Why would you want to vote in Canada if you don’t live there?

It has been a long time since I posted and, despite having intentions to post for ages about a tour of Tower Bridge and a collection of weird statue photos I have taken, and despite having had a sad week in other ways, somehow my brain thought “You know what this blog really needs? A long post about a recent court ruling that directly affects basically no one who reads this blog written by someone with zero legal qualifications who is also currently unaffected by this ruling.” And so here we are!

Canada recently reversed its ruling on citizens living outside of the country for more than 5 years having the right to vote*. The ruling from 2014 found that this residency restriction on voters violates section 3 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms:

Every citizen of Canada has the right to vote in an election of members of the House of Commons or of a legislative assembly and to be qualified for membership therein.

Seems pretty straightforward, which is presumably why two Canadian citizens living in the US launched the Charter challenge when they found out they could not vote in the 2011 Canadian election. But wait. It turns out that section 1 of the Charter states that those rights are subject to

…such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.

So, it is probably not reasonable to allow 5-years olds to vote. It might be reasonable to allow 16-year olds to vote, but a line obviously needs to be drawn somewhere and so we arrive at the need for a judge to judge what is a reasonable limit.

As I am sure will be obvious, I am not a legal expert, so I want to diverge a bit from the ruling (which I read. Kind of interesting. A++ for clarity of writing. Would contribute tax dollars for abbreviated history of voting again, though perhaps not for the judgement itself) and talk a bit more about some of the things I hear occasionally and opinions from the Internet.

There seem to be three basic camps of who people feel should get to vote: taxpayers, residents or citizens. Or, to translate them into their respective internet comment-speak equivalents “Expats are tax-dodging scumbags looking to make more money elsewhere while still taking advantage of Canadian social programs,” “Expats are just a bunch of leaving leavers who leave things and if you leave you don’t care about Canada,” and “ZOMG Lebanon!”

1) Taxpayers

If you pay into the system then you should get to have a say in electing the people who spend that money, right?

Firstly, when people say this they usually mean income taxes. Obviously any time I fly back to Canada on good ol’ reliable Air Transat, I pay a mountain of fuel and airport taxes and surcharges (as I should. The environmental effects of trans-Atlantic flights are bad) and many things that I buy in the country will have GST/HST/sales tax that goes into the same government pot that funds services as income tax does. But everyone seems to be in agreement that sales tax doesn’t count and obviously not everyone who flies to Canada for a week and buys some stuff should get to vote there just because some of their money went to the Canadian government. (Under some circumstances you can claim some of this back as a non-resident, but not all of it. Similarly Canadians visiting countries with VAT can claim some of that back, but don’t get to vote in each of the ten countries they visited on their whirlwind European tour. This would obviously be ridiculous).

It could also potentially mean property taxes, but most countries I know of eliminated the property requirement ages ago because it led to awkward situations where only the richest could vote.

That leaves you with income taxes, which are presumably easier to have a record of than sales taxes and a more meet-able condition than owning property. But even countries where this is basically the rule like the US don’t really have this system. “No taxation without representation” is the famous refrain, but this statement doesn’t actually mean that if you do not pay taxes then you cannot be represented; it means that if you do pay taxes then you should be represented. Hence if you leave the US, but pay taxes, you can continue to vote indefinitely, but if you have fallen on hard times and are actually getting a tax refund, or if you have just turned 18 and haven’t had a job and have never filed taxes, you still get a vote. A more accurate requirement might be that you have to file taxes in order to vote, but this goes against the argument that some in the “taxation” camp seem to be making that you have to pay up to be counted.

For another thing, if you pay taxes and are not a US citizen, you don’t get to vote. So citizens of foreign countries don’t get to vote, nor do corporations who pay taxes [insert Romney joke here]. You must pay taxes AND be a citizen. And of course no one understands what’s going on in Washington D.C. where you don’t get to vote regardless of whether you pay taxes. So, sometimes taxation without representation and also sometimes representation for those who get a tax refund, but it’s hard to fit that on the protest sign.

I have an aversion to the taxpayer argument for many reasons, not least of which is living in Toronto while Rob Ford was mayor and he continually told me what “the taxpayer” wanted, while an estimated 15% of the population are permanent residents and pay taxes but are ineligible to vote. Some people might feel that Canada should have a system of voting based on taxation, but that fact is that we do not. If you leave the country for more than five years and you still pay taxes, you don’t get to vote.

I also worry a bit about using taxes as a way of determining who has “a stake” in the country. If paying no taxes means you should get no vote, then does paying twice as much tax as someone else mean my vote should count double theirs? Perhaps you think that this is ridiculous and that just paying something is enough to indicate that you have an interest and everyone who has an interest gets one vote, but we already established that this isn’t the case because paying sales tax that goes to fund social programs is not sufficient to get a vote.

As for the argument that taxes fund social programs, the Charter challenge was not asking for non-resident citizens to receive such benefits; it was for the right to vote. UK Visas have a 200 GBP/year NHS (healthcare) surcharge regardless of the fact that you are moving to the country to work a job where your income is subject to the same taxes as everyone else that go to fund things like the NHS. So it cost me about $800 just to apply for the Visa (that doesn’t guarantee that you will get it) and yet there are still accusations rolling around in the papers about foreigners sponging off of the system. So I really really don’t need more people to condescendingly explain to me how taxes fund public programs like healthcare. I am aware thanks.

Even the Chief Justice, who says right at the beginning that citizenship is sufficient for voting and then spends pages and pages arguing that the social contract is really The Thing and the social contract depends on residency, has a bit of a go at the respondents for paying taxes in the US. In fact non-resident Canadians contributed about $6 billion in income taxes in 2008-9 while making relatively limited use of social programs. Whereas if these citizens lived in Canada and refused to pay taxes and went to prison, they would in fact be allowed to vote. That is how little taxes matter to voting in Canada.

2) Residents

If you live somewhere, you are governed by its laws, affected by the way it allocates money in its social programs, the way it taxes people and so on. So you should get a vote and, furthermore, people who don’t live there are probably not as strongly affected and should not be allowed to have such a strong influence over people who do live there. This (at least the second part; the government is not moving for permanent residents to be enfranchised as far as I know) seems to be roughly the argument that the government made in the appeal (though, weirdly not in the original case) using the term “social contract”.

