There was a rare opportunity for a civic-duty twofer on Monday in Ottawa. Citizens were urged to cast their ballot in the municipal election on the same day that Ottawa Public Health launched the general-population phase of its flu and COVID-19 immunization blitz, encouraging all local residents “to protect themselves and their loved ones” by getting their seasonal jabs.
In my neighbourhood (Sandy Hill, east of Parliament Hill), it was possible to exercise your franchise at an Elections Ottawa polling station on the second floor of uOttawa’s Minto Sports Complex and then walk about 45 seconds down a hallway to a campus pharmacy and take the flu and COVID shots.
As it turned out, the pharmacist at Shoppers Drug Mart was booked solid for the day by the time I’d arrived, so I got my shots a few hours later at another outlet in the neighbourhood. But lots of locals, no doubt, got the votes-and-vaccines package deal at Minto on Monday.
It required a time commitment of about 20 minutes — not a big ask to help sustain democracy and play a small part in keeping Ottawa healthy, especially its most vulnerable residents, as the cold weather sets in.
Three or four times a week, in the same building, I play hockey on one of the ground-floor rinks, and a bit too regularly drink post-game beers at the second-floor pub. I suppose that’s a wash on the health front. Hockey’s pretty expensive, but I also get free parking and take most of my showers every year at Minto; I guess that’s a wash, too, so to speak.
But October 26, 2026, has reconfigured the building in my imagination. Newfound realizations about the fragility our democratic institutions, including low trust in the reliability of election results, and rising skepticism about the authority of science — most acutely when it comes to the issue of vaccination — are defining features of the present era.
In less than a half-hour on Monday, it was possible for folks in my neck of the woods to do two things in this one place to counter two of the most dangerous trendlines in our society.
There will be some understandable handwringing after Monday’s municipal vote. Turnout in Ottawa was astonishingly feeble — barely 36 per cent, eight points less than in 2022 and the lowest in nearly a quarter-century. (The 2003 turnout of just 33 per cent was largely attributed to an uncompetitive fight for the mayor’s chair, easily won by incumbent Bob Chiarelli.)
This year’s mayoral race, too, was perhaps not as captivating as the ones in recent previous campaigns. No single issue framed the election. But the challenges facing the city only ever seem to multiply — transit and traffic, homelessness and open drug use, housing and affordability, infrastructure and finances, etc., etc. — and yet nearly 65 per cent of eligible voters didn’t get to a polling station to offer their two-cents’ worth.
There was ample opportunity, including numerous advance voting days. And how much more motivation should Canadians need to muster the energy to take a short walk and mark a few Xs, or fill in some dots on a piece of paper, than seeing what’s happening south of the Canada-U.S. border?
That’s where Trumped-up claims of widespread voter fraud and broken election machinery — along with endless false accusations of “fake news” and a concerted push towards authoritarianism on all fronts — are seriously undermining democratic norms in our neighbouring nation.
Opinions, of course, will vary on the merits of getting vaccinated for the good of oneself and one’s community. The convoy occupation of Ottawa in early 2022 (loudly supported, of course, by Donald Trump given its echoes of the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot) made clear that some people trust cranky, fringe podcasters more than epidemiologists and other medical experts when it comes to shoring up public health with a few needle pricks, even during a once-in-a-century global crisis.
Fortunately, during the pandemic, “voter turnout” at vaccination sites in Ottawa and across the country reached almost 85 per cent (for at least one dose of protection from severe illness for those aged five and older) and — according to various studies based on actual evidence — saved hundreds of thousands of Canadian lives.
Maybe the memory of that monumental achievement will continue to convince citizens to roll up their sleeve once a year for themselves and others. Oct. 26 was just the first day of months of available vaccination for the general public.
The stakes aren’t as high in the fall of 2026 as they were in winter of 2022, when Canadian hospitals faced being overwhelmed with serious COVID cases and the degree of urgency to “flatten the curve” of infection was extraordinary.
Likewise, maybe the stakes didn’t seem as high in this year’s municipal elections as they were in 2022, which marked the end of the Jim Watson era and presented a clear choice on the political spectrum between Mark Sutcliffe and Catherine McKenney, the leading candidates to succeed him.
But in a rare convergence of commitments to community, Monday gave the capital’s citizenry a chance to have our say about Ottawa’s future at the ballot box and — at the vaccination station — to do our bit for the health of Ottawa’s population in the here and now.
Randy Boswell is an Ottawa writer and a journalism professor at Carleton University.
The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.
