Voting rights and belonging

A hand bears the mark of an election stamp on the day of the June 13 local elections last year. / Korea Times photo by Jon Dunbar

By Jon Dunbar

A letter arrived in the mail from Elections Canada, Feb. 14, confirming my right to vote in Canadian elections from overseas has been restored.

This may sound crazy, but until last month Canadian citizens living overseas for more than five years didn't have the right to vote. Because we've been gone for so long, it was argued we don't have a vested interest in the politics of our country of origin.

Last year, after Canada arrested Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, China arrested two notable Canadian nationals within its territory, seemingly in retaliation. One was my friend, Michael Spavor.

Michael remains in Chinese custody on absolutely meaningless charges of endangering Chinese national security, seemingly because his home country government dared to carry out an arrest as requested by America. Meng is on bail in her Vancouver home while the U.S. calls for her extradition. The Canadian government is struggling to make contact with Michael and working to secure his release.

So don't tell me overseas Canadians don't have a stake in our country of origin.

I have been a Canadian resident of South Korea for 15 years, and while Canada has suppressed my voting rights for years, Korea has invited me to vote in three local elections since 2012.

In recognition of the growing importance of multiculturalism here, the government in 2005 allowed for permanent residents to vote in local but not national elections, after holding an F-5 visa for three years.

My first time voting was in the 2012 legislative election, where I was constrained from voting in almost all categories but one or two local races. I joined a long line at a school in Yeonhui-dong to cast my vote, and not one single person in line with me or working the polling station batted an eye at this white foreigner voting.

Voters decorate their hands with the ballot stamps to advertise that they'd voted, something I learned after it was too late.

I walked away with stamps on my hands in the Seoul mayoral elections in 2014 and 2018, both highly consequential elections. I was able to vote for mayor, local district representative, proportional representation in which I just select a political party, and education office head. Both times, I did my research in advance and made informed choices.

It does make sense that people like me can participate in selecting community leaders who have a direct influence on our local communities, but at the same time cannot vote in national or federal elections of a country in which we are not citizens.

I only wish my home country, Canada, had been as reasonable. In 1993, Canada enacted a law that disenfranchised any Canadians who had lived abroad for over five years, but it wasn't enforced strictly until the 2006-15 Stephen Harper government.

After being barred from voting in the 2011 federal election, Jamie Duong and Gillian Frank, two Canadians living in the U.S., challenged the law in court and won in 2014, but the Conservatives appealed and once again barred overseas Canadians from voting in the 2015 federal election while the legal battle continued.

Harper's opponent Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau's winning campaign platform included a pledge to reform elections so all Canadians could vote. But after Trudeau won, there was little progress in overseas voting rights for years.

Electoral reform looks less attractive once you're the party in power. We've seen a similar phenomenon in Korea's political candidates who promise electoral reform and constitutional amendments, only to give up when they take power.

Citizenship does not rub off, and when you go abroad you do not leave your nationality behind. We carry Canadian passports. Our visas are hinged on our citizenship. We represent Canada in our countries of residence, except when they mistake us for American. We breathe the air that is polluted by fossil fuels like that which my home province of Alberta continues to dig out of the ground. I fulfill my duties as a taxpayer according to the Korea-Canada tax treaty.

And, as seen by my friend Michael's imprisonment, our wellbeing and security hinge on the international reputation and actions of our home country.

Fortunately, the Supreme Court ruled Jan. 11 that the blatant unconstitutionality of the voting restriction was, in fact, a problem, calling our right to vote a "core tenet of Canadian democracy."

I hope Michael, after he is cleared of all charges and released, takes solace that during his months-long Chinese imprisonment, the Supreme Court restored his right to select his political representatives, even if he chooses not to return to Canada.

Canadian election system

Canadian elections work differently from Korean ones. Canada is divided up into federal electoral districts called ridings, and you vote for the representative in your riding. Whichever party wins in the most ridings reserves the right to select the prime minister.

Trudeau himself had to run in a local election for Papineau, a riding in Montreal, Quebec. So if you live in Papineau, a multicultural district with 47 percent of residents claiming their first language is neither of Canada's two official languages of French and English, then Trudeau is your Member of Parliament.

Thus, in restoring our right to vote, we must register a Canadian address for voting purposes, which could be: your last Canadian address where you lived before leaving the country; the current home address of a spouse or common-law partner; a relative of yourself, your spouse or your common-law partner; a person you are a dependant of; or a person you would live with if you were living in Canada.

This system makes it extra difficult to justify overseas Canadians voting. While we deserve federal representation, I don't really need to vote for city mayor or provincial premier.

The perfect solution to this is staring me in the face whenever I stamp a Korean ballot: Introduce a partial proportional representation system, where we don't vote for a local riding, but for a political party, and that determines how many proportional representative seats each party wins. Canada was considering electoral reform to introduce proportional representation, but Trudeau has backed down from putting it to a referendum.

Nobody gets everything they want in politics, and now that I've won the right to vote in not one but two countries, I'm happy to once again share my opinions in the form of an electoral ballot.

Jon Dunbar (jdunbar@koreatimes.co.kr) is a copy editor of The Korea Times.