A student from Nepal, who couldn’t vote, asked the class who they were voting for. The responses spread across the familiar spectrum: five for the Liberals, three for the NDP, one Conservative, one Green. The rest kept quiet, guarded behind their silence. Then he asked each group to persuade him—why, if he could, he should vote as they did.

The Liberal-leaners said: Because they let you in.
The NDP supporters: Because they’ll be there if you lose everything.
The Conservative: Because someone has to stop the debt from devouring your future.
The Green voice: Because the world will end if you don’t.

He turned to me last, expecting my answer. But I didn’t offer a platform, or a party line. I directed him to Charles Mingus’s The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady on Spotify and told him some truths can’t be delivered in bullet points. A record that doesn’t tell you what to but shows you how it feels to carry contradiction with dignity. Hoping he might hear how conviction sounds when it is too deep for slogans, too fractured for consensus, yet still utterly human.