Extending the right to vote to all Toronto residents is a cause worth supporting. Visit the I Vote Toronto Campaign website @
http://www.ivotetoronto.org/
Quick Facts about the I Vote Toronto Campaign
I Vote Toronto is a community campaign that seeks to extend municipal voting rights to all permanent residents living in Toronto.
* Granting residents who are not citizens the right to vote is not a new idea. Jurisdictions in over 30 countries, including the United States, Great Britain, Argentina, Australia, The Netherlands and Israel allow non-citizens to vote at the local level.
* In Ontario, 130 000 students have parents who cannot even vote for their school board trustee. Many of these students are concentrated in the same schools and neighbourhoods. This leaves entire schools and geographic areas without a local voice.
* In Ontario, property owners (and their spouses) still have more rights than residents. A property owner can vote in any municipality in which he or she owns property. This means someone with a property in each of Ontario's 444 municipalities can vote in all 444 municipal elections, even though they do not reside in all of them. On the other hand, many residents who pays municipal taxes, use local services and have a stake in the community have no voice.
* Low voting neighbourhoods are disproportionately located in the North York, York and Scarborough areas of Toronto.
* Until 1947, Canadian citizenship did not exist. After its creation, British subjects were still allowed to vote in local elections until the 1970s. British subjects were eligible to vote in Nova Scotia's municipalities until 2003. The idea of tying local voting to citizenship is very new, and non-citizen voting was the practice for most of Canada's history.
* Between 1991 and 2001, (Canada’s largest sustained decade of newcomer arrivals), the city regions of Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal attracted 73\% of all immigrants to Canada. The Toronto area alone attracted 43\% of all immigrants to Canada in this period.
