine global community — by even offering free university tuition to foreigners, including North Americans. We reciprocate by treating foreign students like cash cows to be milked relentlessly, charging them tuition fees roughly three times the Canadian rate.

Now there’s the spirit of global co-operation!

This lack of generosity toward others isn’t surprising since we even throw our own young under the bus. Student debt here, which falls disproportionately on low-income households, now totals $14.4 billion and growing by the second, as demonstrated by the ticking debt clock on the Canadian Federation of Students website.

Of course, high tuition also enables our establishment to keep students on a tight leash, focused on getting into professional and business schools (where they’ll have some hope of repaying their debts) and keeping clear of courses that might teach them to question prevailing orthodoxies and mindsets.

Some mistakenly see a generational war going on here. But the austerity fetishists also have their sights set on the older crowd, with plans to take away two years of their retirement.

Under the more sensible Scandinavian approach — banned under the business dogma that dominates here — the tax and transfer system helps citizens move through the stages of their lives.

Education is paid for by those in the workforce whose retirement will later be paid for by the students whose education they paid for. Over the life cycle, it all works out. Everybody contributes when they’re working, and gets a hand at the beginning and end of their lives.

Everyone also has a chance to develop to the best of their abilities, maximizing their own potential and raising national productivity.

Rex Murphy, writing in the National Post, dismissed the student protests as “the future elite of Quebec having a self-indulgent fit.”

It’s an odd form of self-indulgence. Tens of thousands of students have marched hundreds of hours in the cold, potentially jeopardizing their academic (and financial) futures, in order to champion accessible education for all as the cornerstone of a democratic society.

If only they could be less self indulgent, and stick to drinking, partying and finding themselves a comfortable niche in the corporate world.

Linda McQuaig

Canada’s war on drugs is getting nowhere

Peter McKenna

A Colombian farmer harvests coca leaves in the first step of the production of cocaine.

Having just returned from Colombia — once known as the cocaine capital of the world — it’s not hard to see why impoverished Colombians turn to the cultivation and production of coca leaf and opium poppies.

The climate is most receptive, the scarcity of money is palpable, and there are few substitutes for such lucrative crops. The so-called “balloon effect” also makes any crackdown on production ineffective, since crop cultivation, drug laboratories and transportation routes squeezed in one area will inevitably pop up somewhere else.

Is it time, then, for the Canadian government to revisit our endorsement of a “war on drugs” approach to the illicit drug problem in Latin America? Such a hard-line, and often militarized, strategy to narcotrafficking has produced precious little in terms of tangible results.

Mexico has been fighting the drug war for almost six years now and the supply to the U.S. market has remained largely intact — or even increased. But on the Mexican side, there is violence and seemingly irreducible carnage in certain parts of the country, and more than 50,000 drug-related deaths mark Mexico’s failed efforts thus far.

For the law-and-order government of Stephen Harper — who has, incidentally, made inter-American affairs a key priority of his foreign policy — any softening of a robust supply-side approach is simply not on.

Harper’s communications director, Andrew MacDougall, was blunt when he spoke to one media outlet: “The prime minister would be a strong voice in that debate against the decriminalization of drugs. The government’s strategy is in fact completely in the opposite direction.”

Some political leaders and opinion-makers in the Americas, however, are now speaking out loud about the possibility of legalization and regulation of the drug market or, at least, the decriminalization of the region’s robust drug trade.

In a mid-April interview with Agence France Presse, and just before the beginning of the Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia, Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina explained: “The war we have waged over the past 40 years has not yielded results. It’s a war which, to speak frankly, we are losing.”

Even the summit host country’s president, Juan Manuel Santos (a Harper ally), pushed for a vigorous discussion around the table of drug legalization.

In the end, the summit nations agreed to punt the drug football down the field for the time being by calling for more study of the various alternatives. Nonetheless, there is a growing mood in the region for something radically different — and this desire for change is not likely to disappear soon.