In theory this seems like the most reasonable way to do things (and some countries do this, just not Canada), but it pre-supposes a world in which either laws have very narrow range and the consequences of them are faced for only short periods of time or that people are resident in basically one place for large portions of their life, and this is not really the world that we live in.

The judge who allowed the appeal cited Rousseau and, like, I get that Rousseau was kind of big deal, but maybe the concepts of movement between societies and whether one can be subject to laws when resident in another country and how one might move between societies or obtain rapid, detailed information about other societies have changed slightly since 1762? We have planes; they had horses. We have the internet; they had… I guess horses again? Lots of work for horses back in the day. I mean, look at the sort of newspaper headlines they had.

The Globe and Mail editorial says residency should be a requirement because people vote for a representative of their community based on ridings. Sure, that is the system we have, but there is no reason that it is the system that we have to have. We let the Queen pick her representative and she has lived abroad her whole life! But seriously you guys, our system is really old. It works pretty well for a system so old and I don’t have any major problems with it, but it does mean that it’s tough to shoehorn in situations that didn’t exist when it was created. Personally I kind of like the riding thing because Canada is a big country and I like that the representatives in the House are meant to represent the whole country in tiny chunks (and I admire both the G&M’s and the judges’ idealism of pretending that this is what actually happens rather than MPs mostly toeing the party line), but there are Federal parties calling for a proportional representation system in which at least some segment of MPs would be decided based on the popular vote percentage of all Canadians and presumably these MPs would be specifically tied to no region. Or there exist democracies like Italy that actually have an MP to represent citizens abroad.

I went to Westminster and they gave me a 15-minute breakdown on the history so I’m pretty much an expert on the basics: the king used to rule but even in a country as small as England he couldn’t really get everywhere and that made it difficult to maintain power. So he realized that he needed support from other people and invited a bunch of nobles and clergy for a council. Membership in the council was not based on residency, although the king did tend to invite people from a range of areas. Then, you know how history goes: kings are jerks; rebellions happen; eventually a second group, separate from the bishops and barons and people, are allowed to show up and these are regionally based. The clergy and nobles evolved into the present-day House of Lords and the selected regional representatives became the House of Commons. Initially the representatives of each district were not selected by any sort of uniform means and boroughs could make their own decisions on who to send, but later everything was kind of standardized and in order to vote for the representative of the House of Commons you had to own property there. As it was a feudal system, people tended to own property in a particular place and they had an organized system for working that land and they didn’t up and move halfway across the country, which people do now all the time and may have residences in multiple places, even within the country (Are we not still currently in the middle of the trial of a Canadian senator that is spending a whole lot of time asking people what exactly the definition of residence and primary residence is?).

So the issue of which riding is some people’s home riding is tricky. Is it more fundamental to the democratic system that we distribute the votes exactly into the ridings where they fulfill some well-defined residency requirement or is it more fundamental that we allow people whose right to vote is guaranteed by the Charter to exercise that right? Because even allowing for the five-year requirement, we already allow many people to vote in the ridings in which they do not reside: citizens non-resident for less than five years, members of the military and Canadian public service who work abroad for any period of time, citizens who live with those in the military or Canadian public service (time for me to find a new flatmate?), students who live four months of the year in one riding and eight months in another, co-op students who live four months in one place and four months in another and four months in another and prisoners incarcerated in a riding different from where they lived previously. As the dissenting judge put it, there already exists groups of people who are allowed to vote for whom “residence is a fiction”.

Currently when you register you do it at your last Canadian address or the address of a spouse of relative in the riding where you would live if you were to return to Canada. I can see the argument here that people might be eligible in more than one place, but, you know, just make sure that they’re not? The UK and Australia and New Zealand all have Westminster systems and seem to manage it.

I have more that I want to say about residency, but it is sort of tied up with some of the citizenship points, so I will leave it there for now.

I don’t mean to say that it is impossible to have a democratic system in which paying taxes or residency are requirements for voting. Obviously there exist democracies where this is the case. But in Canada it is based on citizenship. Some things, like healthcare, checking out books from the library and so on, are not rights or are not based on citizenship. That’s fine. I do not ask to keep those. I ask to keep the rights that are granted to citizens by the Charter. Some people might feel that these rights shouldn’t be allowed to certain groups of people, but we don’t decide what rights people have based on the whims and feelings of the day. People’s rights are not arbitrary. That is the whole point of having a Charter. It would be a really bad idea for a government to be able to use its power to create laws that disenfranchise people who formerly had the right to vote because that is a system in which the government chooses its electorate rather than the other way around. The way that eligible voters are determined should be clear and not subject to change by the normal Parliamentary system of enacting laws; it should change by changing the Charter. Thus if the people of the country really feel that only taxpaying citizens or resident citizens should have the right to vote, they should begin by encouraging the process of trying to amend the Charter.

3) Citizens

What does it mean to be a citizen? If you were born in Canada and have never resided elsewhere for an extended period, you may not have spent a lot of time thinking about this question. For a number of people on the Internet, the answer seems to be quite simple. Once you leave Canada, you’re not a Real Canadian. Many people make exceptions for military personnel. Some people make exceptions for foreign diplomats or other narrow groups. But in general, for these people, No True Canadian would ever leave Canada for any period. Citizenship = residency. I am curious as to how these people would feel about granting citizenship to those who have recently become resident in Canada. You don’t just apply for and receive citizenship when you move to a new country as a matter of course, and in my opinion you shouldn’t. Because citizenship is obviously not the same as living somewhere, which is why Canada and other countries don’t just grant citizenship to people simply on the basis of moving there.

