When I talk about “home”, I always mean Canada. I’m a proud Canadian citizen; I hold no other passport. Still, international experience is a value that many Canadians share: it’s why we take semesters abroad in college and it’s why 60% of us have passports, compared to 30% of Americans. In my time spent away from my country, my Canadianness has been unquestioned, and I’ve never felt prouder to be Canadian than when I’ve been abroad.
I’ve lived in the US as a resident alien for five years now, where I cannot vote in municipal or federal elections. As frustrating as that can be, it doesn’t feel inherently wrong; I do not feel that I have the same stake in this country as I do in my homeland. And yet, during the closest election in Canada’s history, I can’t fulfill my constitutionally guaranteed, democratic right to have a say in who runs my country.
Stephen Harper took away my right to vote. Like 1.4m Canadians around the world, I am disenfranchised.
I lost my right to participate in Canada’s democratic system this summer, when the Appeals Court of Ontario sided with the government and ruled that Canadians who have lived outside the country for more than five years should be banned from voting. Their reasoning was that permitting all non-resident citizens to vote would allow us “to participate in making laws that affect Canadian residents on a daily basis, but have little to no practical consequence for their own daily lives”.
To say that what happens in Canada does not affect the “daily lives” of someone like me is, to be blunt, a load of bull – and a superficial, naive understanding of the life of an expat. My family’s health depends on Medicare and my mother’s pension depends on a strong economy. Canada’s immigration policy is also of absolute importance to me as it can determine the terms of my return. I play the role of Canadian explainer-in-chief for friends and colleagues who wonder aloud What’s up with the whole niqab story? From economics to social welfare, there are hardly any policy decisions that wouldn’t be relevant to me.
The policy of my country affects my “daily” life and my future as well, and I should have a say in it. This election is an important one: the Harper government, after nine years of running the country and having its way with our policies and our values, now seems shaky, thanks to a wave of strong anti-Harper sentiment across the country.
The #NoHarper movement has been led by young people, who (like supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders in the US and new Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in the UK) are angry and frustrated with a government they feel does not represent them or care about their interests. Urgent pleas to get out and vote are all over social media today. “Voting selfies” flooded Twitter and a Facebook event for “Stephen Harper’s Goodbye Party” had 400,000 attendees.
#NoHarper challenged the dominant narrative that Harper has been necessary for Canada’s economic strength. He has maintained his political support for nearly a decade not because of his likability or his charisma, but for how he is perceived to have managed the economy. His platform has always been to create more jobs in Canada and eliminate the federal budget deficit. He hammered that into the minds of Canadians for years, and most recently went as far as buying out the front pages of several major newspapers with ads warning Canadians that voting for the Liberals or the NDP “will cost you”.
But despite Harper’s constant reminders that he is the reason for the stable economy, young Canadians like me are leaving because of a lack of economic opportunities. We have moved to places like the US so that we can get work. We have moved temporarily away from our home so that we can get ahead. But we Canadians will come home – and so we should have a say in what our country looks like when we get there.