OTTAWA – A recent Court of Appeal ruling states that expatriate Canadians will no longer be eligible to intend to vote, then fail to “mail the thing in”, before forgetting about it entirely.
“This is absolutely disenfranchisement,” said Canadian expatriate Norman Currie, who has been studying abroad for 6 years in Maryland. “It is my right as a citizen to go to register from abroad to vote online, or vote online – I think you can vote online now, right?”
After a fruitless ten-minute Google search for “canadian vote abroad”, Currie then began surfing Facebook, before watching a YouTube playlist of videos devoted to how superhero films should have ended. When asked if he still believed Canadians should be able to vote from abroad, he added, “oh right.”
The current Court ruling comes as a surprise to many foreign Canadians who had expected to wait until the last minute to register to vote abroad, before abandoning the goal through sheer laziness. This will also impact the time-honored expat tradition of rationalizing one’s failure to vote by citing how “one ballot doesn’t matter”, or subsequently claiming, “I was gonna vote for the guy who won anyway.”
“Even though I live in China I’m still passionate about about who will win the election between Harper, Jack Layton and Pierre Trudeau,” said Jack Li.
Reached for comment, a spokesperson for the Prime Minister’s Office defended the decision. “We crunched the numbers and found that Canadians living abroad were less likely to vote Conservative,” said Jason MacDonald, spokesperson for the PMO. “Until this point we were content to disenfranchise them through an overly-convoluted foreign voting system, but now it’s 2016 and every discouraged not-Conservative vote counts.”
Looking towards the federal election, the Harper Government is also requesting that expat Canadians not point out to their voting-eligible friends just how much Canada has changed over the past few years.