At the other extreme, when I tell people back in Canada that I live in the UK at the moment, many people’s first response is “Oh, that must be great. Do you have a grandparent who was born there? Because then you can become a citizen!” There seem to be a surprisingly large number of Canadians who know this, although I only learned this shortly before I moved here. But it is a common response. And the reasons these people usually give for becoming a UK citizen? (1) You don’t have to worry about a Visa, which is technically true, but I very much doubt that the process for becoming a citizen involves less annoying paperwork than the process of getting a Visa. (2) You get to be in the special passport line. And since the UK is in the EU, this is true for all of the EU countries. And (3) it’s just a good idea to have dual citizenship for unclear “just in case” reasons no one could quite specify. Occasionally I will hear something about feeling some sort of connection with the UK from people who have immediate relatives from here or who have visited a number of times, but this is usually secondary to the shortness of border control lines. In other words, the things people could actually put into words for me were all reasons of convenience. I do not doubt that there are other reasons, more difficult to express, which might lead one to want to become a citizen of the UK, but that is basically my point. Citizenship should not be a matter of convenience. Isn’t that exactly what everyone going on about Lebanon is trying to say in the first place? Remember how upset everyone was when Conrad Black renounced his citizenship so he could be a Lord or a Baron or whatever it is that he is (aside from the obvious)?

Some people feel that citizenship does not entitle you to help from your country when the region you are in erupts into violence suddenly. Some people feel that citizenship does not entitle you to a vote if you have lived outside of the country for more than five years. And for some people the most identifiable thing about citizenship is that it gets you into a shorter queue at the airport. Clearly there is a massive amount of disagreement about what the purpose and meaning of citizenship is. Obviously I cannot speak for all expats and everyone is a special snowflake, but when I did my PhD in Toronto, I met quite a few people not born in Canada, some of whom chose to become citizens and some of whom didn’t (and some later left and some are still there). And I know other Canadians who left for PhDs or post-docs in a range of countries. Now I live overseas and have met a large number of expats from many countries, here for many different reasons. And I have had two years over here to ponder my own experience, so I have spent quite a bit of time thinking and talking about what it means to be a citizen of a place and maybe I can share some of those experiences (which turned out to be really long. Sorry) in reference to some of the points made in the ruling or online.

Why would someone who values their citizenship leave their country?

What sort of country you want to live in? Is it one where everyone just stays there and pats each other on the back and tells each other that the way they do things is the best and they have nothing to learn from anywhere else? Is it one where no one should ever try to help anyone in another country? Or make things in other countries? Or have partnerships with companies from anywhere else? Might there be reasons that having Canadians in other countries could be valuable? Would you be happy if a someone left to get experience on a piece of equipment not available in Canada and later returned and got grant money to buy a similar piece of equipment and used what they had learned to run that equipment in Canada? Would you be glad if someone worked on an International project that happened to be done elsewhere but returned benefits to Canada in the form of, say, a vaccine or a cancer treatment? Would you be proud of an artist who moved to apprentice under an artist in another country and used that in combination with what they brought as a Canadian to express themselves in a completely unique way? Would you be proud of a musician who worked for years to build a following overseas and sold out stadiums there? Would you be equally proud of one who played small clubs, but always put on a great show and represented the country well and influenced people’s opinions about Canada in a positive way?

We already recognize that some citizens might have jobs that require them to move overseas but that allow them to retain enough inherent Canadian-ness to vote: people in the military, diplomats (who are often people that were formerly politicians of the sort who created this law that still allows them to vote, so I am sure it is entirely coincidence that they view people like themselves as able to retain that real Canadian-ness where others may fail) and certain public servants (although the exact rules on this seem confusing since some people who work in International Development are funded directly by the Canadian government and can vote and some are funded indirectly through NGOs and may not be able to and also seems to create sort of an awkward situation where if a hypothetical government were concerned about certain citizens abroad voting in a certain way, they could de-fund the organization and strip them of their right to vote. Government choosing the electorate). So why are these people able to remain “Canadian enough” while living overseas, but not others? Might there be citizens in other jobs who could retain a significant connection to Canada?

The arguments against expats voting seem to be full of a whole range of hypothetical scenarios where everyone who leaves is a selfish person looking to make gazillions of dollars, or they actually hate the country but are somehow still willing to go to a lot of trouble to vote there. I don’t want to get too detailed and give up anyone’s anonymity or personal info (and I do not have the special powers to see into other people’s heart of hearts for their true motivation and have to go by what was said), but here are a few of the reasons that non-hypothetical living people that I know have indicated as their reason for moving countries for at least some period of time:

• UK citizen came to Canada to get experience in a new lab as a post-doc. Later returned to the UK as researcher
• did his PhD in the only lab in Canada with a particular piece of equipment. Moved to the UK to get a new lab’s perspective on the same technique. Plans to return to Canada.
• did a Masters in Canada and moved to Switzerland for a PhD because she wanted a new experience and had family there and had friends in the lab. Plans to return.
• moved from Canada because spouse got a job in France. Had a baby. May get a post-doc in France or may return to Canada at some point. Uncertain.
• moved from Canada to do a PhD in Oxford because it seemed like a good lab. Has since returned to work in academia in Canada.
• moved from Canada to London for a post-doc. Has since returned to work in industry in Canada
• moved to the UK from Greece because the PhD opportunity was good. Now doing a post-doc and probably will not return in the near future because of employment situation in Greece.
• a number of people who moved from various EU countries to work at an engineering firm in the UK that designs buildings and transport in many countries around the world
• moved to the UK from another EU country and married someone from the UK and has a child. Probably will stay in the UK.
• moved from Portugal to do undergrad in the UK, Masters in the US, PhD in the UK

(The list is skewed towards STEM because of my own background, not because I think scientists and engineers are the only people who can contribute something valuable toward their country by leaving it. If you are interested in a more detailed, industry-based story, This American Life recently did an episode about a partnership between US-based GM and Japanese-based Toyota that gets into what it is and isn’t possible to learn from each other and how actually visiting a country and seeing a new system in action can change your whole perspective on the work that you do and make workers happier and more efficient).

This week I went to talks by people who are citizens of the UK, Germany and the Netherlands. I am on an EU funded project that includes partners from England, Scotland, Germany, the Netherlands and of course that well-known EU country, the United States. It is a complex world. And science is all the better for it being a complex world where nationalistic pride is set aside in favour of co-operation. I am sure there are artistic and other domains where this is the case as well.

