If you dont vote- you dont get the right to bitch. it is that simple.

Well it really is as simple as this little cartoon shows.

when I was 16 I enumerated both the Provincial Election and which helped secure Mr Harris his final seat.
When I was 17 I did the same to get rid of Jean Cretian ( that didn't work )
I wasn't allowed to vote. I watched as my peers and even my own parents chose not to vote.
I knew what a MPP was and a MP was before I understood Pi  ( actually I still don't fully understand pi )

I lived in a home with my grandfather, a strong willed man with STRONG political views. I would sit at my Aunt Ethel's house each Sunday and eat her fresh strawberries with yogurt and listened to her husband and my grandfather discuss Brian Mulroney until veins pulsed on their foreheads. I say down and played with marbles while they discussed the new tax GST. and the new OHIP plans in the 80's
I was 7 when my grandfather told me
" when your eighteen Shelly, you need to vote "
That wasn't a request it was a demand, from a man who didn't make demands.
when I was 10 I asked him why he would get so upset talking to Uncle Gary.
My grandfather took me to the Baycrest center and introduced me to his dear friend who had a funny tattoo on her arm with numbers written crooked in blue faded ink.
She was a 10 year old girl when the Canadian Soldiers rescued her. it was too late for her family. they were gassed, her baby brother was only 4.
I didn't understand what this old woman had to do with voting until a LOT later in my life.

When I was 13 Desert Storm took place I told my grandfather war was stupid.

That is when I received my Copy of Anne Frank. Like all people I fell in love with her story I was trapped up in my Uncles Attic waiting for the Nazi's I was afraid. I screamed when they found her. I cried when they killed her family.
but it wasn't real, until I seen pictures like this

war was real, and sometimes it IS worth it. Each one of these children here were prisoners because of the God they believed in. They were held captive because like me their last name was Abramson, or Stein or Silver. They were criminals because they wore yamaka's and read a Torah and not the Bible.

it was when the Holocaust became real to me, I realized I was FREE. and that freedom came at a price.

I am a Jewish woman who married a Christian man.
I have two Non-Denominational children
and I have that RIGHT to marry a man that wasn't of my faith.
I am allowed to tell my grandfather when I was 13 that war is stupid even though he was a  solider.
I am allowed to go to school, I am allowed to enter my place of worship without being harmed.
I am allowed to do all this because men like my Grandfather and like the men and women in Afghanistan.
a group of women in the 1800's fought for me to vote. They had to take it ALL the way to the Queen .

So I have to VOTE it takes 30 seconds
and it is my RIGHT as a Canadian