"We value your money but not your vote": the (dis)enfranchisement of permanent residents and the right to vote in municipal elections
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Immigrants and individuals without permanent resident status make up 29.1 percent Winnipeg’s population (Census of Canada, 2022). In Winnipeg, and across Canada, permanent residents (PRs) and those with precarious status, do not have the right to vote in municipal elections. This paper investigates the possibility of granting PRs the right to vote in Winnipeg by drawing from recent examples within Canada and in the global north. I am guided by a comparative case study approach which allows me to identify, then compare and contrast, the municipalities that have already granted the right to vote to those who do not currently hold citizenship. Grounding itself in Anne Schneider and Helen Ingram’s social construction of target population, this paper examines the continued disenfranchisement of newcomers and imagines a more equitable policy landscape where all newcomers have the chance to vote in municipal elections. While Canada is celebrated multiculturalist deeply embedded policies on multiculturalism and inclusion, a large portion of our population is prevented from voting and having their voices be heard. This disenfranchisement is fundamentally inequitable and impedes integration. While permanent residents are not eligible to vote in most municipal elections, they are required by law to pay municipal, provincial, and federal taxes in exchange for access to city services such as the bus, libraries, or garbage and recycling services. Despite enjoying these municipal “perks”, not having a voice on municipal politics and decision making creates a sense of exclusion and inferiority, that although individuals without citizenship are abiding by the laws and using city services, they are not receiving the same rights as individuals with citizenship. Implementing the right to vote to all permanent residents not only promotes better integration, it may encourage the next generation of newcomers to run for political office.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".