Celebrating the right to vote and mourning my lack of it.

A few months after I moved to Edinburgh in September 2002, my electoral roll papers arrived in the mail at my student residence. I half knew already that as a Commonwealth student I was eligible to vote in both the Scottish and wider United Kingdom elections, but it was still a delightful surprise. Here I was a foreign national (despite a cultural ancestry more Scottish than many native-born Scots) being welcomed into the national political debate. My vote counted and it made me feel very much a part of British politics.

This was 2003, just as Britain was entering the war in Iraq and political debates really seemed to  mean something. Labour was dominant, the Lib Dems were flourishing and no one was imagining a time when they might go into coalition with the Tories. The notion was laughable. Also, coming from a small country at the end of the world, it was exhilarating to vote alongside tens of millions of other people in elections that had direct world consequences. (Sorry, New Zealand.) I kept up on political issues from both Holyrood and Westminster. I debated the issues. I learned the nuances of British political life. I began to know them better than the issues back in New Zealand, but you better believe that I kept my name on the electoral roll at home and submitted my postal vote come election time.

Voting is at the front of my mind this week, with a national election taking place in New Zealand on Saturday 20th September and the referendum on Scottish Independence on Thursday 18th. Obviously I am no longer eligible to vote in Scotland, but those few years of enfranchisement in the mid 2000s mean I am still very invested in what goes on in my former home. Because former home can also mean future home. Such decisions are rarely off the table.

I’ve always been politically motivated. New Zealand was the first country to grant universal suffrage to women in 1893 and I come from a political family. I have been raised to think of election day as a day of celebration in itself, regardless of the result. My first general election was a wrestling between family tradition and a changing personal conviction. I have regretted some of my voting choices, but I have always thought it through and been proud just to vote.      

But I am not eligible to vote in the country of my residence and I mourn the lack of it. 

Canada only allows citizens to vote. I am a permanent resident and though permanent residents of countries like the United Kingdom and New Zealand may vote, in Canada my status means I may not vote federally, provincially, or even municipally. This policy is not unusual, but for a political soul enfranchisement means belonging. Therefore, I will never belong in Canada until I am a citizen and can vote.

Interestingly, there is talk of extending the time it takes to become a citizen in Canada. Currently, after three years as a permanent resident, you may apply for citizenship. This may be changed to four years, meaning that it will take approximately six years to become a Canadian. Six years without a vote.

The rationale is that this time will guarantee that new Canadians are invested in their life in Canada. That it’s not just an easy road to citizenship.

I don’t dispute that four years might be a good idea, but I do dispute my restriction from having a political voice. How can I possibly feel invested in this country if I may not participate in its decision making? Even though I naturally keep up with politics, I'm just not as emotionally involved with Canadian political news. It's not my business; I am a foreigner whose opinion is invalid.

Consequently, I will make sure I maintain sufficient contact with my home country so that I may have a political voice. This will mean making sure I’m home for at least a month every two or three years to keep my name on the electoral roll.

Not exactly the idea Canada intended.

I very much doubt my opinion will change Canadian policy, but I highly recommend they take the United Kingdom’s approach of allowing permanent residents and even some temporary residents the right to vote.

And whatever happens after the 18th - if the Union stands or falls - I hope the countries that form the British Isles maintain that welcoming policy of enfranchisement and belonging.

And you thought six weeks was long.

Unimpressed child hiding in regional park

I think it’s safe to say that I’m never going to be nominated for “Mum of the Year”. Unless it’s an award for “Most distracted, irritable, somewhat eccentric Mum who still manages to get her children to all the things they’re meant to be at in a vaguely presentable fashion, and who has somehow got them to mostly behave appropriately in public”. That’s a parenting win as far as I’m concerned, but don’t come to me if you need advice on getting kids to bed or eating their dinner or not always answering back. 

