TORONTO — In an op-ed published Tuesday, veteran actor Donald Sutherland bemoaned his ineligibility to vote in his native Canada.
“If you don’t live here all the time you can’t vote,” the 80-year-old star wrote in The Globe and Mail.
“Americans who live abroad can vote. They can vote because they’re citizens! Citizens! But I can’t. Because why? Because I’m not a citizen? Because what happens to Canada doesn’t matter to me?”
Canadian citizens who live more than five years abroad have not been allowed to vote in federal elections since 1993. The restriction was struck down as unconstitutional by an Ontario Superior Court judge last year but then upheld earlier this month by the Ontario Court of Appeal.
Sutherland was born in New Brunswick, raised in Nova Scotia and attended the University of Toronto. He spent his early career in the UK and moved to the U.S. in the late ’60s.
Sutherland and his wife of 43 years, Quebec actress Francine Racette (whom he met on the Saskatchewan set of Alien Thunder), keep a home in Georgeville, Que., about 140 km southeast of Montreal.
“We are Canadians. We each hold one passport. A Canadian passport. That’s it,” Sutherland explained. “I’m not dual anything. I’m Canadian.”
The actor has three sons with Racette — Vancouver-born actor Rossif Sutherland and U.S.-born Angus and Roeg. He is also the father of actor UK-born Kiefer Sutherland, whose maternal grandfather was Canadian politician Tommy Douglas.
Sutherland was named an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1978 and honoured with a star on Canada’s Walk of Fame in 2000 — the same year he received a Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement.
“My sense of humour is Canadian,” added Sutherland, whose Globe essay includes a requisite beaver joke.
The accomplished actor, familiar to a new generation of moviegoers for playing President Snow in the Hunger Games movies, recently made the film Forsaken in Alberta.
Sutherland said as an expatriate he’s not allowed to vote in Canadian elections — and he pointed the finger at the Harper government.
“Is it because they’re afraid we’ll vote to return to a government that will once again represent the values that the rest of the world looked up to us for? Maybe.”
In 2008, Sutherland penned an essay for the Huffington Post in which he complained about not being able to vote in the U.S. elections because he’s Canadian.
“I pay a bunch of taxes to your government but I can’t vote,” he wrote, adding that without Barack Obama as president, “it’s my firm belief that we’re toast.”
Sutherland pleaded: “Put Obama in the White House and make the country ours.”
Comments