I could go on since my entire department contains more people from outside the UK than in it, but common trends are that people came either because they felt there are good labs doing good work here that they could learn from or because there were limited opportunities back home, often that they had already explored; some returned but many are still abroad and uncertain of their long-term plans because academia has poor job security in the early stages (and early stages now last until you’re about 40, so…); very few people became citizens of the place they moved to in spite of some staying for many years and they return regularly for visits to their home country; and, I feel ridiculous even saying this because it is such an obvious thing to say about students and post-docs in London, no one but no one moved to become disgustingly wealthy. Some people moved because job prospects in their field were poor and they wanted to do the thing that they are good at when maybe they could have stayed in their home country and done something different. So yes, that happens. But ain’t nobody who has jumped on the fast train to cashville by becoming an expat.

Aren’t these people just trying to have it both ways? Aren’t Canadians living abroad trying to get all of the advantages of the place that they live and of being a Canadian citizen?

I assume this argument comes from people who have not lived abroad because my own experience and that of every other expat that I have talked to is just the opposite. It feels much less like having it both ways and much more like belonging nowhere.

When my passport was going to expire, I decided to try to renew it from the High Commission here. This turned out to be quite a straightforward and well-organized process, but to do it you have to actually give them your physical passport, which gets mailed back to Canada, and it is gone for a couple of weeks while they process everything and mail it back. I sent my birth certificate off when I originally applied in Canada and didn’t think much of it. But this time it was the strangest feeling to hand the passport over and then you’re just here, the same place you were before, but knowing that you can’t go home if you want to. (I kept from hyperventilating by noting all of the citizens in front of me in line who had lost passports while on holiday who were trying to get temporary ones with little to no identification and used that to tell myself that if I had to get out, Canada would get me out. Even if some people think that is not the job of the Canadian government.)

When I am in the UK, I feel like a Canadian and everyone identifies me as Canadian (or American; it’s basically all the same to them, a big continent “over there”). Service-wise, the situation in the UK is pretty good, but this obviously varies by country and even here there is a lot of talk about foreigners being a burden and people who should be viewed with suspicion. When I am in Canada, everyone knows I am just visiting and I am aware that a number of Internet people would tell me not to let the door hit me on the way out. It is a similar situation for the expats from the EU that I know here, some of whom have lived here for well over five years and are married to people from the UK. None of them have plans to become citizens of the UK. They still consider themselves citizens of the country they arrived from. But they don’t receive services from that country and can find it a strange experience to go back.

The appeals Chief Justice disagreed with the application judge’s point that not allowing non-resident citizens to vote created a group of “unworthy” citizens. But then he goes on to say that non-resident citizens who work for the public service are different from those who don’t because the second group “…voluntarily severed their connections with Canada in pursuit of their own livelihoods,” which sort of reads to me like he thinks that people who made this choice are worth less than those citizens who made the “right” choice. Because, as we all know, no one who joins the public service is motivated by making a living with decent benefits; they all do it for wholly altruistic reasons because they want to serve their country and probably they would do it for free if nobody paid them or gave them benefits because they just love the country so much more than everyone else. Like, a livelihood is a means of securing the necessities of life. So apparently if you find that staying in Canada means you are unable to obtain the basic necessities of life then, if you still want to vote, you should just tough it out. If you leave, that’s voluntary and no votes for you! That seems a bit vindictive. Do these people know any actual human being outside of the public service who has left the country? And leaving apparently involves severing your connections. I remember the day that I left for my glamourous life as a post-doc and I told all of my family and friends “See you suckers NEVER. I am off to make bazillions by doing basic scientific research that I definitely hope never benefits Canada in any way.”

Sorry if that’s a harsh reading of the judge’s words, but when you are already adrift in between worlds, you feel the loss of rights like this very keenly. I don’t pretend to have the answers to what being a citizen means in such a world, only to say that I live in a world full of pseudo-stateless people who are not viewed as UK citizens when they are here and not always viewed as “true” citizens of their countries of citizenship when they regularly return there.

It’s not really disenfranchising people because non-residents can just vote where they are/Why don’t you just become a citizen of the UK?

Or as the appeal ruling put it “The deleterious impact is mitigated by the likelihood that non-residents can participate in the foreign polity.” This depends hugely on what country you end up in. Of the two respondents in the trial, both are in the US, where you cannot vote unless you are a taxpaying citizen. One of the respondents has US citizenship and votes; the other does not and cannot in spite of having lived in the US for 13 years. As it happens, I can vote in the UK because the UK allows citizens of the Commonwealth who are resident to vote in their national elections, but I don’t think Canada should try to unload its obligations to its own citizens onto other countries that may have more permissive voting regulations than Canada has itself. There is a dismissiveness about the whole thing, like they are saying “well just vote in those other countries”, as though the process of voting in Canada is something to be taken seriously, but for other countries we can be flippant about it, the kind of thing one “just” does.

The obvious follow-up here is “Well then why not just become a citizen of the place your living?” Firstly, this is not a simple matter even logistically. You usually have to be resident somewhere for a period of time before you can become a citizen in addition to other criteria you may or may not meet. In the UK (and I believe the US), this is five years, with some of it as a permanent resident (which implies and intention to stay, which not everyone does). Five years until you can submit the application, which takes time to process and may be rejected. This does not even address the question of non-residents who move from one country to another every few years. You can argue that people should “just” change citizenship or abandon their work and move home to uncertainty, but the bottom line is that Canada is voluntarily creating a situation where some of its citizens have no democratic right to vote anywhere. That’s not on other countries. That’s on us.

But suppose I did tick all of the technical boxes for becoming a UK citizen. What if I don’t want to? I hope that suggestion doesn’t offend anyone. I’ve met plenty of lovely UK citizens and I know there are lots of people out there eager to become citizens of the UK. I just don’t happen to be one of them at this point. Which brings us back to the question of what it means to be a citizen of a country. The Chief Justice in the appeal talks about what laws expats are governed by and he brings up conscription as one and then dismisses it, which I find sort of funny because conscription is actually my one-step litmus test for citizenship ever since I read this David Rakoff essay about how he decided after 22 years of living in the US that he was ready to become a US citizen.