But as Harper said during his concluding summit news conference: “Let me remind you of why these drugs are illegal. They are illegal because they quickly and totally — with many of the drugs — destroy people’s lives and people are willing to make lots of money out of selling those products to people and destroying their lives.”

The issue here, however, is not about the harmful effects of heroin and cocaine. It’s about how best to regulate, confront and diminish the negative ramifications of illicit drugs.

Obviously, Canada has important interests at stake here, since drugs from Latin America make their way to our streets — accompanied by criminal behaviour and the devastation of Canadian lives and families.

So if Canada is to jettison the “war on drugs” paradigm, what should our new strategy be?

First, the Canadian government needs to acknowledge that the militarization of the drug war has been unsuccessful and counterproductive. After that, we can start to think about providing meaningful financial assistance to improve the region’s police and justice systems, halting programs that spray harmful chemicals on farmers’ fields, and assisting in finding alternative cash crops to coca leaf and poppies.

More to the point, we should not rule out the possibility of working with our Latin American partners to decriminalize (beginning with marijuana) or legalize the drug business — especially if it serves to undermine the transnational criminal groups that control it.

As of today, though, Canada (and the United States) stands out as one of the major dissenting voices on how to combat the drug problem. By doing so, we risk of damaging our image in the region, of being seen as obstructionist and overly U.S.-friendly, and even undermining our efforts to widen and deepen our linkages with the Americas. We should “just say yes” to new thinking.

Peter McKenna is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island in Charlottetown.

May Day gives Canadian unions a chance to reflect on the future of labour

Tomorrow is May 1, but you could be forgiven for wondering which event Canadian labour unions will be commemorating.

Is it the international day of celebrations of unions and working people widely celebrated in Quebec and Europe?

Or is the other Mayday, the signal of the life-threatening emergency?

Publicly reviled, politically sidelined and watching our membership numbers decline, there would seem to be little to celebrate.

But the biggest problem for unions may be a lack of imagination that prevents us from seeing new opportunities for connecting with workers and our natural constituencies.

What better time for fundamental reflection than now, when on the national scene we see signs of a coalescence of the progressive middle in Canadian politics?

With the election of Thomas Mulcair, we have an NDP leader who used to be a Liberal facing off against a Liberal leader who used to be a New Democrat.

As a committed Liberal and former NDP fellow traveller, I congratulate NDPers for having the courage to a take a chance on change rather than take the bait from old-timers like Ed Broadbent, who tried to demonize Mulcair as somehow un-NDP and unworthy of support.

The former NDP leader’s outburst shocked many, but it should not have. Mulcair’s triumph marks the end of social democracy as the internal value system of our new official opposition.

But there’s no point in pining for past political purity, though we unionists spend a lot of time doing it. It would be better for us to focus on the current moment – and on the opportunities it presents for us.

Mulcair’s arrival means goodbye to ideological politics in favour of those the Liberals have been practising for years (and pretty successfully, until lately). You avoid sharp edges (such as appeals to class politics) in favour of more ambiguous calls for fairness.

And with new election rules that end public subsidies and require funds to be raised from individual donors, political parties need to be entrepreneurial, connect with their constituency on an emotional level, and persuade them to part with their dollars.

Unions could take a lesson on all counts. Certainly, we have to speak forcefully when governments and other employers are at us to make concessions when for years we have been getting wage increases that barely keep up with inflation. But we also have to learn to speak in a way that makes people want to join a union, rather than run away.

Many people out there think that joining a union means going on strike (though more than 90 per cent of negotiations are settled without industrial action). Ratcheting up the rhetoric makes our militants feel good, but does little to score us new converts.

Unfortunately, fighting rear-guard actions leaves little energy for the original thinking that we so desperately need. We look to a change in labour laws as the answer to all our problems. If we could just have people sign cards and not have to go through a vote, our numbers would not be going down, we rationalize.

But image repair is more important than legal change if we want to get out of our deep funk. We need to convince workers that we have a valuable service that we can provide for a very modest charge – in many cases, less than your monthly cable TV bill. They don’t need a union because their employer is part of a capitalist conspiracy but because management advances the company’s interests and workers need someone to protect theirs.

