Remembrance Day is over but for local residents to continue to pay their respects, they need to do more than stand silent for a moment at the Cenotaph. The men and women who fought and died for this country and its people not only deserve to be remembered by a moment of silence, they deserve to be remembered with a moment of action.
There is no more powerful way for Canadian citizens to honour their ancestors, their fellow Canadians alive today, their war dead, their living veterans and their current serving members in the Canadian Armed Forces than to vote. That sounds overly dramatic but only in the light of today's focus on the rights and needs of the individual over the collective. Individual rights only come to the forefront in peaceful democracies under the firm control of law and order or in lawless anarchy, when it's everyone for themselves. In other words, the best way to celebrate the triumph of the individual in Canadian society is for residents to make their individual marks on a ballot.
The poppy helps us remember the dead but voting helps us remember why they died. Democracy is not some natural thing that happens among like-minded individuals nor is it a universal right (if it was, everyone would have it and it couldn't be taken away). It is a privilege that we don't nurture and protect at our peril. The majority of individuals in human history have not lived in a democracy and a significant portion of today's global population don't, either. Instead, they live in a state where their individual rights are not respected, where the state can - and usually does - decide what they see, hear and read, what development happens in their community, what education their children receive, where the roads go, and so on.
Saturday's vote on whether fluoride should be added to or removed from the city's water supply wouldn't happen in many parts of the world. The edict would be given, one way or the other, by a small group in an office, without the consent of citizens. Meanwhile, devoted local citizens banded together in 2011 and 2012 to force the city to hold a referendum before investing in the River Road dike project. Residents across the province united themselves to force the B.C. government to dump the Harmonized Sales Tax and return the Provincial Sales Tax. It doesn't matter whether these were good or bad choices but that citizens had the power to direct their elected officials to stop doing what they were planning or to change what they had already done.
As Canadians, we can't even agree on making Remembrance Day a universal holiday in Canada. The residents of Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec and Nova Scotia do not receive a statutory holiday on Nov. 11 and their employers expect to see them at work. There are ongoing efforts to change that but it will be done by elected individuals working within the democratic institutions of this country.
Canadians enjoy so much freedom that they can't see their freedom anymore, taking it for granted that it has always been there and will always be there in the future.
For residents who see voting as a waste of time, perhaps some time spent in a state where voting is not allowed, where democracy is a dream and individual rights only belong to bullies with guns and money, instead of everyone, would awaken their appreciation of the good fortune to live in a country where the freedom to vote is also the freedom not to vote.
Not voting is a rejection of any personal obligation towards freedom, democracy, law, order and the individuals, past and present, who have worn a uniform to protect all of those things on our behalf. Not voting is a shirking of the responsibility citizens have to each other and to future generations to maintain those freedoms.
Remember to vote in this election. It's a tough job but you'll be taking part in a long and worthy tradition that many others, past and present, would have given so much to have for themselves.
