By Joe Johnson (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: April 10, 2013
Former UFV student Andrew Mercier has been politically active since receiving his degree in political science. As a Teamster and shop steward at his place of work he’s socially minded, and now with five current UFV students and alumni on his campaign team, at the age of 27 he’s the NDP candidate for Langley in the upcoming May 14 Provincial Election.
Voter turnout in youth is problematic and getting more-so. How do you go about turning this around?
That’s an important question because the Liberals have just cut funding to Elections BC, and I think this is a pretty similar tactic we’ve seen across the globe with conservative parties. The Republican Party pioneered voter suppression in the United States, which is to make it difficult for people to vote. You cut funding to the independent elections bodies to register people, and then you blanket the air with negative ads, which disengages people and turns them off.
We need to address this issue before it becomes a crisis in our democracy. Right now people who are under thirty vote at a rate of less than 30 per cent, and as soon as one generation passes and that becomes the norm in Canadian society, if that trend is continued, we will have a massive crisis of democratic legitimacy. If only 30 per cent of people are registered, and only half of that number show up to the polls on election day, which has been the recent trend, you’ll have governments elected with six or seven per cent of the vote.
I hear this at the doorstep all the time when talking to young people. I’ve talked to hundreds if not thousands of young voters – I myself am 27. Usually I hear people’s issues with the political system, and by the time I finish talking with them, the number one issue I hear is “how do I register to vote?” There are more barriers put in place of younger people voting than almost anyone else and what we need to do is ensure that everyone’s registered, because people that are registered to vote are more likely to vote.
What we’ve proposed to do is to lower the age of voter registration to the age of 16, register students in high schools—in social studies classes—so that when they become 18 they’re registered and we’ll start to see those numbers climb back up. And that’s not a substitute, also, for engaging people, which means talking about the issues and not pandering or beating around the bush on questions.
Being a former UFV student, how has the university affected you? Any professors that have helped you along the way?
I started going to UFV in 2004. I was working full time when I was doing that. It was UCFV back then and I was fortunate to go to it because UFV is a smaller school where you get to really know your professors and you get to forge relationships. A lot of my friends who went to bigger schools didn’t have that. One of my best friends went to UBC and he was always one of a hundred students in the class.
I was very fortunate to study with Hamish Telford in the faculty of political science. Hamish is one of Canada’s preeminent experts in Canadian federalism, which I think is little understood. So I was very, very fortunate to have that experience. The problem is “how do you build a social democracy in a federal country where social programs are provincial?” I think, it’s something very practical, but it’s something we need to be very cognizant of as social democrats and progressive minded people.
I was also very fortunate to take classes with Ron Dart and ethics courses with Glen Baier, which really shaped a lot of my political thinking. But also the mentorship of Scott Fast. Scott is someone that I still speak with that has been a tremendous mentor in my life – I probably wouldn’t be running if it wasn’t for Scott.
So I think if I didn’t go to the University of the Fraser Valley I probably wouldn’t be as engaged or involved as I am right now.
Since becoming an NDP candidate in September 2011 what have you found to be the most pressing issues in your Langley riding?
People don’t trust the government. I’ve knocked on about 5000 doors. I’ve had more than 3000 conversations with people in Langley. And the number one thing that I hear is that people want change because they think this government has done a bad job. The thing I hear after that is that people aren’t planning on voting because they don’t trust politicians. And I think people have an intuitive understanding of the way the system is structured.
Right now in BC, in terms of financing political parties, it is the wild west. It is the last frontier. You can take as much money as you want from anyone, and people understand that the process works like this. And they’re disgusted by it, they’re turned off by it, because they understand that essentially what happens in a system where you can take that much money from anyone, dollars become votes. The Liberals had a fundraiser a couple of month’s back where they raised $2 million. They had a very small number of people going because it was massive corporations going in and buying tables.
We need to return to a system where it’s one person, one vote. And the way we do that is by banning corporate and union donations. I think that’s how we address the democratic deficit that exists in BC politics right now.
There are some major energy projects coming down the line that will have environmental impacts. How do you balance the environmental affects when it comes to creating needed jobs?
We need a government that cares about the environment. And the only way you can get a government that cares about the environment is to vote for the NDP. The first thing the Liberals did when they introduced the carbon tax was they gave the money back to the biggest polluters in the province. When they introduced the Pacific Carbon Trust, they used that to take money for carbon offsets from schools and hospitals and give it to their corporate donors, Encana. What we need to do is make the environment a focus.
When Gordon Campbell was premier they signed the Equivalency Assessment Act with the federal government. And what this act did was say BC will no longer have its own environmental review panel to oversee the environmental assessment of big energy projects and infrastructure. So a project like Enbridge doesn’t go through a BC specific assessment, it only goes through a federal assessment and we accept that federal assessment as our assessment.
Now, Jim Flaherty in the last federal budget gutted the federal assessment process. So right now we have a federal assessment process that acts as a rubber stamp, and we’re accepting that as the final say on the environmental cost of energy projects. And that’s not right.
So what we’re going to do within 10 days of forming the government is withdraw from that and recreate a made in BC assessment process so that we can reclaim our jurisdiction over that issue And so that we can evaluate these programs with BC’s interest at mind. Enbridge can’t go through. And we need a government that’s capable of doing that, because if the BC Liberals get reelected we’ll have the Enbridge pipeline.
The Liberals have announced cuts to advanced education, and ultimately core funding to universities in the amount of $46 million over the next three years. Will the NDP reverse this?
This has been a problem ever since the Liberals lifted the tuition freeze that Glen Clark put into place in the 1990s. When I started to go to university in 2004 it was possible for me to work part-time and to take four classes. By the end of it, I was working two jobs and taking three classes because I could barely keep up because tuition had risen that fast within that timeframe.
What we need to do is prioritize education right now. Tuition has gone up virtually every year, and the amount of money you have—or your family has—dictates the level of education you’re capable of getting and your level of success for the rest of your life, and that’s not right. I graduated from university with $35,000 in student debt, and I’m still paying. Over 50 per cent of my income goes to paying student debt. What we need is a government that understands this problem.
So in terms of advanced ed funding, they’ve projected more cuts in this current budget. But what we’ve said is that they’re projecting these cuts to hide what is really a massive deficit, they have an $800 million deficit. So we’re going to reevaluate the budget when we get in, but one of our top priorities is to make sure there’s financial aid for students. And that’s why we’re going to put $100 million of revenue from raising the bank tax to 2008 levels into non-repayable student grants. Not loans – grants, to make sure students are capable of being able to afford an education.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
