Election

With all the hype about the US election, I'll have to say, we're getting closer and closer to becoming Canadian residents. We received our Ontario driver's licenses in the mail on Monday and should be getting our health cards in the mail in the next couple of weeks. We have yet to get Jeremy's truck registered in Ontario (he just needs to get the insurance switched to an Ontario provider) and then we need to get our permanent resident applications in the mail. I mailed his firearm stuff on Monday so it's just a matter of time before that's taken care of to get his guns registered. So, slowly by slowly we're getting there.

It's an odd feeling sitting here in Canada with such little mention of all the US election activities going on. We have no candidate signs in yards, no billboards up, no tv commercials, it's not continuously on the local news and the free newspapers we get during the week are only local Petawawa Military papers and Pembroke/Petawawa papers that cover only small local events. Since we have satellite, we can get US based channels and stations so we aren't in the dark, but it takes an effort to turn to these channels. In a sense, it's been nice not having to hear all this 24/7, but at the same time, we loose connection with this. Unfortunately, this came up so quickly and I was unprepared and didn't get myself going to figure out how to obtain an absentee ballot in time, so I was unable to send in a vote. I did talk to our neighbor, Claire, this afternoon and she gets the Ottawa paper and was happy to give it to me so I could read about the election. We ended going to bed last night before hearing the outcome (as the last polls in Alaska closed at 1am our time). I was hoping to hear the outcome on the Ottawa news channel this morning, but after watching it for about 30 min, they still hadn't mentioned anything so I had to go downstairs and turn on the satellite to a US station to hear.

It'll be interesting to watch what changes can be made, but odd to have to watch it from the outside. As soon as Jeremy brought up Canada, I was really excited to see if we'd move and to see how another country works and how their systems work better or worse or just differently. It seems that there are just as many problems and people are still unhappy about the way things work. One nice thing is that Canada only has campaigns that last about a month so there isn't this endless 2 year campaign that gets old and drags on and on that you can't seem to get away from and the media distorting people's words. At the beginning of October, there were elections here and it was so nice not to have to hear about it continuously in the news and see all these negative TV commercials and it was over so quickly. But, unless we become Canadian citizens, we won't be able to vote.