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Last week Halifax Regional Council made a token gesture to welcome newcomers by letting permanent residents vote in municipal elections. Naturally, the topic elicited the usual xenophobia from radio callers and Internet commenters.
The public seemed worried planeloads of new immigrants would invade our city, flex their democratic muscle and change all our blue tartan to Barcelona stripes. Imagine, thousands upon thousands of active citizens actually bothering to vote in elections.
More than 70 percent of the province’s permanent residents (citizens of other countries who now live here) reside in Halifax. That’s 10,435, according to Statistic Canada’s 2011 census. Mainly, they come from the United Kingdom, United States and the Philippines. But since the data’s already been collected, here’s the full list (and nifty pie chart) to help you better understand Halifax’s multicultural tableau.
Who’d have thought we have five times the Uzbek citizens than Australians in town? For comparison’s sake, of the city’s nearly 300,000 eligible voters only 110,311 filled out a ballot in the last municipal election. If every single permanent resident voted next go around, the turnout percentage would rise three points and finally reach over 40 percent.
Of course, granting someone the right to vote doesn’t mean they actually will. Our domestic elections prove that much. Extending voting rights to permanent residents has already been done in a number of jurisdiction across the world like New Zealand and Japan. A recognition that the people living and investing in those communities might want a voice in their governance.
Ultimately, it will be up to the province whether Council’s motion becomes law.
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The public is to blame
This article appears in Dec 4-10, 2014.
I don’t think it should be a right to vote, I think it should be a requirement to vote.
The “against” arguments in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_vo… are not compelling. For example, whoever wrote this gem “Low voter participation in a voluntary election may not be the result of political apathy. It may be simply an expression of the citizenry’s political will, indicating satisfaction with the political establishment in an electorate” must be extremely naive. Most non-voters don’t vote because they *are* apathetic. And here’s another gem from that article: “Some do not support the idea of voters being compelled to vote for candidates they have no interest in or knowledge of”. Well, hell, the majority of people who do vote now aren’t exactly well-informed either.
Requiring everyone to vote, with properly designed ballots that allow for spoiling or blank votes etc, is a step up from what we have now. Getting a simple majority of votes, for example, when only 37 percent of citizens have voted, means very possibly that only one-fifth of eligible voters approve of you or even know who you are, let alone know your track record.