Phoebe Maltz Bovy hosts The Jewish Angle for The CJN Podcasts—with new episodes each Tuesday.

One thing about immigration is that you can have whichever status or identity where you are, and then you move and it’s gone. I never thought of myself as a low-information voter because, wonk though I’m not, I tend to know what’s up. But once I became eligible to vote in Canada, I realized I had a lot of catching up to do.

My confidence when it comes to Canadian politics is still not what it is regarding the United States of America. Some of this is about my greater familiarity with the country where I was born and have spent most of my life. Some of it is also that thanks to American hegemony, you could ask someone Sentinelese about the electoral college and they’d be able to give an informed response.

I passed my Canadian citizenship test, and I read the news, I consult explainers. But I’m still learning new things when it comes to technicalities of how the government gets formed, or what strategic voting entails, or whether that is what you’re even meant to be doing.

I was feeling like a fool and then I read this, on the Wikipedia page about “Elections in Canada,” that “The Canadian population generally misunderstands the electoral system, with most citizens believing they vote to directly elect the prime minister…”

So very possibly nobody knows what’s going on, apart from a particularly confident-looking raccoon outside my window. Those little hands would be able to fill out a ballot, I have no doubt.

But I’d like to think I know enough to vote without apologizing and will share a bit of my thought process in doing so.

I’m a political moderate by Canadian standards, or a Democrat by American ones. I strongly oppose gutting basic social services, and have witnessed what happens when subsidized daycare comes and goes. I have firsthand comparison of universal healthcare and its absence, and see the lack-thereof version as disastrous and unethical.

I am not a leftist activist, neither in disposition nor overall end goals. I did not move from the U.S. to Canada for highfalutin........

© Canadian Jewish News