Very briefly, I arrived in Canada in October 1989 as a privately sponsored refugee. My family and I left Soviet-occupied Poland in about mid-1988 because of the civil unrest. We spent just over 14 months in a refugee camp in Germany before being resettled here.
In the seven and a half years that my mother lived in Canada before she passed away, she was only able to vote once in a federal election. In fact, it was the one and only time she had voted in a free democracy. For her, that democratic participation was the height of civic duty which she imparted to us, because that was the ability to exercise our voice and shape the future of our country.