It’s the summer holidays here in Canada, so that time of the year when mothers like me see in full relief the inadequacies of their parenting abilities. Oh, you’re still here, children? And you want to do something? Yeah, I’ve been planning for the last five and a half years to have a day where I daydream for an hour or so, watch some pleasant television, and only eat bread and grapes. Maybe some salami or whatever looks appealing in the fridge. Oh, you want to do something. Right. And you want fed? Every day? God, I suppose so. I’m not going to be able to watch those episodes of Time Team or that documentary on Thomas Cromwell am I? Not even E! News? 

For those of you who have never experienced a North American summer vacation before, this goes on for 9 1/2 weeks. Yes, you read that right. Just over two months. For primary school children. TWO WHOLE MONTHS + a few extra days on either end. It’s like a mini form of hell, and being North America it’s pretty hot too. Endless weeks of 25+ degree temperatures and humidity hot. To make matters worse, the poor wee kids have just come off the back of 26 weeks of school since January with only 1 week off, a couple of teacher-only days and maybe Good Friday and Easter Monday. It’s insane. They’re tired, ratty and want you to entertain them. For 9 1/2 weeks. 

This is definitely a bit of a culture shock for me, because I’m used to the six-or-so-week-long New Zealand primary school summer holidays, conveniently kicked off with the fortnight of Christmas and New Year. The end of January and start of school comes by pretty quickly, so there are really only a couple of weeks idling about. There are always parents who have a bit of a ‘mare with childcare, but usually there are plenty of people around to muck about with. 

Canadians pride themselves on their outdoorsy summers, where families go away to the cottage or go portaging and lose themselves in nature for a week or two or four, but most people don’t actually have a cottage, and most parents have to work. Therefore, anything beyond a couple of weeks away is the preserve of the privileged. Unsurprisingly, with parents staring down the barrel of two months of kids at home, an extraordinary industry of summer camps and activities has developed. Some children have day camps (aka daycare) booked in for all 9 weeks of the summer, but even for families where a parent is home most of the time, summer camps are de rigueur. And boy do you start to feel the social expectation come early May: “So what camps are you signing up for this summer? We’re putting Molly into an great looking art camp and then thinking of a couple of weeks of mixed sport, or the YMCA? Do you want to co-ordinate weeks?”

Um, ah, actually, things are a bit tight right now, with, um, moving here and all, and me not having what you’d call a, ah, job, so, well, no. 

Booking my daughter into $200 per week day-camps was out of the question, so in the end we signed her up for a few swimming lessons and three mornings of an art programme. We’ll probably scrap together a last minute activity or two, but otherwise it’s fun with Mum and little brother for the summer.   

We’ll get bored and more than a little irritated with each other, but we’ll survive. We can go to the library and there are heaps of parks with splash pads around town. We’re also fortunate enough to have grandparents in town for the summer and a few friends on hand, but it really makes you wonder how people who are genuinely struggling manage the long Canadian summer. Parents who are working but can’t afford to make ends meet even when the kids are in school; parents who have no hope of being able to afford summer camps and still have to work, and have to scramble through two months of figuring out what their kids can do and who the hell will look after them. 

Because everything costs. Not just going away or summer camps, but going to the movies. Going to the art gallery costs. To the museum. You pay to take a car into a regional park, not to mention the petrol to get there. Going to the public pool costs. Sure, it’s $4 a head, but do it enough and it starts to add up. 

And don’t say to me, “But we never did summer activities. We just mucked about at home and played with our friends.” That’s great, but you were in the majority. Your neighbourhood pals were doing the same and most of your mums were mostly at home the whole summer. It’s all very well to celebrate my kids doing nothing like the good old days, but they don’t have very many friends to do nothing with because most of their friends are away or doing summer camps. In fact, you participate in an important aspect of the national cultural practice by attending summer camp. It’s that ingrained. 

In the meantime I’ll trust in the knowledge that being extremely, unbelievably bored is good for children, and we’ll try not to watch too much TV -- but I will damn well get to the end of that documentary on Thomas Cromwell. Come September, we’ll all be very ready for school and I’ll be extremely ready to start my new job. 

