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MONTREAL - With voter turnout for municipal elections in the doldrums across the country, Quebec is turning to comic relief in a public-relations effort to propel its electorate to the polls this fall.
New TV ads feature a woman asking, "Why should I vote?" as she takes a gulp from a glass of the brown sludge trickling from her kitchen tap.
A cyclist asks himself that same question while manoeuvring through mounds of garbage beyond his driveway. One ad shows a man getting a kick in the gut in a crowded park. The host of a fictitious news website, www.rdn-tv.ca, covers the fallout from an election where nobody bothered voting.
The province's chief electoral officer is spending $1 million on an advertising campaign to highlight the importance of voting in a bid to resuscitate moribund interest for the upcoming municipal elections.
"It's the first time we're using the web," said Cynthia Gagnon, spokeswoman for Quebec's chief electoral officer. "It's a bit unique as far as Canada goes."
Low turnout is not a problem limited to Quebec - or Canada - as most western countries are struggling to find ways to tackle widespread voter apathy toward all levels of government.
But the trend is most pronounced at the municipal level, where turnout tends to hover at between 30 and 40 per cent of voters actually casting a ballot.
Among the largest Canadian cities, Toronto posted a 39 per cent turnout during its last municipal election in 2006. Vancouver was at 31 and 32 per cent in its last two elections.
The nation's political capital set the pace in 2006, when 54 per cent of voters in Ottawa cast ballots municipally - a major spike from 33 per cent in 2003.
Calgary had a dismal 18 per cent turnout in 2004 and did far better in 2007, with turnout at 33 per cent. It was just 27 per cent in Edmonton in 2007.
And Halifax, where officials had hoped to reach 50 per cent with a new electronic voting system in 2008, wound up with a disappointing 37 per cent.
Hence Quebec's change of tactics. Instead of bland visuals of ballots and faceless narrators imploring people to vote on Nov. 1, this year's spots aim to hit viewers over the head with the consequences of a municipal vote.
"We've wanted to get away from the symbolic nature of our old campaigns, like the 'x' or the polling box, and use a different approach," Gagnon said.
TV ads and sites like Youtube are the chosen forum being used by Quebec's chief electoral office.
The campaign has even caused a minor controversy.
The online component includes spoof news shows called "Chouinard en direct," or "Chouinard Live," where a manic, gesticulating TV host gets exercised over the poor turnout.
The spots drew the ire of Jean-Luc Mongrain - an animated, real-life TV host. He noted that the spoof anchor looked an awful lot like him, and his TVA news network demanded that the ads be pulled.
But the director of elections scoffed at the request. Its initial video had 40,000 hits on Youtube.
"Quebecers like humour - and the younger generation especially. We wanted to get down to their level, but using parody and a bit of exaggeration to demonstrate the link between citizen services and voting," Gagnon said.
Across Quebec in 2005, voter participation in municipal elections was about 45 per cent but only 35 per cent on the population-heavy island of Montreal.
One pollster applauded the initiative. He also warned against scapegoating absentee youth for a trend has been worsening over two decades.
"Not only the current generation of new voters don't tend to turn out - but in our system, some people who may have voted in the past, are opting not to do so anymore," said Christian Bourque, vice-president at Leger Marketing.
"It's an easy cop-out to only blame it on youth," Bourque said.
"But if there is nothing about our politics that seems to be able to engage youth, maybe it's the fault of our political leaders."
The storyline of this year's Montreal mayoral race - a battle between two longtime foes from provincial politics - certainly has prompted additional interest.
The federalist mayor, Gerald Tremblay, is an ex-provincial cabinet minister whose administration has come under fire in a series of corruption allegations.
His main challenger is Louise Harel, a Parti Quebecois firebrand who earned the ire of the city's suburbanites and anglophones as the architect of unpopular municipal mergers when she was a minister.
Still, that showdown might not be enough to force people to the ballot box. Bourque says politicians must give people a more compelling reason to vote.
David Siegel, a political scientist at Brock University takes a contrary view. Maybe it's a bad idea to goad people into voting, he says.
"If people don't want to vote, if they're not informed about how they want to cast their vote, then do we really want to force them to come and vote?" Siegel said.
Siegel said getting away from gimmicks and tricks and teaching people in the longer-term about why local government is important is the way to go. He says there isn't much evidence of a link between social networking and turnout.
"But people get more sophisticated about these things over time and maybe they'll figure out how to convert this into voter turnout, but I don't know that it's happening at this point," he said.
