Two and a half years a citizen and now I’ve got my first federal election. On the way to the voting site the clouds are gray, white; all of them level and overlapping, assembled in a single sheet. If there’s any blue it’s been tucked away. But the air comes in keen on my face and I’m ready to take part.
Location. The polling place is tucked well inside a low-income housing project, with a line of 10 or 12 people to tell you that this particular three-story rectangle is the one you should head for. Other such rectangles are spaced at regular intervals well into the distance; they’re featureless and trim and separated by some trees but a lot more asphalt. Everything’s clean, no litter.
Process. About 20 minutes from end to end. You wait on line outside the door and a young man moves from person to person, checking their election cards so he can see if they came to the right place. Once you reach the door you wait until another young man with a beard decides there’s room for you inside. Once inside you cross the room to a line of long tables with silver-bearded old volunteers sitting behind them. They check your election card again and then your ID.
Then you wheel about and stand on line for a table placed all by itself. Behind it sits a young man with a beard; next to his elbow there’s a tall box that looks like it’s been made from cardboard and then wrapped in something; beyond him there’s a high, long-legged little table buffered about with a three-panel partition. You present yourself to the young man, who tells you to proceed to the table with its buffer. On the table are ballots, pencils, and pens. You make a big X next to the name you want, fold your paper, and walk over to the young man; he strips off some sort of border from the paper. Then you slip your ballot into the box, which has a slot in the top. You’re done.
Controversial issue. Canada requires ID if you’re going to vote. But they make it easy for you. You can use the card everyone carries around anyway, so they can get medical care; or you can use your driver’s license, or a library card and a utility bill, and there’s a list of other possibilities. The election card I mentioned is actually a postcard that the government mails to you; it establishes that you’re registered to vote and tells you where to do so. If you’re not registered, you can register at the polling place. All in all, pretty sweet.
Who I voted for. The Liberal Party candidate. In my opinion every Canadian should vote for the Liberals as long as Donald Trump remains in power. Many Canadians disagree with me. Some are foolish enough to want the Conservatives; others figure the party’s bound to carry their district, leaving individual voters free to address favorite issues. My pal Marie-Eve has a chance to vote for a woman and will take it; the candidate in question belongs to the Bloc Québec but that’s not a problem. My trainer wants the New Democratic Party to keep getting federal funding, which requires the party to win a certain number of votes.
Myself, as a citizen who’s still far more American than Canadian, I’d like to deal with Donald Trump. Simple numbers send him a message he can read; a record percentage of the popular vote would show him something about the Liberals, that they’re standing extra-solid and are ready to take him on. A parliamentary majority, though vital in itself, wouldn’t send as clear a message, since (in his view) what the hell is a parliament.
Odd features. You may have noticed that all the volunteers are men with beards and that they’re all young except for the fellows behind the long tables. I don’t know why any of this is. The young men looked like editions of each other, the way there used to be a fat Superman and a thin Superman. The young man standing guard at the door was narrow-shouldered and slight of bone, perhaps 19. The fellow checking cards might have been in his mid-20s and was several inches taller and broader, with an especially robust layer of beard and a suggestion of fresh, creamlike jowl. It’s tempting to say that the young man at the voting table was somehow in between the two, but what I remember about him is how abstemious he was about not looking at your vote. After he stripped off the border from my ballot, he swung his glasses, profile, and beard sharply away from me as he handed it back; his gaze was pitched to a corner of the ceiling at the other end of the room. It was a Jim Carrey sort of move, angular and extreme.
Turnout. As mentioned, 10 or 12 people on line when I got there. When I left, maybe 15 or 20. Inside the lines were brief: three or four people in front of each of the long tables, and then one person ahead of me at the voting table, and he was already proceeding toward the booth. On the other hand, people seemed to throng the voting room. Orange bucket chairs lined two of the walls and people sat there waiting for I know not what; a mini-corridor leading back from the entrance featured brief rows of further people in bucket chairs. Maybe they hadn’t registered and were waiting to be processed.
Ambience. Low ceiling, bright fluorescents, bulletin boards crowded with neat notices in various colors; the notices and the frame line up. A patch of floor shows itself between the door and the tables with the silver-beards. Otherwise just lights, ceiling, orange chairs, and people and then more people. I never caught what the notices said. The walls could’ve been cinderblock; anyway they were all painted pastel. The wall alongside the entrance door featured a series of windows marching along, and I guess on bright days the place could have sun rushing in. On this wall, in among and above the windows, the pastel colors joined into a mural: whale-size green leaf, basketball-size blue marble (Earth). The colors swarm over that wall but they cut little ice next to the fluorescent lights, the white-tile ceiling, or the crowd of profiles and hairlines. Nuancely, I decide the colors are tentative; they take up space but somehow can’t manage to be there.
On the line outside: men, women, mainly in their 40s and 50s, I guess. Arms folded, gazes parked, hip pointed one way or the other. Everyone has on low shoes. Windbreakers, jackets, the women in pants because spring is still getting here. And low shoes—no heels, no boots either way, for men or women. Dinky shoes: running shoes, regular, whatever.
