Based on a letter offered by the Council of Canadians, I chose to go personal and tell Canadian Senators that my son deserves to vote. Here’s my letter. You can send one, too. by visiting the Council of Canadian’s Fair Elections Act webpage.
Dear Senator,
I am so proud of my son. He is graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Ontario College of Art and Design this year and has already received incredible support and encouragement for the work he displayed at the annual Grad Exhibition earlier this month. He now has a piece in another show and commitments with galleries over then next few months. He is brilliant, funny, and politically astute. His values are clean and he lives them out in his day to day life.
He lives in a basement apartment with a few friends. It’s the second place he’s lived this year. We’ve joked that he could design a walking tour of the entire city of Toronto just by showing people the seemingly innumerable places he has lived while studying for his degree.
He is no different than many of his friends, members of a generation that lives in what are sometimes called urban tribes. They care deeply for one another, are incredibly loyal, and will give over a couch for weeks or months at a time if someone needs it (and my son has). They never stay too long at one address, moving closer to school in the winter and to their favourite park in the spring. Their landlords, when they have them, are mostly absentee and indifferent as long as they get their rent. Come election day, neither my son nor many of his friends would be able to convince anyone eligible to vouch for them to go with them to the polls. They are disenfranchised because their lifestyle doesn’t fit the ideal set up by the Conservative Party that currently forms the government, an ideal that looks more like you and I did when we were their age. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t eager to be part of the telling of Canada’s next story and part of choosing its next government.
And so, I am writing to urge you to reject the so-called “Fair” Elections Act in its current form.
The act, despite its changes, remains deeply flawed and an affront to democratic principles.
In its current form, the bill would still disenfranchise my son and thousands of voters like him. It still does nothing to get to the bottom of the kind of widespread election fraud that took place in 2011, serving instead to punish a constituency that doesn’t actually perpetrate election fraud to any significant extent. And it, ridiculously, still limits the ability of Elections Canada to prevent election fraud or even report on it when it occurs.
Be the chamber of sober second thought. Now is the time for you to stand up to a government that too casually plays fast and loose with our democratic rights. It’s time for Mr. Harper’s arrogant indifference to end.
I urge you to take bold action to defend democracy in Canada. Send this bill back to the House of Commons and back to the drawing board.
Sincerely,
gretta vosper