The Manitoba Provincial Election is Tomorrow (or, Mercifully It's Almost Over)

Can you feel the excitement? Oh, boy! Ha, ha! What fun!

Let's just go ahead and proclaim that the summer officially starts after this election is over and done with; the weather wasn't nearly good enough to justify the May Long Weekend as the start of summer, and quite honestly our carefree days of summer aren't going to show up until we've all successfully banished politics from our collective frontal lobes. (If a federal election is called before September, I say we riot.)

I'm not going to deign to make seat-count or riding-by-riding election predictions, because -- as anybody who has been keeping up with my Stanley Cup predictions can attest to -- I am very bad at predicting things. But I will make one prediction, as regards an area of the election that nobody else has brought up yet: the voter turnout.

Are you ready? Here it comes.

The voter turnout is going to be really bad.

(Yes. Valuable insight. I bet you're glad you dropped by today.)

The 2003 provincial election drew a turnout of 54%, which is just terrible. Then last year's civic election drew a voter turnout of 38%, which is even worse -- and we were lucky to get that many voters. Winnipeg is a city of such overwhelming apathy towards seemingly everything that it's almost impossible to get fourty per cent of Winnipeg to care about anything at any given time except for... er, for... crap, I did name this blog properly. I should be ashamed of myself.

I tend to be an incurable optimist when it comes to things that I should really know better about, but even I'm going to register genuine surprise if this election breaks fifty-five per cent across the province. I'm going to stake my prediction as 52.7% of eligible voters showing up tomorrow, with no better than 45% turnout across the city of Winnipeg. Here's hoping I'm wrong!

(Incidentally -- and of all the ideas -- The CBC will be airing election coverage tomorrow night instead of the hockey game; god bless publicly owned television, because no privately owned station could ever get away with ratings suicide this severe.)

Me? I'm going to go out and vote tomorrow, even though I'm the only person I know in my age group who intends to vote and even though I know full well that my vote is absolutely meaningless in the larger scale. (Yes, it is. I'm not deluded here.) And then on Wednesday it'll all be over, everybody will be miserable for the next four years no matter what the outcome is, and we can all get on with the more important things in life! Like fighting off the multiple oncoming biblical-level plagues of insects!

Happy Victoria Day, tiny and embittered electorate!