Rakoff got the form and he filled out most of it no problem, including the part where you have to list every time you have left the US in the last ten years, which was a huge number for him because he still had family in Canada and would nip back over the border all the time. Then he got to the question about if he would ever take up arms to defend the country if it came to it and he had to put the form away for a week. And ever since then I have sort of considered that the metric for whether you are ready to become a citizen. I have no idea if this is actually part of the application for every country – people seem to spend much more time talking about knowing how wide the country is at its widest point or what Henry VIII is most famous for (apparently the answer is breaking with the Church of Rome and not having a lot of wives or a festering leg wound) – but as such tests go, I actually think it’s not bad. I would prefer if the world could stay in a stable enough state that I don’t need to be conscripted by anyone, but if we ever find ourselves in the sort of apocalyptic disaster that would result in a country telling someone like me that arms need to be borne, I know which country I want it to be. Two years in, I can’t say that I am ready to make that commitment to the UK on even the most theoretical of levels. Maybe by five I will feel differently, but I don’t find it that ridiculous that it might take some people a bit longer.

Maybe this is an overgeneralization, but it really seems like citizens living outside of their country of citizenship is viewed differently in Europe. The very existence of the EU encourages citizens to move freely between countries and many people choose to study or work abroad for periods far longer than five years without ever considering changing citizenship. That one should become a UK citizen simply because one happens to work in London for a good percentage of the time would probably be a surprising idea to a lot of these people. They go back to their home countries regularly; they have family there who are affected by the laws; some have the right to vote in their home countries and some do not (and to the extent that I’m aware that voting laws have changed in any of these countries, they have enfranchised rather than disenfranchised people). When there is a conference or event in their country they offer advice and are proud of it. Some have the intention to go back someday and many aren’t sure but mostly no one thinks about it too much because academia is uncertain like that.

I played Frisbee in the spring with two Canadians, two Brits and a two people from France and I was talking with one of the French women and we somehow got onto the subject of citizenship and she asked me whether I had grandparents from here (seriously, how does everyone know this?!). I said that I didn’t but even if I did I wasn’t sure that I would become a citizen. She nodded then exchanged a look with the other French girl, who was listening, and then they both burst out laughing. Yes, they agreed, they had no plans take on UK citizenship either, even if they stayed for a while. They are French. Why would they? The very idea was absurd to them. Now they had also been here less than three years, so perhaps in another few years, if they are still here, I should ask them again and see if they feel differently. Perhaps I am wrong about this, but it seems like many Canadians view Canadians who leave with resentment, something to be discarded. But Europeans are more likely to view citizens who work elsewhere as representatives of them, that they are sending these people out into the world as an extension of themselves and they hope that their country comes across well.

I know that Canadian residents live beside a giant country that it constantly seems is about to swallow them up, but we need to stop being so insecure that we view any sort of international experience as suspicious or un-Canadian or we will be left behind in today’s world. I would go so far as to say that there are a lot of cases where we should not just tolerate citizens leaving Canada but where we should encourage them to leave, with that encouragement including allowing them to retain the rights granted to them by citizenship.

It’s not really disenfranchising because they get the right back when they come back.

What even is this? If the government makes new laws to disenfranchise more of its citizens for the next 2 or 3 election cycles, but they tell them there will be some way to get them back in the future then everyone should be okay with that? This is like some first grader who gets told to share a toy with another kid and when you come back later they have it again and they say “You only said I had to share it. You didn’t say for how long.” The Charter said all citizens would have the right to vote, but they didn’t say which elections they would get to vote in. Let’s try to do better than this Canada.

But people who don’t live in the country are not subject to the same laws.

The way the ruling is written, it is as though the governments create laws and then the residents of the country all think “Okay, now I can/cannot do this thing.” But my own experience of it when living there is more like the government enacts laws that are overall policies that can have far-reaching consequences, both beyond the country’s borders and temporally, for years to come. It is not like Parliament makes a law and then, in five years, if that is when the next election is, all of those laws disappear. Canada looks somewhat different than it did five years ago, but it looks even more different from 20 years ago and you cannot always point to one particular Parliament and say “That is the one responsible.”

Take, for example, one of the more publicized pieces of legislation that gets passed each year, the budget. This year, there was some debate as to whether the increase in the limit that residents can contribute to their TFSA would result in a “tax leakage” that governments far into the future would have to deal with. Thus a policy enacted this year by the government could have effects on people living in the country at the time that “Stephen Harper’s granddaughter” is an adult.

Or consider how many Canadians are concerned about the new anti-terror bill that has a section giving CSIS new powers. By the judge’s argument, most Canadian citizens (and residents) don’t need to be concerned because this law doesn’t govern them. It only governs the things CSIS can and can’t do. Of course people are concerned about it because (1) the things that CSIS can and can’t do are indicative of people’s freedoms and (2) this law is part of a string of bills that this government has passed to change security policies in a way that have produced an overall trend that some people are concerned with. The effects of the bill are wide-ranging and potentially very long-term, not some narrow restrictive thing that only applies to residents this election cycle.

Or the 2013 Speech from the Throne included a prominent section on trade, which affects not only the jobs of many people working for Canadian companies abroad (What is the point of working on all of these trade contracts if you are just going to turn around and tell any Canadians working at the companies that then they are lesser citizens if they’re there more than five years?), but also the way that Canadian citizens abroad are viewed in those countries and the lives they live there. And certainly if one intends to return to Canada then the government’s commitment to dementia research as well as services for seniors would be of interest. In such a world, how do you determine who is still bound by the social contract?

Ask any Greek expats you can find what percentage of people who have talked to them lately have discussed what Greece should be doing with respect to the Euro, or what is the deal with Greek pensions. Ask anyone who is German how much they have had to defend their country’s actions over the same matter. Ask any ex-pats from Scotland how many people’s opinions on independence they heard in the weeks and months leading up to the referendum. Ask me how many times I had to attempt to explain the phenomenon that is Rob Ford to people. Expats probably know better than most people how the decisions that their governments make are viewed in the world because how their country is viewed in the world is how they will be viewed in the world, at least on first impressions, and they probably spend a lot more time explaining their governments’ actions to people than most residents.