But next time you complain about wanting school to start after six weeks of a New Zealand summer, spare a thought for those useless parents like me who have to figure out something to DO for two whole months and a few extra days.   

The thorny issue of flowers in the performing arts.

Flowers arranged at home. (Photo: ©Sonja Nikkila 2008)

The other week my five-year-old daughter had her first ballet recital. It was a lovely if slightly drawn-out affair, with well-executed dances from the older students punctuated by delightfully cute potterings around the stage from the tiny girls, and everything in between. Even my three-year-old son put aside his vehement protests at being there in admiration for the senior modern ballet girls’ performance. “It had cool music,” was his assessment, but also, it was an impressive performance of compelling choreography. 

And how did my daughter do? Great. Actually, she and her class proved themselves as performers not only when the music cut out and they continued with their dancing, but when the music came back on again and they almost seamlessly returned to the correct spot in their routine. That, my friends, is why you put your children into dance and music.

The recital was coloured however by the expense of it all. From a professionally-made costume costing over $100 and worn on stage for all of five minutes, to the tickets at $28 a head for a concert in a proper performing arts venue. This was a professional performance in all facets bar the performers themselves. Suffice to say, my eyebrows raised a little on seeing all the parents carrying flowers for their darling children, and then a florists’ stand in the auditorium, presumably there to fleece any parents who were as yet unaware that small girls are supposed to receive flowers after ballet recitals. 

My mother sarcastically asked me if I was going to buy some flowers, to which I curtly replied, “she’s not a soloist; she doesn’t get flowers.” Then my rant began to formulate.

Was I perhaps bitter about my own chorus status? I have very rarely received the soloists’ flowers, but once when a friend gave me flowers after a performance, I was actually embarrassed. After all, I was just a chorus member in a concert performance of Acis and Galatea; you could’ve just bought me a drink. No, hang on, I actually would have preferred a drink. Or several, because a bunch of flowers could buy several drinks. 

I really like flowers. I love front gardens stuffed to the brim with cottage blooms. I’d love to have the money to full my house with deliciously fragrant bouquets or the means to regularly pick bunches of wild flowers. I do love flowers, but aside from the delight of receiving a completely unwarranted and unexpected bunch of flowers, I’ve never really had much time for the floral industry. Or at least in its relationship to the performing industry.

I’ve seen my sister - a professional singer of high regard - receive more flowers than she has the space for in her flat, and on a couple of occasions I’ve quickly calculated that all those bunches could have paid for a week’s rent. I’ve also seen her receive flowers after scandalously underpaid performances when the male soloists have received bottles of wine. That wine may not cover the costs of rehearsal and concert, and actually could be much less expensive than the flowers, but at least it’s arguably more useful and more enjoyable.

I’ve seen performers given flowers from audience members who have tried to get themselves reduced-priced tickets or comps because they’re family members. People who won’t pay more than $10 for the performance - money that should go towards paying the performers themselves - but will fork out over $30 for flowers as an act of congratulations. An act that pays the florist appropriately.

Let me repeat that: we will pay the florist but not the performer.

Returning to my daughter’s amateur ballet recital, the florists’ stand further reinforced for me the cultural practice of disregarding the worth of a performer. Even for a child’s performance, we will pay the auditorium staff according to the letter of employment law, we will pay the costume makers professional rates, we will pay the technical staff, and we will probably pay the teachers (though we might try and skimp on that if at all possible). Furthermore, we will pay the florists for materials and labour.

But we will tell our small children that if you perform all you will get are flowers that will die in a few days and are probably meaningless to you at this point in your life.

And get used to it kid, because chances are if you manage to get into a ballet company in your late teens or early 20s, you will struggle to pay the rent, but your art will be rewarded in more flowers than you know what to do with. The florist, however, will still be appropriately compensated.

