Winnipeg school trustees call on province to give non-citizens right to vote

In a unanimous vote, Winnipeg School Division trustees passed a motion to call on the province to give non-citizens the right to vote for their trustees.

The same motion, supported by all nine division trustees on Monday evening, also calls for the minimum age to vote for school trustees to be lowered to 16 from 18.

Both actions would require changes to provincial legislation that can only be made by the province.

"We've had an incredible amount of immigration to Winnipeg, and it's changing the face of it. These people go to our schools. They buy property in the school division. They pay school division taxes, and they don't get a say," said Winnipeg School Division trustee Mark Wasyliw, who introduced the motion, on Tuesday.

"There's something that seems really wrong with that."

According to Immigration Partnership Winnipeg, there are 67,000 permanent residents in Winnipeg who don't have the right to vote because they aren't full citizens. That organization has previously advocated for extending the right to vote in municipal elections — including for city councillors and the mayor — to permanent residents.

Similar changes have already been proposed and supported in Vancouver, Toronto and several municipalities in New Brunswick.

Noelle DePape, a senior project manager at Immigration Partnership Winnipeg, said the organization wasn't involved in Wasyliw's motion, but enthusiastically supports it. After learning about the motion, which Wasyliw raised on Nov. 5, the organization sought and received permission to present at the Winnipeg School Division trustees meeting Monday night.

"It really felt like a historic milestone to be there, having unanimously all of the trustees from the WSD vote in favour of this," DePape said.

"It makes me think of, you know, Nelly McClung getting the right to vote for women, and the importance of getting the Indigenous vote. And now it's time for our non-citizens, who are contributing members of our community, to have the chance to vote in our civic elections, vote in the school board elections, the civic elections."

'Best informed voters in the province'

School board chair Chris Broughton said newcomer parents have valuable to contributions to make as voters.

"Many of these people are engaged in their communities, contribute to their communities, they're taxpaying citizens in every other way," he said. "But they don't have a voice to city council and to school boards."

Per Wasyliw's motion, the Winnipeg School Division administration will now draft a letter on behalf of the board of trustees seeking a meeting with Manitoba Education Minister Kelvin Goertzen to discuss the changes.

Making the change would require revising the provincial Municipal Councils and School Boards Elections Act, which can only be done by the province itself.

Broughton said that letter will go out in the next month.

Administration will also draft a letter seeking a meeting with Goertzen to discuss lowering voting age to 16.

Wasyliw said a lower voting age would give schools the chance to help young people build up a habit of voting before they leave the school system.

"If we had voting at 16 and 17 years old, that would happen during a school year. It would become a major community school event. There would be lots of education and programing," he said. "These would be the best informed voters in the province."

The board is also calling on the province to loosen the rules for establishing identity to include an option for sworn oaths, which it argues would make voting more accessible for impoverished or homeless Winnipeggers.