In this provincial election, definitions are paramount. At least, so I've come to think after my years of writing political science essays as a McGill student. Vague terms figure all too often in our discussions, and as Orwell noted in his timeless Politics and The English Language, such political rhetoric does little more than aggravate our ignorance. The English language, in fact, plays a central role in the recent events that occurred to several Anglophone students during the past week, when the Parti Québecois's Bertrand St-Arnaud raised his shrill cry of "They're stealing our election!"
This paraphrasing, regrettably, only slightly exaggerates St-Arnaud's sentiments, which initially took the form of "We don't want this election stolen by people from Ontario and the rest of Canada." The phrase's panicked pitch, likely designed to elicit a kneejerk populist reaction from the Parti's faithful ("stealing our election? Not in my province!"), was quickly debunked by Quebec's chief electoral officer. "The British are coming," indeed.
The linguistic ambiguities that Orwell so adroitly skewered in his essay are the through line in the string of political abuses which have befallen English-speaking students as of late. After the PQ's awkward attempt at political football, the federalist faction followed suit by focusing -- rightly so -- on troubling instances of Anglophone students being falsely deemed as ineligible to vote; the most laughable, if perhaps not the most disgraceful, instance of this occurred when Branden Edge, a McGill student who is himself running as a candidate for the Green Party of Quebec, was rejected. The reason these voter hopefuls -- all Canadian citizens above the age of eighteen who had lived in Montreal for longer than six months -- were turned away concerns the nebulous concept of domiciling: the intention to make Quebec one's home.
According to student reports, voting officials have claimed that having an out-of-province drivers' license or health card means that one is not domiciled, irrespective of leases, utility bills, provincial tax payments, or length of Quebec residence -- a somewhat arbitrary set of conditions. Clearly, these criteria are all the more at risk of being employed in a slapdash manner when one considers that several of these students had previously voted in municipal and federal elections in Montreal. Keeping in mind that a domicile's official definition is "the place with which a person's important actions or 'states' of civic life are associated", it is difficult to argue that someone who holds a Quebec license has exhibited a greater degree of civic participation than someone who has voted within the province in various elections.
Students' being rejected on the whims of the elections officers would have been shameful, but perhaps not quite as egregious, had they some form of recourse. Unfortunately, these officials, knows as revisors, "form an independent authority and have full jurisdiction and competency to enter new electors on the lists of electors, make corrections to the lists, or strike names from the lists." To translate: revisors seem to be the end of the line.
Several students, such as McGill's Adam Holloway Stikuts, were able to register following initial rejection by returning and speaking to different revisors or to their supervisors. This eventual success, however, underscores the fact that that when insufficient linguistic precision is coupled with haphazard revisor training, registration becomes subservient to bureaucratic fickleness; that is to say, it degenerates into a crapshoot. If you are barred from putting your name on an electoral roll by virtue of a supreme official who interprets a vague term in line with a personal bias, whether conscious or unconscious, you may as well start praying. Just make sure that your beliefs conform to the PQ's charter, first.
You may very well agree, and be inclined to give little import to the fact that a handful of students were rejected from registering to vote. What of it, if these few votes will be, at most, a drop in the electoral ocean? Rights, however, cannot to be spurned based on their utility to the masses, nor are they subject to the personal caprices of voting officials.
Robert Dahl, one of the 20th century's most influential political scientists, had several criteria in his definition of democracy. One of the central requirements of his framework was voting equality: not only must all citizens' votes be of equal weight, but all citizens must be afforded equal and effective opportunity to vote. By this definition, the ambiguity surrounding the concept of domicile has resulted in students' rights being unceremoniously violated. Then again, I suppose such are the politics of the English language in Quebec.
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