The New Citizen's Issue Map: Immigration, Jobs, Housing, Health, and Taxes

Many new citizens are treated as if they should only care about immigration. But your life in Canada is bigger than your immigration file. You may be building a career, raising children, paying rent, starting a business, caring for parents, waiting for a doctor, learning the tax system, or trying to buy a home. Each of those is a civic issue — and each connects to a different part of government. This article maps your real life onto your real ballot.

You are not only voting as an immigrant. You are voting as a worker, parent, renter, homeowner, taxpayer, patient, neighbour, entrepreneur, student, and citizen.

Immigration matters — but it isn’t everything

Immigration policy is real and important, especially for family sponsorship, permanent-residence pathways, citizenship rules, refugee policy, international students, work permits, settlement services, and processing times. If those shape your life, they belong on your ballot. But the rest of your daily life runs on systems that a different level of government may control entirely.

The issue map

Here’s how common concerns connect to government. Use the colour to see which level holds the main power.

The “issue stack”

Some problems don’t belong to one level at all — they’re stacked across all three. Housing is the clearest example. If you only vote on it at one level, you’re pulling one lever on a machine with three.

Don’t vote from one identity only

This part is delicate, but it matters. Community groups, relatives, professional networks, or online groups may encourage you to vote based on a single identity — where you’re from, your religion, your profession, your language. Those things are real and they belong in your decision. But they aren’t the whole of it.

Your background matters. Your community matters. But your vote belongs to your whole life, not only one label.

You are a worker and a parent and a renter or owner and a patient and a taxpayer. A vote that serves only one of those parts may quietly work against the others. The issue map exists to help you see all of them at once.

Build your issue ranking

Here’s the practical move that the rest of this series builds on. Start wide, then narrow:

• List your top five issues — whatever genuinely affects your life right now.
• Cut to your top three — the ones you’d actually use to compare candidates.
• Connect each one — which level controls it, and which candidates are talking about it seriously?

Those three issues become your measuring stick for everything that follows: the platforms you read, the candidates you weigh, the promises you test. This is the seventh step of the civic ladder — you now know how your whole life, not just your immigration story, connects to the ballot. Use the worksheet below to map yours.

This guide is for general civic education only and is strictly non-partisan. The division of powers is shaped by the Constitution and ongoing court interpretation; many issues are genuinely shared or contested. For specific questions, consult the relevant government authority directly.