And beyond foreign policy, non-residents could pay income taxes or have retirement funds or own property that are affected by changes the government makes while they are away. Or their job could be affected. The Greek example is obviously quite an extreme one, but I know Greek citizens in the UK who were not eligible to vote in the Greek election or the referendum (that is, they told me they were not allowed, but the Internet suggests that they can make the four hour flight back to the place they are registered in Greece, so I guess it is technically possible, but quite expensive for a process that is supposed to be democratic. Greece were supposed to have voting at consulates and so on for expats but did not get fully organized in time), either in the recent election that voted in the current government or in the referendum about accepting or rejecting the EU plan, and being in the EU is the basis for their being able to work here. They also could not vote in the recent UK elections, which had a number of parties talking about the UK leaving the EU. No one quite seems to know what will happen if Greece (or the UK) leaves the EU, but they could lose the right to work here and have just a short time to move back to Greece. They might have to leave behind partners and children, at least temporarily, while paperwork was getting sorted out. They would have to find a new job or get sponsored on a Visa for their old job. This is an extreme example but I think it is less hypothetical than the supposed dangers the Attorney General highlights from non-resident citizens voting and it represents a severe effect on day-to-day lives of these citizens. Many expats live in precarious or uncertain circumstances and have no representation.

And this does not even touch on their friends and relatives back home whose lives, incomes, pensions and so on will be affected by government decisions, even though I am already reliably informed by the Internet that feelings about loved ones don’t count as “an interest” in the country. I assume that many parents of resident citizens vote in ways that they think will create a better situation for their children, but non-resident citizens with children in Canada are not able to do the same.

I’m not sure I fully understand this social contract thing and how it doesn’t open the door to all sorts of absurd ridiculousness. I mean, Canadian citizens who vote already get to affect the lives of non-citizen residents who can’t vote and who are more likely to be affected by some of the laws made (eg. immigration caps on bringing family members over). The government makes laws and sometimes they affect you directly and sometimes they affect people you care about and sometimes they don’t affect anyone you know. Sometimes they even affect people without the right to vote more than they affect you. What is the cut-off for how many laws you have to be affected by and for what percentage of the year do you need to be affected by them before you should get to vote? Because five years of non-residency does not seem like a requirement that correlates all that well with these things.

Maybe TFSAs or tax rates or pension plans or whatever don’t seem like enough of a reason to cast a vote to some people, but we don’t ask people why they’re voting on the way into the polling station. We let people be single-issue voters for things like the environment or gay rights or downloading movies off of the internet. I might think your reasons for voting were incredibly stupid if you revealed them, but you are allowed to cast your vote for whatever reasons you like.

I also thought it was very Canadian that in all of the commentary I have seen, everyone was polite enough not mention that a judge was explaining to two non-resident citizens who were losing a right enshrined in the Charter because of a law that a government passed that they were losing it because the laws the government passes do not “generally” apply to non-residents.

Isn’t five years a long enough time?

Man, I thought I was under pressure to finish up my PhD in a semi-timely manner, but now Canadian grad students abroad have the Ontario Court of Appeals looking at them disapprovingly from behind a calendar too.

In the ruling, the judge goes back to when Parliament put the five-year rule in place (they were expanding the groups of citizens who could use special ballots to vote) and quotes from the Hansard. And everyone is just like (paraphrasing) “Is five years enough? I dunno. It’s kind of a matter of judgement. We did the best we could.” Everyone quoted seems to agree that 25 years is getting up there and makes them kind of uncomfortable (although even then no one flat out says these people shouldn’t be able to vote), but less than five years there are probably lots of ways that that could happen and someone could still be connected to the country.

And yet there is this big gap in between 5 and 25 years that no one wants to talk about and so they are just like (very poetically-licensed paraphrasing) “Let’s restrict it to the shortest time we’re willing to consider reasonable and see if it stands up to a Charter challenge. It’s the same length of time as a maximum election cycle so those are two time periods that are the same, which makes it seem less arbitrary.” What? You are trying to decide whether or not people get to vote and there’s a big period of time you don’t even want to think about? Surely it is worth thinking about the time frame in detail and trying to draw the line where it infringes on the fewest people’s rights. Why would you just pick the shortest period of time you were comfortable with and then just shrug: Welp! I dunno if we can do better than that so good enough.

(These quotes mentioned the social contract zero times, by the way).

I have not been out of the country long enough to give a personal opinion. Perhaps, after five years, I will no longer be able to answer the conscription litmus test in the positive for Canada. Maybe I will come to view the presence of police in my neighbourhood every Arsenal home match day as a reasonable way of preventing hooliganism rather than the thing I currently feel would be a better solution which is to view football as a dull sport in need of more scoring, checking and a better offside rule (perhaps one involving blue lines?). Maybe I will find myself wanting to go for a cheeky Nando’s instead of a Timmy Ho’s. Or whatever marks a Real UKian as opposed to a Real Canadian. And then maybe I will say to myself “I would very much like to pay 1000 GBP to take a test about the patron Saint of Scotland and how much Brits like inviting people over for dinner parties.”

But based on the sampling of EU citizens I know who have been here for 8-10 years, I don’t think this is likely. I have not actually posed the conscription litmus test to anyone because the apocalypse isn’t always a topic I feel comfortable bringing up with people in day-to-day conversation, but people generally know what citizenship they should be holding, and it is often not that of the country that they live in.

The G&M editorial says “reasonable people can disagree, reasonably, over how long a citizen should reside outside of Canada before having her vote suspended.” Isn’t the most reasonable thing, aside from not suspending people’s rights at all, to choose the length of time that infringes on the fewest people? Why on earth would you choose the shortest amount of time that everyone seems to be okay with? The editorial will try to convince you that Canada’s limit of five years is in the middle of other Westminster systems such as those in the UK, New Zealand and Australia, but actually the information they give is misleading (in fairness, they may have based it in part of what is in the ruling, but maybe the papers could fact-check that to try to give the most accurate information possible?).

