Imagine if they held an election and no one showed up to vote.

Actually, you don’t have to imagine it. We have elections to choose school board trustees every four years, and if it’s not literally true that nobody shows up to vote, it’s close enough to cause us to wonder what’s going on.

It’s not that school boards aren’t important. After all, they’re in charge of the places where we send our children for six or seven hours a day. You know – children… our most precious treasures.

The Toronto public board has a quarter of a million children in its care. It has a budget of more than $3 billion.

The Toronto Catholic board looks after about 86,000 students and has more than $1 billion to spend.

So why is it that so few of us bother to vote for trustees? It’s convenient enough since we elect them as part of our municipal election process.

It’s not necessarily because people just don’t bother to vote at all. In 2014, a lot of voters made a pick for mayor and for councillor, but didn’t vote for a trustee. There wasn’t a single ward where that wasn’t true.

Sometimes one voter in six voted for a councillor but not a trustee. In truth, I’m surprised the other five made a choice. My guess is that a lot of voters simply pick trustees blindly. Heaven knows what they base it on. Maybe a name that looks vaguely familiar. Maybe the name that’s right at the top. Maybe eeny-meeny-miny-moe.

I’m very critical of people who don’t understand what a privilege it is to live in a democracy and be given the freedom to choose our leaders. I think voting is a duty of citizenship. It’s a contribution to civil society.

Yet I was one of those who left the trustee part of my ballot blank four years ago. I simply had no idea who any of the candidates were or what they stood for. And I fancy myself a careful, knowledgeable voter who wants to cast an informed ballot.

I want to be an informed voter this year too. But getting information on the people running for trustee is not easy. I have not had even one leaflet delivered to my house. No one has knocked on my door. I haven’t even had a robo-call.

I have looked to the internet for information. There is a site devoted to the “2018 Ontario Municipal and School Board Elections.” With a few more clicks of the mouse I discovered that for the public board in my ward there are apparently eight candidates to choose from. Beyond their names, there is not a scintilla of information about six of them. Two of them do nothing more than link to web sites. I saw another ward with 10 candidates and not a single one of them is more than a name.

Being a school board trustee strikes me as coming pretty close to being a volunteer. You are not paid a salary. You get an honorarium. In some places it’s just $7,500 a year. The most you can be honoured with is $29,500 a year. So working to raise money to run, and then campaigning diligently is asking a lot.

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“Politician” has become a dirty word in some circles. So maybe this mom-and-pop approach to school board elections fits the new zeitgeist. Anyone can throw their hat into the ring. Policies are optional. No one’s going to ask any serious questions about the issues. No fiery debates to worry about. The candidate with the biggest family or the most friends or the cutest name, wins.

But surely something is desperately out of whack here. We put billions of dollars and the education of our children into the hands of people we don’t know anything about.