First Person: The privilege to vote: Reflections from a newly minted Canadian
CBC
This First Person article was written by Ariana Salvo, a freelance writer and photographer based in Charlottetown. For more information about CBC's First Person stories, please see the FAQ.
There are four privileges that Canadian citizens enjoy that residents do not: the ability to serve in the Canadian Armed Forces, access to high-security government jobs, being called to serve as a juror and the privilege to vote in elections.
I moved to P.E.I. from Italy in 2004 to pursue my master's degree in Island Studies, but only received my citizenship in 2019. Every year for 16 years candidates came knocking, and every year I told them I wasn't yet able to vote.
But today I will vote in my first Canadian federal election.
This year, of course, not a single candidate knocked on my door. I had assumed that Citizenship Canada would share the list of new citizens with Elections Canada so they could send us voter registration information, but this didn't happen. Eager to enjoy my new privileges, I went online and registered myself to vote.
A friend asked me to describe how it felt to register to vote for the first time in one word.
"Exhilarating," I said.