Smaller world

May 27

Far away, a different perspective Living a world away in Johannesburg, South Africa, or more accurately being 781 days and 13,315 kilometres away from my hometown of Toronto, I have to confess that I feel somewhat disengaged from the testiness and volatility that seems to have gripped the national mood as the country heads to the polls. And despite being a political animal, in both profession and disposition, I have to also admit a degree of complacency about the election campaign.

The sponsorship scandal, the future of health care, taxation, and other perennial Canadian election issues seem so distant and even trivial compared to the issues that circumscribe my life here and dominate the political agenda of this country, including an unemployment rate over 40 per cent, an HIV/AIDS pandemic that has infected a quarter of the adult population, crime rates that would make you shiver alternately between fear and disbelief, and racial inequalities that would offend Canadian sensibilities to the core.

But civic duty calls and I have duly submitted my application for an absentee ballot to Elections Canada and begun to consider the issues informing the election campaign. After all, I am planning to return to Canada one day and I hope to find the country I left behind as strong and stable as it was when I left and hopefully even more so.

According to the reports I've been reading on-line, Liberal leader Paul Martin has phrased the question underlying the next federal election as: What kind of Canada do you want? NDP Leader Jack Layton says it's about hope and ideas. And, Conservative leader Stephen Harper describes it as a time for accountability. As I weigh their respective positions, and those of smaller parties, I will keep their suggestions in mind.

But however self-servingly the different political leaders may wish to narrowly characterize the key debates, my principal concerns in this campaign are rooted in the issues that affect me as a Canadian living abroad in the developing world, including: Canada's image abroad; our role in foreign policy and global trade; Canada's commitment to assisting developing countries, especially in the fight to control the HIV/AIDS pandemic ravaging sub-Saharan Africa; and, immigration and refugee issues. These issues also speak to notions of accountability, hope and ideas, as well as a vision for the future, maybe even more so than some of the domestic issues the campaign seems to be converging around.

Like most Canadians, when I was living in Toronto and Ottawa, my concerns were predominantly focused parochially on the issues that seem to forever top the political agenda of our fair country: health care, education, the environment, jobs and unemployment, social programs, and other such priorities that collectively make up the fabric of our polity. But living in South Africa and travelling extensively throughout the region and being so far removed from Canada has recalibrated the values and priorities that will guide how I will cast my absentee ballot in the upcoming federal election.

While it might sound trite and unoriginal to say how much being away from Canada has made me appreciate being Canadian as well as all the privileges and advantages that comes with the status, this ongoing realization has made me rethink what it means to be Canadian within the broader context of a globalized world.

In many ways, being in South Africa is like living in an alternate Canadian universe, one in which the values that have sustained us as a nation have been fully compromised: no universal health care, no universal access to education, massive corruption in government, deep inequalities based on race, environmental neglect, rampant crime, and a host of other social ills that makes this country, beautiful and promising though it may be, deeply troubled.

But while the two countries may exist on opposite ends of the imagination, they are both part of the same continuum that links us together in a common moral universe. And in this universe, what happens in Canada has an effect on South Africa, both real and metaphorical. So, as the election campaign gains momentum and I consider more fully the issues to decide whom I will cast my vote for, I will be thinking of not only the upcoming election in Canada, but the recent South African election that celebrated 10 years of democracy, in the deep conviction that what happens there matters here and vice versa.