And let’s not get hung up on those labour laws. As unions have done in Australia, let’s throw open our doors to anyone who wants to be a member, whether they are part of a certified bargaining unit or not. Like they would for any kind of membership, any worker Down Under can sign up online with a credit card, after which they are charged a monthly fee. In return, they get personal and confidential advice when they want it from an expert regarding the most important financial matter in their lives – their job.

Perhaps this is the game changer we need. Some might regard flogging memberships in this way as reducing ourselves to the same level as a fitness centre. I say that’s great. We want to be as inviting, non-threatening and as life-enhancing s your local sweat spot.

Yes, there is a future if we unionists can grasp it. Happy May Day.

Glenn Wheeler

OTTAWA—A new poll challenges conventional political wisdom by showing a majority of Canadians — including most Conservative voters and wealthy individuals — would support higher taxes to fight income inequality.

Higher taxes are supposedly political dynamite but the poll — the first major survey for the newly founded left-leaning Broadbent Institute — suggests the toxicity of taxation has been exaggerated and is the product of a concerted “ideological” campaign, says Ed Broadbent, the institute’s namesake.

A telephone survey of 2,000 Canadians by Environics Research asked about attitudes toward growing income inequality and the role of government and individuals in addressing it.

After canvassing whether respondents see inequality as a real problem, and whether the rich should pay more, it asked directly if people would “personally be very, somewhat, not very or not at all willing to pay slightly higher taxes if that’s what it would take to protect our social programs like health care, pensions and access to post-secondary education.”

In all, 64 per cent said they would be willing to pay “slightly higher taxes,” although what exactly “slightly” higher meant was not specified. Of the 64 per cent, 41 per cent were “somewhat” open and 23 per cent were “very” willing to pay more.

Surprisingly, it found a majority of support across gender, ages, education levels, family income and employment levels, and in most regions. Only in Quebec, the highest-taxed province, the survey found slightly less than majority support — 49 per cent — for higher taxes.

It said even a majority of Conservative voters (58 per cent) are somewhat willing to pay higher taxes to protect social programs, while Liberal and NDP voters are more supportive (72 per cent would pay more.)

“This attitude toward paying slightly higher taxes is reflected equally in high income and middle income Canadian households. It’s only their governments who are offside,” said a release that accompanies the poll to be published Tuesday. “These numbers prove that concern about income inequality cuts across partisan lines.”

Overall, 14 per cent said they were “not very willing” to pay more, 19 per cent were flatly “not willing,” while 3 per cent didn’t know or didn’t answer.

The survey tested three other scenarios: increasing the personal income tax rate on the rich with incomes above $250,000 and above $500,000; gradually increasing the corporate tax rates back to what they were in 2008 (19.5 per cent compared to 15 per cent now, though that wasn’t specified) and reinstating a 35 per cent inheritance tax on wealthy estates above $5 million, with spouses exempt.

All three options found a majority support across all groups, although Alberta’s support for increasing corporate tax rates was more tepid than other regions at 67 per cent, as was Conservative voters, although 62 per cent of Tories still supported raising corporate tax rates.

Broadbent, the former NDP leader, said the results went well beyond the “hunch” he’d had that Canadians would support not just higher taxes on the rich — “that’s not surprising,” — but would also tolerate paying more themselves. “That’s the tougher question: ‘what about your own taxes,’ ” he said in an interview.

The results also directly challenged a picture painted by the conservative Manning Centre’s recent polling which suggested Canadians want a reduced role for government in their lives, and are unlikely to believe government is able to solve the big problems of the day.

The Broadbent Institute’s survey found most Canadians (77 per cent) believe the growing gap between the rich and “everyone else” has long-term negative consequences, and want the government to make reducing the gap a high priority.

The survey, conducted between March 6 and 18, can be considered accurate to within plus or minus 2.2 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.