So, I apologise to the florists of this world; I love the product of your art and will buy flowers when I can for their own sake, but I will not buy flowers for my daughter’s or my son’s performances. I’d rather they get a certificate, a ribbon or a cheap medal to acknowledge their year’s work. You can’t keep flowers, but twenty years after I stopped dancing, I still have all my certificates, ribbons and medals as mementos of a childhood full of love and labour in the performing arts.

If your child really deserves a reward after an excellent performance, how about putting the $20 or $30 you would otherwise spend on flowers into their bank account? It may be less ostentatious, and perhaps even a little mercenary, but it will quietly suggest the notion that performers should be paid too. 

I’m not saying I’d build a summer home here...

Maple trees and sloping eaves

It’s been a year. Exactly a year since we moved to Canada. Twelve months to the day since we embarked as a family on another great adventure. 

This week we moved into a nice little house that’s more to our tastes in a slightly different part of town that suits us better. An older neighbourhood, bit more urban, bit more socio-economically and culturally mixed, closer to the train station, walking distance to our town centre, the lake, all that. It feels more us. The bedrooms are up in the eaves and sloping roofs are friendly roofs.    

That’s not to say our old place wasn’t nice too. Well, the house itself was a bit crap, but I stand by my blog post last summer about our extraordinarily lovely neighbours. However, the official line, the line I cheerily tell people when they ask is that we’ve found moving to Canada far more expensive and far more difficult than we ever expected. The job hunt for me has been abysmal, and it’s just that much harder emigrating with children, and basically, we moved to Chris’s home neighbourhood and we just can’t afford to stay there.  

But the trees are really quite lovely.

I’ve been thinking that a lot of late - the trees are really quite lovely. They are, but it does rather imply that I’m in the Fire Swamp.

Little and middle-sized mammalian garden critters who try to eat our garbage aside, it’s less fire swamp and more slow death by suburbia. Most of the time I can be very objective and positive about the good things we’ve found here, but the truth is I’m miserable. Some days when I can’t maintain the philosophical façade, I wonder if it’s chemical rather than circumstantial. But if it is just circumstantial, is it the whole emotional whirlwind that is immigration and settling your family and job hunting and job rejection, or is it that I’m more suited to city life than the suburbs? Or is it Canada? Could it be that I’m not suited to Canada? 

I never expected to be singing this immigrants’ song. It’s positively ungrateful - I’m educated, English-speaking, white. I’m the demographic that’s supposed to have it easy. I’ve met people, I’ve made some friends (expats mostly, because I’m an immigrant), I’ve tried to get involved, I’ve slowly made some work contacts, I’ve joined a choir and get to sing regularly in the lovely old centre of downtown Toronto. I didn’t even mind that terrible winter we just had.

But I just don’t feel like I belong here. Or it doesn’t belong to me.

Tomorrow might bring a different response and unhappiness has precious little perspective, so I’m not going to link this post to my numerous wry observations about Southern Ontarian life. This will not be an immigrant’s complaint. After all, it’s only been a year and on paper the months ahead have promise: I like our new little house, I like the neighbourhood. It’s compact, but there’s more room for me to breathe. I have work prospects, but my optimism is extremely cautious. We’ve signed a two-year lease and I’m not making any longterm promises beyond that. 

And here’s the rub, I don’t want to go “home” either. What has become very apparent these last twelve months is how much I miss Britain. On my most dark, lonely days, I can’t help but think that I made such a huge mistake moving back to New Zealand in 2008. At the time, it seemed the very best decision for me and for my family, but that wonderful thing hindsight suggests it was the wrong move for my career and for me. Right now it feels like I’ve made yet another bad decision. Or when I’m feeling a little too fatalistic, like I’m paying for that first incorrect choice. 

But it doesn’t help anyone being fatalistic, and we’re here. Things have been topsy-turvy like your standard immigrants’ experience, and, on paper at least, things are looking up for our sophomore year.

And the trees are really quite lovely.