Ottawa Restores Some Rights

From the BBC:

"Canada plans to restore voting rights for long-term expats"

Canada plans to restore voting rights to some 1.4 million expatriates.  Ottawa is introducing legislation to allow expats who have been living outside Canada for more than five years to vote in federal elections,  Two Canadians living in the US have been fighting for the right to vote after learning they were ineligible to cast ballots in the 2011 general election.  Canada's Supreme Court is planning to hear their case next spring.   The new policy is part of a package of electoral reforms announced on Thursday by federal Democratic Institutions Minister Maryam Monsef.  Ms Monsef called the five-year limit "arbitrary".  "People have a very strong connection to this country and to their identity as Canadians. Just because they're living abroad doesn't mean they've forgotten about this place," she said.  The law has been in place since 1993.  Gillian Frank, currently living in Princeton, New Jersey and Jamie Duong, who resides in Fairfax, Virginia, went to court to fight against the voting rights limits after trying to register online to vote in the 2011 Canadian federal election.  It became a hot-button issue during the 2015 federal election when an Ontario appellate court overturned an earlier win for the two expats. Canadian actor Donald Sutherland, the father of Kiefer Sutherland, even weighed in, criticising the policy that stopped him and his wife from casting a ballot.  In 2009, there were an estimated 2.8 million Canadians living abroad.  About 11,000 Canadians living overseas, excluding armed forces members, voted in the last federal election. Canada is not the only country that places limits on the voting rights of long-term expatriates. Citizens who have lived outside the UK for more than 15 years are barred from voting. Two Britons who wanted to vote in the June EU referendum lost a challenge against that law earlier this year. Australia and New Zealand also have varying voting limits for citizens who have lived abroad for extended periods.   On Thursday, the federal Liberals also proposed making it easier for people to vote within Canada by reintroducing vouching that allows one person to corroborate someone else's identity at the polls and allowing people to use their voter information card as ID. Those provisions were controversially removed by the previous government. Canada's elections commission will also be allowed to pre-register Canadians between 14 and 17 years of age to vote.

^ As a Canadian living outside of Canada I know all to well just how the Government in Ottawa openly discriminates against us. Not being allowed to vote is just one of the many acts and laws that the Canadian Government uses to violate the rights of native-born Canadians who live outside of Canada. Canadians born outside of Canada in the second generation are not considered Canadian citizens (even if they have two Canadian parents who are considered by the Government to be native-born vs. naturalized.) That means that someone who is a naturalized Canadian (with no actual Canadian blood running through their veins) has more citizenship rights than a person born to two Canadian parents outside of the country in the second generation. That is just plain wrong. Another example of Ottawa's discrimination is that a Canadian who is outside of Canada for 6 months or longer looses their health care and has to wait months after they return to Canada to get it back - so much for our "great" and "universal" health care system. Canadians like to take pride that we are an open, diverse and honest country yet we allow Ottawa to continue to openly discriminate (they don't even try to hide it) on Canadian citizens simply because they are outside of Canada. Those attitudes may have worked years ago, but this is the 21st century and the world is much smaller. Ottawa should stop discriminating against any Canadian (inside or outside of Canada.) ^

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38095709