This week, in Quebec and Afghanistan, people proved that elections matter.

In Quebec, voter turnout was more than 70 per cent in Monday’s provincial election. In Afghanistan, about 60 per cent of eligible voters showed up to cast a ballot, despite the risks involved in that simple act.

Contrast these heartening democratic developments with the state of the debate over the Fair Elections Act in Ottawa, which grows more dismal and personal every day.

On Monday, even as Quebecers were going to the polls, I ran into an MP, walking swiftly away from Parliament Hill.

“I need to get some fresh air,” he said. “I need to calm down about this Fair Elections Act.”

He said he’d been talking earlier in the week to another MP at a social event, who bluntly said to give up; that “people don’t care” about the Conservatives’ proposed changes to how elections are run in Canada.

It’s not the first time we’ve heard that Canadians don’t care about the issues at the heart of fierce debate on Parliament Hill or in the op-ed pages of the newspapers.

But this matter of apathy was particularly on my mind this week because of Hy Solomon, the late, respected Financial Post journalist who died in 1991, too soon, at the age of 57.

After Solomon died, the Public Policy Forum (PPF) established a journalism award in his honour, which has been bestowed on some formidable people over the past 20 or so years, including Star colleagues Chantal Hebert and the late Jim Travers.

This week, my name was officially added to that distinguished list. Along with the prize comes the task of making brief remarks to the annual PPF dinner about the state of public policy and journalism in Canada.

So with the week’s events in democracy rattling around in my head, I chose to focus my remarks on what I see as the “information gap” in Canadian politics. Here’s a taste of the remarks I prepared for Thursday night’s PPF dinner in Toronto:

When Hy Solomon died in 1991, his passing was lamented by the leading politicians in Parliament. The then-minister of finance, Michael Wilson, described Solomon’s brand of journalism as “a dedicated pursuit of the facts” and “a sense of responsibility that his readers be well-informed.”

Twenty or so years later, I wonder if Hy might be called a bit of a radical today, for this belief in a well-informed public.

All of us have a list of phrases we’d like to see banned from use in workplace conversation. “Going forward” and “at the end of the day” are on my list.

But at the top of my list is this phrase: “people don’t care.” It’s not simply stated as a fact, but as an excuse for keeping the public ill-informed.

Everyone has heard about income inequality — the widening gap between haves and have-nots. It’s the big public-policy challenge of our time.

But there’s another form of inequality that should also be worrying us. Let’s c all it information inequality: the widening gap between those in the know and those who know not. When did facts and evidence become the domain of an elite few?

I spent a lot of time the past few years researching a book about how marketing has taken over Canadian political culture and policy-making. Some of this all-marketing, all-the-time approach threatens to make wants more important than needs, the short term more important than the long term and advertising more powerful than journalism. It’s a culture that rewards people who can whip up emotions rather than those who can marshal facts and evidence to make their case; a culture where anecdotes trump statistics.

In my business we sometimes describe this tension as entertainment versus public service journalism, or, if you prefer, cat videos versus the Constitution.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

The phrase “people don’t care,” I fear, is a way of saying that we don’t have to bother with Hy Solomon’s old notions about the responsibility to inform. It’s not just defeatist. It’s a bit elitist too. It’s basically saying that knowledge, like wealth, only belongs to the privileged few.

The mark of a healthy economy, we’re told, is one in which everyone has a chance to improve his or her lot in life. A healthy democracy should work the same way — a society in which everyone has a chance to know more, where we don’t write people off as permanently apathetic, any more than we’d write them off as permanently poor.

If we want to close that information gap, we need more “responsibility to inform” and less “people don’t care.”