Human interest. A Chinese lady rounds the building’s corner, right next to the entrance door, and says she left a glove in there. A young man with a beard can be seen galloping along the series of windows, and then he’s standing in the doorway with one hand raised. “It looks like this,” the Chinese lady was saying, a pink-furred cluster clenched in her fist. The man in the doorway held up a similar cluster, so problem solved. She disappeared around the corner again.
“La,” said the low, wide old lady who’s two people in front of me. The old lady points back across the housing estate. In the distance a black kid is doing pushups: plank-shaped, up-and-down, perfect form, a series of them. Two buddies stand there watching; he rises and falls in front of their knees. The guy just in front of me looks too. “Bien fait!” I say, figuring to get included.
The young man with a touch of creamy-jowl looks at the old lady’s election card. They converse, her at length but without raising her voice. Her tone is regret. There’s nothing to be done. She steps to the edge of the pathway where we’re standing. Her proper election place is a good deal away, or so I gather from her French. I raise my shoulders, hoping to demonstrate that general opinion is with her and feels things have turned out badly.
The man right in front of me is taller than I am. He’s stylish, with a gray jacket closing in at his waist, and hair of the sort where individual strands look like dark struts and buttresses. His profile is a winsome affair, going delicately in and out. He has a stroller with a little girl and tells me he’s starting her early. Then in English he says the same thing. I respond: “Je comprends—nouvelle citoyenne.”
The man, the departed lady, and I had all shown up at the same time. I’d passed the old lady in one of the estate’s stretches of asphalt; she had moplike white hair cut with bangs, and a broad mug like a catcher’s mitt. “Bien vite,” she said, smiling like she’d heard a joke she liked. As I settled on line I heard her politely dispute with a newcomer. This was the young man with the stroller. She said he ought to go first, he said she ought to. Feeling grand, I stepped aside. “Les deux!” I said.
Further human interest. The young man in the coat reaches the door, or the broad yellow tape that lies across the ground a yard from the door. He tells the bearded youth that it’s her first time. The youth gives her a cheery welcome.
The father and his stroller are up by the voting table. He tells the boy that he’s starting her early.
Now he’s alongside the windows and has his stroller aimed for the place’s door. He tells a young man with a beard (the glove one), she liked voting.
A bearded man with silver hair is bent over a folder: firm blue lines and copious white spaces, numbers of some kind. He works with a pleased sort of quickness, getting to the bottom of something. Next to him there’s another silver-beard, and then a sandwich, diagonally cut, sealed in wax paper and lying on further wax paper, making for a crisp-looking pile of a nest. A closed binder, then a stubby little rectangle of a French paperback (bright but indeterminate painting, candy-colored author’s name, title in black type, a gap of white space above that). The book is on the table’s far end, the edge.
Snags. As it turns out, you need an election card inside, not just on the line outside. I figure this out but it’s still too late. Arriving at my table I pluck at my bookbag’s zipper, brace the bookbag against my arm. “Yes, the card,” says my bearded, silver-haired old party, drily patient.
Then I get to the voting table, and I’m pretty sure I just saw somebody drop a sheet of some kind on the table. A black, glossy substance, stiff, not to be written on. Was perforation involved? Now there’s the voting-table boy in front of me and I ask how voting is done. He absorbs this and I explain that in the past I’ve voted, but by mail or pulling down switches. He rallies and says you make an x with a pen or pencil. “You don’t have experience of this?” he says, in English. I get the feeling I’m the only person who asked. “Can I have a pen to write with,” I say, getting down to brass tacks. The young man says there are pen and pencil in the booth. He is definitely bemused.
I vote, he tears off the strip, he hands me my ballot, still folded over. “You put the vote,” the young man says, still in English. “You’re the one to do that.” I’ve been pegged as an element that brings randomness to a proceeding. He cranes his neck and profile away and I vote. Take that, Trump.
Epiphany. Rounding off my expedition, I go to the city’s big library and return a CD set (William Finn’s Falsetto, 2016 original Broadway cast). When that’s done, I stand in view of the circulation desk and pause.
I take in a low-ceilinged plain that lies around me. It goes in all directions, and along it I see tables and people, and shelves, and then more of all these and then a glimpse of distant wall. The carpet is one sort of tan, the furniture is another, maybe the ceiling is a third; as with the voting place and the pastel walls, one feels an uncertain but irremovable sort of visual neutrality dropping into place. Along it, living inside it, there’s a scattering of people: an endless scattering, a fairly thick scattering. But the profiles point in all different directions, and people are clumped near or apart from each other by no pattern. Each person is doing what he or she wants to do at that moment.
Outside the cars are small, and someplace a black kid’s doing pushups, a little girl is getting changed. The man with the paperback is sitting against a wall, eating and reading with the book flipped open in his hand. I take my cane and proceed home. It’s a good sort of life here.