VOTING RIGHTS
The case against expats participating in elections.
Iworked outside Canada for the entire two terms of the Mulroney government, and a couple of years of the Chrétien government that followed. Not because I had anything against Brian Mulroney or Jean Chrétien, but because I was lucky enough to get an opportunity to work in interesting cities and get paid for doing it.
I never stopped being Canadian and I was always careful to vote. If you’re a Canadian, you consider it your home and you care about it. You vote. Seemed simple.
I can’t say I knew what I was voting for, though. There was no Internet at the time, no Facebook, no Twitter, no tablets or smartphones that let you live on the other side of the planet and follow Canadian events as easily as you could in Regina or Rimouski, Que. Canada usually only made the international news for one of the three big clichés: Mounties, snow or hockey. And even then, it wasn’t taken very seriously. In England, where I worked for several years, Canada only made the papers if the Queen or some other Royal paid a visit, and mainly only so Fleet Street could trot out its stock of hackneyed stereotypes.
Donald Sutherland has it easier. If he wants, Sutherland could monitor Canadian affairs quite handily. It would be little trouble to stay better informed than many Canadians, who pay more attention to the gender confusion of former U.S. Olympians than they do to the management of national affairs in Ottawa. That’s largely the point Sutherland makes in his diatribe against the Harper government for preventing him from voting.
“Ask any journalist that’s ever interviewed me what nationality I proudly proclaim to have. Ask them. They’ll tell you. I am a Canadian. But I’m an expatriate and the Harper government won’t let expatriates partici- pate in Canadian elections,” he wrote in a letter to the Globe and Mail.
Except it’s not the Harper government doing anything of the kind. As the National Post’s Tristin Hopper reported, the law that prevents Canadians from voting if they’ve been out of Canada five years or more was introduced in 1993. Which means it was in place during four Liberal mandates before the Conservatives took office. It’s only news now because it was challenged by two Canadians living in the U.S., overturned last year and reinstated last week in a ruling by the Ontario Court of Appeal.
The Appeal Court’s reasoning is sound: “Permitting all non-resident citizens to vote would allow them 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,” wrote Justice George Strathy.
The decision notes that allowing long-term expats to vote would vio- late a “social contract” that binds Canadians to laws that they have played a hand in creating. This makes absolute sense. For every fervent patriot like Sutherland, who presumably lives in the U.S. due to the demands of his acting career, there are tens of thousands of passport-holders who barely give Canada a thought.
At the time the five-year rule was introduced, Canada was in the process of handing out thousands of passports to “investors” who wanted it mainly as a hedge against turmoil in their home country. If you recall, one of Stephen Harper’s earliest international acts as prime minister was a dramatic evacuation of Canadian passport-holders from Lebanon during a confrontation be- tween Israel and Hezbollah forces. It was great theatre, except Canadians learned that thousands of those affected proved to be Lebanese citizens who had met the minimum standards for a Canadian passport before returning home and hanging on to the Canadian document in case of just such an emergency. They knew little about Canada, but without the five-year rule, 50,000 of them would have had the right to vote.
Lebanon is far from the only country where this happens. The Vancouver Sun reported in 2013 that there were 350,000 residents of Hong Kong holding Canadian passports, and that Asians continue to leave this country in large numbers after completing the minimum requirements. Immigration experts acknowledged that many never intended to stay and were merely taking advantage of Canada’s traditional generosity with its citizenship.
The five-year rule may be an inconvenience for Sutherland, who comes across as far less arrogant and self-important than fellow Canadian Neil Young, who prefers jetting into the country just long enough to demand Alberta cripple its economy by getting out of the oil business, before jetting back to California. But both are Canadian the same way Mike Duffy is from Prince Edward Island: it might be where they came from, but it’s not where they live. Even Canada’s Senate now understands that difference.
An estimated 1.5 million Canadians are considered long-term expats, easily enough to decide a close election. If Sutherland spent more time here, he might better understand why the five-year rule is an intelligent and well-reasoned law aimed at ensuring those most affected by legislation get the deciding voice in it. Someone might also have told him it’s been in place for 22 years.
For every fervent patriot like Donald Sutherland, there are tens of thousands of passport-holders who barely give Canada a thought