They correctly say that the limit in the UK is 15 years and I do not consider a factor of 3 to be all that “close” to the Canadian limit. Then they say that New Zealand has a limit of 3 years, but in fact the wording is such that you have to have been in New Zealand in the last three years, not have lived there (you can tell that these are distinct things because they use the phrase “lived in” elsewhere. I believe this is similar to the way Canada used its five-year limit prior to 2007; it would reset if you came back to the country). They say that the limit in Australia is six years, but actually the initial requirement is that you have to declare your intention of returning within six years. If you reach that point and find that you are still outside of the country with the intention to return and wish to vote, you can write to the appropriate Australian authorities telling them that and if you do this every year then you can maintain your right to vote (I say can and not do because it’s not clear from this whether such applications are refused and on what grounds they would be refused). In addition, all of these countries allow permanent residents and/or Commonwealth citizens/British subjects (which I think is the same as Commonwealth citizens? Perhaps there are a few differences) to vote if they meet certain requirements and the UK allows EU citizens to vote in some cases. Parts of Canada have allowed voting by British subjects who were resident in the past, but it appears that now only Saskatchewan is hanging in there with a very specific subset of British subjects remaining provincially enfranchised. So an expat many people feel will not be involved enough in the country to vote in three years time was able to turn up information that the person whose literal job it was to write an editorial on the subject did not feel it necessary to include, but perhaps yourfavouritesearchengine.co.uk turns up different results than yourfavouritesearchengine.ca.

In any case, the point is not that Canada should adopt the voting regulations of any of these other countries. If the G&M or anyone feels that Canada’s voting regulations should be different then they are free to write all of the editorials or blog posts that they like. But they should not tell people that the recent ruling is “fair” because it is basically in the middle of all of these other countries. It is not. It is far more restrictive. And maybe that’s what Canadians really want, but we shouldn’t lie to ourselves about it, declaring that voting in Canada is incredibly permissive compared to other Westminster systems.

Also, the Globe and Mail has the best Cryptic Crossword. I miss them. The ones here are way too hard.

But the Courts/experts said it was fine!

In the original application, the judge ruled that the law was unconstitutional and could not be saved by Section 1 of the Charter. It was then heard by this appeals court, where 2/3 judges thought the law was a “reasonable” limitation. So we are 50/50 with judges so far. Possibly we will find out what some more judges think about it in the Supreme Court.

According to the dissenting judge, there have been four parliamentary studies on voting rights and all of them recommended removing the residency requirements on voting. And if you turn to academics, you can find those arguing both for and against residency in the importance of voting.

What about Canadians of Convenience?

If you are reading this blog, there is a good chance that you know me personally and maybe you think “Sure, you’re cool [Thanks guys]. But what about Canadians of Convenience?” Whether it is some people from Lebanon that you read about in the newspaper, or your cousin’s friend who moved to the US 20 years ago and hasn’t been back since, people are really concerned about these people having the ability to decide on the laws that residents will be governed by. In the terms of the ruling, these people have no intention of being bound by the “social contract” again. Perhaps we need to restrict the rights of people like me, who might be a small portion of expats, in order to ensure that people without the intention of returning influence Canadian laws?

The Attorney General was concerned about this as well, and here is the evidence that he presented for this: Nothing. I particularly enjoyed this part of the dissent from the ruling:

…a social contract is a symbolic representation of the relationship between citizens and state… a symbolic and philosophically-based objective must be tethered to a specific harm, a specific problem, or at the very least a potential harm if the legislation is struck down… Yet the Attorney General has put forward no evidence of harm, real or potential, that would flow from invalidating the five-year non-residency limitation – no studies, no complaints from Elections Canada, no concern from any other reputable source.

The respondents submitted the results of a survey of Canadians living abroad conducted by a Professor Emeritus at SFU. As a survey, it is prone to bias, but it found that 60% of expat Canadians surveyed hold no other citizenship than Canadian and 65% hold their Canadian citizenship by birth; 94% had visited Canada since moving abroad and over half had been to Canada within the previous year; 64% get news from family or friends back home frequently or very frequently (slightly outpacing the percentage who get news from the media).

I would suggest two things to people really concerned about Canadians of convenience voting. The first is that they don’t actually have an issue with non-resident citizens voting. They have an issue with the people that Canada grants citizenship to in the first place. This is a completely separate issue from whether citizens of all types should be allowed to vote. Indeed, several Internet commenters seemed quite concerned about people getting citizenship in order to obtain free heart valves and then leaving, which only residents can get healthcare so it is already outside the realm of non-residents, but even if it weren’t it has zero to do with voting. Unless free heart valves with every citizenship was a recently-enacted law I missed. You don’t smash your laptop when your wi-fi router goes down. Not only does it not solve the original problem, it creates a new one. If the system of granting citizenship is broken, fix that (and changes were made in 2009). If the system of voting is broken, fix that. Fix the thing that is broken.

The second thing I would say is why? Why would someone game the electoral system of a country they have no interest in? If you are one of those people who knows someone who has been abroad for 20 years and has never been back, that person had the right to vote from at least May of last year (possibly from 1993-2007 as well as long as they made visits as infrequently as every 5 years). Did they ever? Were they even aware they could? Why would they want to?

Of course one can dream up all sorts of hypothetical scenarios like being paid by a shadowy organization to vote (although I am pretty sure this is already illegal based on other electoral laws, not to mention it being hugely inefficient for an organization to donate to individual voters, which is maybe why they only managed to get to 6000 out of the estimated 1 million eligible voters living abroad who are not military/diplomats/Real Canadians?) or just plain old being vindictive jerks and wanting to mess with the lives of Canadian residents while they get away scot-free in their sweet sweet overpriced London flatshare with rubbish plumbing MUAHAHAHA. But is there any evidence that this actually happens? There is not.

I have thought about this quite a bit because I did not vote in the last UK election even though I was technically eligible to. I know the parties’ general positions and I know the main leaders, but after 18 months here, I just didn’t quite feel ready to grapple with the history of the Scottish fight for independence, the UK’s position in the EU or the way the English class system has contributed to various party loyalties. I recognize that the Visa fees and other things that I have complained about are a result of laws passed by the very House I could be voting for, but I’m not certain how long I am staying and I felt a bit weird casting my vote for a Parliament where I wouldn’t necessarily be present for the long-term effects of most of the laws they enact. I guess I didn’t want to mess up anyone else’s social contract?

