OPINION | I lived in Qatar and couldn't vote. Here's why you can't take yours for granted

Flashback: it's 2011, and I'm not allowed to vote. 

I'm still a Canadian citizen; I still hold a passport and care way too much about Olympic hockey and got far more enthusiastic than was necessary when a Tim Horton's opened in Dubai.

But I'm living in Qatar, and for that reason, I cannot vote. 

I'd been living for years in a country where I essentially had no rights. It's a theocracy, but there are certain elected positions where certain segments of the population can vote — but that population is very small. 

In fact, for over a year before that election, I didn't even have the tiny bit of protection an expat with a work visa had. Expatriates living in Qatar had to have a sponsor who essentially owned you: you needed their permission for everything from going to the liquor store to entering or leaving the country. 

I'd finished my contract, but my sponsor didn't give me permission to get another sponsor, so instead I was sponsored in Dubai and came in and out every month on a series of tourist visas. I was literally a ghost. 

Being disenfranchised was a new experience for me. I'd been in Qatar since I was 23, but before that I had voted in every flavour of Canadian election — municipal, provincial and federal. 

I'd marched in the streets on my 18th birthday, protesting Canada's involvement in the Iraq war. I'd grown up being involved — some of my earliest memories are going to protest rallies; my dad taking my sister and I for ice cream while my mom stared down the RCMP. 

• Find all of our N.W.T. election coverage at CBC.ca/NWTvotes

None of that was a possibility in Qatar. You knew deep down in your bones that things could happen, and you'd have no say at all. 

Instead of a system where I was a voter and could go to a council meeting, or write a letter to my MLA, I was in a system where you had to be careful about shushing teens in a movie theatre, because you weren't sure who their daddy was and how much wasta — power, influence and control — he had. 

No excuse in N.W.T.

I couldn't vote in Canada either. In 2011, I could register to vote over fax, but they'd have to mail me a paper ballot. Those could only be mailed to embassies, and there wasn't one in Qatar. 

I was willing to fly to Kuwait, but alas, I'd need a Kuwaiti address to receive mail at the embassy. If I was military, there was a base in Qatar and they could send it there … but only if I was a member, not if I was just one of the approximately 3,000 Canadian families living in Doha. 

So I didn't vote. This was the era of the Arab Spring, and I watched friends from around the globe fly home. I watched friends do more than book a flight to vote; they went home to march in Tahrir Square, they faced violence on Bloody Thursday in Bahrain, and risked their safety to make their voices heard. 

So colour me surprised when I hear from people in Yellowknife that it's just too difficult to vote here. In 2015, only about 20 per cent of people aged 18-35 voted in the N.W.T. election. Yellowknife had the worst turnout, with only 16.7 per cent of young adults actually making it to the polls. 

But while communities may have higher turnout, as a whole, the territory didn't look so hot — not even half of the population actually used their right to vote. 

"If we had turnout in Yellowknife of 80 per cent, 90 per cent, it would change elections," says Open NWT founder David Wasylciw.

"If you look at the last election there were, I think, three candidates with less than a 10 point differential. And that's huge, you don't see that elsewhere in Canada. Individual votes make such a difference."

Use your voice

So why aren't people voting? 

"People growing up now have always had the right. It's not been a struggle," says Wasylciw. "People die in other countries to vote … And we're really worried people don't show up to vote because you have to wait for five minutes in line at a school?"

"I don't think we have an ignorant electorate by any means, but I do sense sometimes that people are disenchanted more than apathetic," says the N.W.T.'s chief electoral officer, Nicole Latour.

She says part of her job is to remove barriers—which is why she was so excited to introduce online voting for the first time, the first jurisdiction across Canada to use it at the provincial or territorial level. 

Being able to do it online would have made sure I still had a voice all those years in Qatar. Since my time there, the system has changed, and I've been deluged in the last weeks with posts from friends around the world who are all voting in our upcoming federal election. 

Wasylciw is skeptical online voting can be done both securely, and anonymously. And while Latour had high hopes for it as a way to snag that elusive under-35 vote, this week it was reported that fewer than 500 online ballots had been issued, with 60 per cent going to voters over 35. 

"It's funny even in talking to people about why they don't vote, not many people that say: 'oh, it's hard,'" Wasylciw says. 

"There's: 'oh I forgot,' which is definitely a thing, there's: 'I don't care, it doesn't make a difference,' there's all those arguments, but rarely does somebody say it was too hard. 

"Showing up is difficult. We're in Yellowknife, it's not far."

But showing up is important. If you can, you need to do it: because there are people who want to in the N.W.T., in Canada, and all over the globe, who can't. 

This column is part of CBC's Opinion section. For more information about this section, please read this editor's blog and our FAQ.