As Ontario reviews the voting rules for its 444 municipalities, the governing Liberals have devoted much attention to the issue of how votes should be counted.

Last month the Liberals announced they would allow municipalities to use a ranked ballot system — in which voters can rank candidates in order of preference — to elect local councillors and mayors. It’s a great idea and one I championed as a board member of the Ranked Ballot Initiative of Toronto.

We should change the method we use to count votes, but reform also includes voter eligibility: who is allowed to cast a vote in a local election, and why? Hundreds of thousands of voting-age Ontarians cannot cast a ballot in local elections because they are not citizens and the current rules state that only citizens can vote in a municipal election.

This has got to change — we need to acknowledge that non-citizen residents would derive the same benefits from voting as anyone else and they need and deserve these benefits in a democratic society.

During the era of former premier Dalton McGuinty, I served as project coordinator of “I Vote Toronto,” a campaign to convince Queen’s Park to extend voting rights to non-citizen permanent residents of Canada. While many residents and organizations understood our goals and supported us, I was truly gob smacked by the number of people who argued that voting isn’t worth anything unless we stop some people from doing it.

Scarcity is a terrible argument where representation is concerned. The idea that allowing non-citizens to vote will “devalue” the franchise of citizens is a naked appeal to privilege. In Canada’s good old days, white, male, Anglican property owners of a certain age were the only people eligible to vote.

There is no doubt that as others gained the franchise — women, indigenous people, religious minorities, people living with disabilities —the value of each privileged, God-fearing white dude’s vote diminished. That was a good thing.

But every group that continues to be excluded from voting must confront the same tiresome arguments: that privilege comes with its privileges, that the excluded do not know enough about voting, or do not want to vote, or will vote in some uneducated or ill-advised manner.

Immigrants are the backbone of Ontario’s economy and the source of much of its growth. Our government deems newcomers fit to live, work, invest and raise families here, but somehow unfit to make electoral decisions about the laws and regulations that govern their lives. Sheesh.

While municipalities all over the world allow at least some non-citizen residents to vote in local elections, Ontario’s politicians have long seemed afraid to follow suit.

Interestingly, our provincial political parties allow non-citizens to buy party memberships and to vote in partisan leadership contests. Ontario PC leader Patrick Brown allegedly signed up more than 40,000 new party members during his recent leadership bid, many of them from so-called “cultural communities” (i.e. black and brown first- and second-generation immigrants). His campaign didn’t ask if all these folks were Canadian citizens — it wasn’t deemed a relevant factor to their ability to partake in that democratic process.

Canadians seem increasingly supportive of allowing some non-citizens to vote in municipal elections. City councils in Toronto and North Bay have formally asked the province to enfranchise non-citizens who have obtained permanent residency; officials in Halifax, and in five municipalities in New Brunswick, have made the same request of their respective provincial governments.

This was what I hoped for all those years ago with I Vote Toronto and in retrospect I am only sorry I didn’t push the threshold even further than permanent residency.

Before 1988 in Ontario, you didn’t have to be a citizen to vote. You had to reside or hold property in the municipality where you planned to vote; Nova Scotia allowed non-citizen British subjects to vote in local elections until 2007.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

The need to vote and the benefits of being able to do so — for permanent residents, foreign workers, students and undocumented people — are just as critical for new immigrants as they are for citizens. Premier Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals should acknowledge this and extend the municipal franchise to all non-citizen residents.