It sort of comes down to the fact that I recognize that this isn’t really my country, at least at this point, and I wouldn’t really feel right about making decisions about it even though I technically have the right to. And I’m not sure why the same cannot be said about citizens of Canada. If you don’t have an interest, are you really going to go to the trouble of registering to vote?

But where would you vote? What if people lie about which riding they’re from for strategical reasons or try to abuse the system in some other way?

You vote for the electoral district in which you “ordinarily reside”, which can be the riding of your last residence or one of a spouse or relative that you would live with. This is not a lot of options, but it’s true that there may be more than one option and someone might try to register strategically (although you have to register well in advance, so it’s an educated guess at best). But I already listed the other citizens who can vote outside of where they live in the “Residency” section above.

If this still bothers you, then I would suggest that rather than taking away people’s right to vote, we adjust the “ordinary residence” issue. Make tighter rules about what people can declare as their riding? Require better documentation? Go full Italy and give expats their own MPs to represent them? I have complete faith in Canada’s ability to create rules and bureaucracy enough to satisfy most of us; just leave the right to vote intact.

No system is perfect. So it often seems to go in democracy: you try to give people rights in a fair way and that leaves loopholes that can be exploited by people looking to abuse the system. But here’s the thing: the evidence that there is widespread abuse of the Canadian electoral system is pretty limited. The judge in the original application and the dissenting judge in the appeal both note this. The Attorney General argued that a bunch of scary things could happen, but he did not actually provide any evidence that they ever happened before the five-year limit existed.

This seems to be part of a series of attempts to disenfranchise various people based on questionable reasoning. First, a bunch of people get robocalls telling them their polling station is somewhere it isn’t and we get basically no answers about that (unless I missed it. Please send a horse with a news update if so). Then an MP “misspoke” as the bill about vouching was coming through. And now this new move to block votes from over a million potential voters because maybe non-resident citizens are really out to mess with Canada. We can all dream up crazy situations where someone could abuse the system, but should we take rights away from real people because we are afraid of things that no one can actually provide evidence for as systemic problems? It’s not even robbing Peter to pay Paul; it’s more like robbing Paul because, well, hey, you heard Peter denied Jesus so all saints are probably unworthy bums, amirite?

How do we decide who should vote?

So I don’t know how much of that was convincing, but if you buy any of the ideas that there are some expats who do intend to return to the country and have significant interests there, but may end up being gone for more than five years, then here is a crazy thought: perhaps residency is not the correct metric with which to measure someone’s investment into the social contract. What would be?

Perhaps we could set up a somewhat complex but not impossible procedure that they had to navigate in order to register for, receive and submit their election ballot. Well boy do I have some good news for you: that is the system we already have!

This was my experience: search around for information online, click through a few websites with a lot of reading until you get to the form. Print out the form and fill it out, referring back to the instructions. Get the appropriate proof of ID together and mail it all in. In a few weeks, Elections Canada mails you back to say that they got it and what will happen if there is an election and how to change your information on the register should you need to, although my experience was that they mailed me back this information in French even though I requested English (Oh, Canada). And then, presumably, in October I will get a blank ballot and will have to write in the name of the candidate I would like in my riding and make yet another trip to the post office as though it is 1995 to mail it back in. It is not hopelessly impossible, but it is not click-a-button easy either (though to be honest once you’ve filed a Visa application in the UK I think you are about as prepared as you can be to deal with complex bureaucratic processes). If this still seems insufficiently Kafka-esque to weed out the hypothetical cheaters then make it so expats have to renew their commitment every year or two like Australia.

This probably needs a conclusion

In response to the idea that people who want to vote should get citizenship in their country of residence, I asked “What if they don’t want to?” That is kind of my point. Why do we not revoke people’s citizenship as soon as they leave the country? Why do we not grant citizenship when people take up residence in Canada? Because residency is one sort of social contract and citizenship is another. Where you live at the moment is not the national identity that contributes to who you are as a person.

Consider the story of Poland’s most famous composer, Chopin. He left Poland when he was 20 and never returned (technically the country disappeared shortly after that, which was sort of the impetus for leaving, but he also never returned to the region formerly known as Poland while he lived). Yet all of the music he wrote after that is considered to be representative of Poland, to the point that he is essentially a national symbol. When he died in France, he left instructions for his heart to be taken back to Poland, which it was, in a jar. During WWII it was rescued from its place in a pillar in a church in Warsaw that was destroyed and, at the end of the war, the Polish people celebrated as the heart was marched back through the ruined city and into the church. (And if you want to find out whether Chopin really died from TB it is the Polish government you need to get permission from first). Chopin obtained French citizenship at 25 and lived outside of Poland for half of his life, but he was Polish nonetheless. This is why I say that citizenship should be enough. Not every citizen can be as famous as Chopin or write the same sort of stirring nationalistic pieces of music, but people know where their heart is supposed to end up.

ETA: Donald Sutherland said it better, shorter and with a beaver joke.

*the original bit in the CEA with the non-residency restriction dealt with special ballots only, which sort of implies that if someone non-resident returns to the riding in which they would ordinarily reside on a day where there happened to be an election or advanced poll and they brought, say, their passport and a bank statement with their address, then they could vote (which would obviously suggest that your right to vote is not related to your interest in the country or any sort of social contract but actually to whether you happen to be in your riding on the appropriate day with the appropriate ID). But then later the judge says that the Attorney General says that non-residents for 5+ years cannot vote in person at a polling station either, which the Chief Electoral Officer denies, saying that they actually do allow non-residents to vote in-person at a polling station. But then the judge says that for this appeal he doesn’t need to decide who is right and can just assume that the Attorney General is, so does that mean that now non-residents can’t even vote in person even though the law doesn’t explicitly forbid that? Law is confusing you guys. I will stick to the physics of nuclear spins and diffusion thanks. (return)