The Right to Vote

Yesterday was the federal election here in Canada and the way I spent my day had me feeling very lucky to be Canadian. It made me feel lucky I live here, lucky to have been born here, lucky to have my voice count at the polls here. And I know that being Canadian can be complicated....we don't do near as well as we like to think in terms of race, particularly when it comes to First Nations people. There are dozens of communities without safe drinking water, even in 2019. We have a lot of blind spots, and I plan to talk a lot about that on this blog over time. I don't believe we live in a utopia. But I love being Canadian, I feel so grateful for the experience I have had in this country, and I believe we can and hope we will get to a place as a nation where everyone here has a positive relationship with being Canadian. So with great respect for the people that have different experiences, I would like to share what being Canadian means to me.

I am both a first generation (my mother emigrated from Wales as a teenager) and a second generation (my paternal grandfather was born and raised in Mexico before immigrating to Canada where my dad was born) Canadian. Growing up in and around larger centres for most of my early childhood years, my friends came from varied cultural backgrounds. I grew up trying seaweed snacks with my friend while she taught me Chinese slang, and chatting too late into the night with my friend who's mom would pick up the phone and tell him in Arabic "okay, I told you to be off the phone by 9!" To me, learning about different foods and customs, hearing different languages, has always been part of the beauty of Canada. I love being a part of a country where my family on both sides was welcomed and so were the families of my friends. Our families were so lucky to have made it here, I didn't realize just how lucky mine was until yesterday. My dad's side was German, but they left Germany in the 1800's for the Ukraine as settlers in search of opportunity and religious freedom. They wrote a small book about my great great grandmother's life and I read it yesterday morning while getting my bloodwork done. I was to be at the hospital three hours to test for diabetes and thought it would be a great opportunity for me to read the book.

What a read! Heartbreaking and inspiring in equal measure, I was shocked at all she and her children had survived. They grew their farm into a prosperous venture over a few generations but everything changed with the first world war, and later communist Russia. They were taken as political prisoners and forced to work themselves nearly to death in Siberia for years. This after enduring immeasurable hardships for decades due to religious persecution and their cultural background. It is staggering to think what life was like for them. To imagine what they would have given for the freedoms I have enjoyed my entire life. Freedom, and privileges like the ability to take a morning off from my job to get my bloodwork done. Or to have access to the health care I got yesterday. My life is so easy in contrast. Which brings me to our election. The opportunity to have a voice. My ancestors didn't have a voice...they were taken out of their homes in the middle of the night and they were put on a cattle car for 12 days in miserable conditions to the coldest place on Earth. The ability for me to stand up and voice my values and exercise my right to vote is a privilege hard won by all those who came before me. The ancestors that decided to keep hoping even in the most bleak of situations. The women and people of colour who fought for an equal opportunity to vote. This is a right I do not take lightly. It is a right I am grateful for. And it is a right I will always exercise, with the weight of that history pushing me to the polls. We are lucky. There is work to do, no doubt...progress is slow, but hope is necessary.

Proud Canadian,

-Amanda