On days like today, I’m proud to be a Canadian

Driving to the polling station this morning, I asked my son Jacob to check the address on the Elections Canada card that had come in the mail.

He read off the address and asked, “Where’s that?”

“It’s at one of our neighbours’,” I said.

“Like, in a house?” he replied, surprised.

In his 18th year, this was his very first chance to vote, and he thought we’d have to drive into Westsyde to a hall or a gym. Even when we lived in the outskirts of Barnhartvale, we usually voted in the school gymnasium. But in Black Pines, there’s no school, no community hall — but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have it’s own place to cast your ballot.

The sign on the front door of the house, beside the official Elections Canada poster, said, “Come on in, we’re downstairs!”

I knocked a couple of times on the door and opened it. “Come on down!” a voice cheerily greeted us, and we went down the stairs into the basement.

There, the neighbours running the polling station had set up a table with a ballot box and voters’ list; a few steps away was the voting booth.

“Sorry,” they joked, “We’ll need so see some ID to prove who you are.”

Of course, they knew exactly who we were. Jacob, though, had come prepared with his ID, since he had to register.

“How’s the house coming?” asked one of the neighbours/polling clerks when it was Jacob’s turn in the voting booth, and we chatted for a minute or two.

As Jacob and I left, I felt a certain pride in living in a country where you are not only allowed to vote, but encouraged to vote, and where polling stations are set up in people’s houses to make sure you have every opportunity to vote.

“So who’d you vote for?” I asked Jacob as we drove toward town.

“Nice try,” he said. “One of the great things about living in Canada is that you don’t have to tell anyone who you voted for. That’s why they call it a secret ballot.”