In the leadup to Canada's federal elections tomorrow*, there's been lots of talk about whether expatriate Canadians should have the right to vote.
* (yeah, I know, super-awesome that they did it again on a Jewish holiday!)
Last time around, we didn't. They changed the law to say you could only vote if you'd been gone less than 5 years and intended to return. We were under 5 years, but couldn't honestly say we planned to return to live in Canada. So our rights were taken away.
But this year, in response to a legal challenge from a pair of Canadians abroad, the Supreme Court reinstated our rights. The 5-year condition, they said, made no sense and hadn't been instituted in response to any particular problem, real or perceived.
Still -- lots of Canadians, including some of my beloved family members, don't think we should be voting. They're not alone. I don't have statistics, so I can't say most, but I know many people back there feel that we shouldn't get to vote unless we sleep on Canadian soil a certain number of days each year. And a few days ago, CBC ran an op-ed by Mark Reynolds, an expat who claims, "I don't live in Canada anymore. I shouldn't have the right to vote in its elections."
As I'll explain below, the Supreme Court disagreed, and I disagreed. Here are a few reasons why.
1) Being Canadian didn't stop the minute we moved to Israel.
If anything, we became more Canadian once we were here. All of a sudden, instead of being "the Jews" in our neighbourhood in Toronto, we were "the Americans" in our neighbourhood in Israel -- and, after we explained to everybody, sometimes more than once, that it's not the same thing, "the Canadians."
It sometimes takes weirdly a long time
