The contest is on. The writ for the 2017 B.C. election dropped April 11, but voting began only Saturday at advance polling stations.
Saturday, today and from Wednesday through Saturday (May 3, 4, 5 and 6), many British Columbians are voting in the election’s early innings.
Early turnout for this and other recent elections — provincial, federal and municipal — indicates we prefer the convenience and option of advance visits to the ballot booth. They permit us to choose a day that works better for us, to circumvent election-day lineups at voting stations, and to fit in the business or day trip that had been planned for May 9 months ago — and still exercise our democratic responsibility.
Options and convenience increase access and opportunity. The increased number of advance-voting days represents recent steps in incremental efforts over many decades to increase participation in elections in Canada. The first steps in this direction took place a century ago.
For decades before Confederation in 1867, full citizenship in Canada was legally limited to men. By the end of that century, laws across the country mandated near-universal white male citizenship at the federal and provincial levels, and explicitly excluded women voters. For the most part, federal law gave the provinces power to determine who was eligible to vote in any election.
Most provinces restricted the vote to men who owned property of certain minimum value or earned a minimum annual income, but B.C. permitted white men to vote in elections if they had lived in the province for at least 12 months and in the riding for at least two months before an election.
Only in 1917 did B.C. grant women the right to vote in the province’s elections.
Federally, Canada’s electoral law stipulated that “idiots, madmen,” criminals and judges were not allowed to vote. It didn’t mention women, but they, too, couldn’t vote federally.
Things started to change on the federal level with the First World War. In mid-1916, Richard Borden, prime minister at the time, had promised Britain another 50,000 Canadian soldiers to fight in the trenches. However, he knew the only way to muster that many additional men was to bring in conscription. He also knew many Canadians would not welcome conscription.
So, his government adjusted voting eligibility. To ensure victory for conscription, the Borden government’s Wartime Elections Act of 1917 gave women who were British subjects and wives, mothers and sisters of soldiers serving with the Canadian Expeditionary Force the right to vote on behalf of their male relatives. Women serving as nurses and ambulance drivers in the military also got the vote.
Six months after the Dec. 17, 1917, election, during which about 500,000 women voted for the first time in a Canadian federal election, Borden’s victorious coalition government extended the right to vote to other, mainly white, Canadian women 21 years of age and older.
In 1920, the Dominion Elections Act made the federal franchise universal — except for aboriginals and persons disenfranchised by provinces “for reasons of race.” Because B.C. excluded Chinese, Japanese and South Asians from provincial elections, these people also could not vote in federal elections.
It was only in 1948 that Asian women and men became eligible to vote federally — in the same year Canada adopted the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
However, Japanese people living in B.C. won the right to vote in provincial elections only in 1949. Doukhobours followed in 1953. Treaty-status aboriginal women attained the vote for band councils in 1951, and for federal elections only in 1960.
Prisoners behind bars were the last to achieve recognition of their right to vote. In 1993 — 24 years ago — Canada’s Supreme Court determined that prisoners in Canada cannot be denied their voting rights.
Marginalized people still find it difficult to participate in elections — particularly the homeless and others who, for whatever reason, don’t have a full-time permanent address to confirm residency.
The broadening of the franchise and of voting options has been a slow process in Canada and its provinces. It could be improved still further.
All this goes to show that the franchise shouldn’t be taken for granted. So vote — at the advance polling stations today or later in the week, or on May 9.
