Juno News - October 16, 2019


Elections Canada needs to take non-citizen voting seriously

Topics
non-citizen voting in Canada
Hosted by
Andrew Lutton
Mentioned
Candace Malcolm
How 'Politically Correct Totalitarians' are Undermining Canadian Universities Barack Obama endorses Justin Trudeau

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

178.6

Word count

640

Sentence count

27

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Non-citizens are getting voters' cards, but many of them don't know they're not supposed to be voting. Andrew Lutton talks about the growing number of non-citizens on Elections Canada's voter list, and why it needs to be enforced.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 One of the most important things in a free country is its fair and open elections,
00:00:14.400 meaning that a free country needs to safeguard the democratic process.
00:00:18.600 That's such a paramount obligation for a nation.
00:00:22.400 Unfortunately in Canada, Elections Canada doesn't seem all that concerned
00:00:26.600 with the volume of non-citizens who would be logistically able to cast a ballot,
00:00:32.000 although not legally so.
00:00:34.200 Now I've written about this in the past, other people have raised the concerns as well,
00:00:37.800 that you could go and add yourself to the voters list right at the polling station
00:00:42.600 without proving you're a citizen.
00:00:44.700 Now you have to declare an oath and sign a form that says you're a citizen,
00:00:48.900 but you don't need to prove that.
00:00:51.500 But it goes beyond that because non-citizens are actually on the list already,
00:00:56.200 where they're getting voters cards, all they have to do is show up with their card,
00:01:00.200 with their driver's license, and they can cast a ballot.
00:01:03.500 Now this is something that's been raised by non-citizens who receive their cards, 1.00
00:01:07.800 who are concerned about this fact.
00:01:10.400 The ones who aren't speaking up are the ones who may not know
00:01:13.500 that they aren't supposed to be voting.
00:01:15.700 When I was a candidate in the provincial election in Ontario in 2018,
00:01:19.400 I encountered permanent residents who were genuinely unclear
00:01:23.300 about whether they were legally entitled to cast a ballot or not because of these concerns.
00:01:28.000 Because some of their friends were getting voters cards, other people would tell them,
00:01:31.400 no, you don't need your passport or citizenship, you just have to go and sign up.
00:01:36.100 That's how voting works here.
00:01:38.100 We know that in May, Elections Canada acknowledged that it had more than 100,000,
00:01:42.500 I think it was 103,000 non-citizens on the voters list.
00:01:46.600 And it said it was going to work hard to get those names off the list,
00:01:50.600 though it's unclear how they did that, and actually it's unclear if they did that.
00:01:55.300 In my colleague Candace Malcolm's column on TNC.News,
00:01:58.600 she talks about a couple of other incidents where people who are not supposed to be voting
00:02:03.300 have received their voters cards.
00:02:05.600 Now we have to assume that the majority of people who are not supposed to be voting
00:02:10.000 know this and won't do it.
00:02:11.800 But we've seen ridings where very slim margins have been the determining factors
00:02:16.800 in who won and who didn't.
00:02:18.300 Which means that if you're talking about 100,000 or hundreds of thousands of voters
00:02:23.000 on the list, depending on where those are,
00:02:25.200 that could be having a monumentally disruptive effect on the race in Canada,
00:02:30.600 on who wins the election.
00:02:32.300 And it's not to say that this is being co-opted for sinister purposes by a particular party,
00:02:37.600 but it's to say that we need to safeguard our democratic process
00:02:40.800 to protect the democratic rights of those who are citizens and those who should be voting.
00:02:46.000 This is not offensive, this is the law, and the law needs to be enforced.
00:02:51.000 But unfortunately when we hear rhetoric from the government like a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian,
00:02:55.800 it's safe to say that platitudes are trumping the law in many cases.
00:03:00.100 We see this with the immigration file, and yes, we're seeing it with Elections Canada and citizens voting.
00:03:05.600 I once knew a woman who had no idea she wasn't a Canadian citizen.
00:03:09.800 She assumed her mother had looked after it when she was younger,
00:03:12.800 and it wasn't until adulthood, after she had cast ballots in several elections by the way,
00:03:17.800 that she got her citizenship squared away.
00:03:19.800 In many cases, these things can be dealt with, but people need to know.
00:03:23.800 And when voters' cards are being sent to non-citizens,
00:03:26.800 it's only muddying a process that needs to be protected and preserved.
00:03:30.800 For True North, I'm Andrew Lutton.