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Originally Posted by Cowboy89
100% agree. There's a well defined, non-onerous path to becoming a citizen should one choose. What problem is YYC Council trying to solve by allowing PR non-citizens to vote?
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I tend to agree with there being no pressing need to change the current voter eligibility criteria. However if the question is how do you best create a representative democracy then I think residency is more important than citizenship at the municipal and provincial level for sure and probably at the federal level as well.
The goal of a representative democracy is to provide services and taxation in areas where the goals of capitalism don’t align with the goals of a community.
So democracy is a selection of people who align with the goals of a community and an evaluation of people’s performance on accomplishing those goals.
So municipal governance is really about the day to day services you receive and interact with aside from health and education. So to set the level of these services it really seems that being a resident is more important. You are the direct user of these services. Some may talk about long term visions of cities but since we don’t have future residency requirements for any voters I’m not sure why you’d want to differentiate between citizen and non-citizen.
So I’d use a municipal test as 51% of the year preceding the election is required to vote. As Slava states you can’t just use who happens to be in Canada that day. But that’s exactly what we do for citizens in municipal elections. If you are a resident of Calgary on election day (and a citizen of Canada) you can vote. Same for federal riding boundaries and provincial residency for provincial elections.
I think the general principle of anyone who has made an intention to live somewhere for a period of time that will be impacted by the decisions of the government they are living under probably should get to vote.
We give permanent residents OAS after 10 years, they get health care and education benefits, they can pay into CPP. The main difference between it and citizenship are residency requirements to get citizenship.
So I think in general a residency focused system rather than a citizenship focused system would result in a more representative democracy.