SoVote

Decentralized Democracy

House Hansard - 101

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
September 23, 2022 10:00AM
Context: House Hansard - 101 - Sep/23/22
Mr. Taylor Bachrach (Skeena—Bulkley Valley, NDP)
Mr. Speaker, it has been such an honour to bring forward Bill C-210, the right to vote at 16 act, on behalf of all those brilliant 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds across Canada who are currently excluded from voting. They are young people like Will Cooper from Lisgar Collegiate right here in Ottawa, who is part of the #Vote16 movement. I want to thank all of my colleagues, my brilliant colleagues in the NDP, the member for Nanaimo—Ladysmith and the member for Vancouver Kingsway for their support over the course of the debate on this bill. I also thank the member for Manicouagan for her words. I, too, have a 17-year-old daughter and a 15-year-old daughter and my conversations with them have helped shape my thinking around this legislation. To the member for Louis-Saint-Laurent and the member for Moose Jaw, it seems we have a bit more work to do to convince them to come over and support this piece of legislation. I will say that I had an interesting conversation with one of their colleagues about a month ago. I asked them about this bill, and their response was very blunt. They said they hated it. I asked them why, and this person said, “Young people are not going to vote for me,” and that very well may be the case. They might not vote for me either, but that is not the point. The point of this is that young people have a voice. Young people care about the issues. Young people have a stake in the future, and young people deserve to be included in the voting franchise in our country. We have heard so many points and arguments, and some of these have to do with this idea around voter turnout. I think this is a rather technical point, but it is a compelling one, because we all want our democracy to be stronger. Make no mistake, though: The international evidence from places like Austria and Scotland shows that 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds vote in higher percentages than their 18-year-old and 19-year-old peers. They do that for a number of reasons. It is because 16 is a relatively stable time of life for young people. It turns out that 18 is a terrible time to expect young people to vote for the first time. It is a time of great transition, when young people are moving away from their home ridings and entering the workforce or going to school. That is why we see lower voter turnout among 18-year-olds to 24-year-olds. We look around the world and we see that democracy is embattled right now. I think that is something that concerns all of us in this place. More and more people are feeling disenfranchised and they are feeling alienated from our political institutions. The way we buttress our democracy against these headwinds is by including more people, not fewer, in our democratic process, and by making our democracy more inclusive, not less. Recently, I had a chance to chat with a dynamic young leader in a small coastal village on the central coast of British Columbia. She talked to me a bit about youth engagement. She is a young person, as I said, and I know youth engagement is something a lot of members in this place are interested in. I think many MPs have youth advisory councils. The Prime Minister has one himself. This young person was a member of a youth advisory body for another government, and she said to me that sometimes it feels as if youth engagement is a performative thing for politicians and that it is more about creating a certain perception of the elected official than it is about giving the young person agency and the ability to change the future. I was thinking about this conversation when I came across this report from last year called “Canada's First State of Youth Report”. The federal government convened 100 youth from across this country and held 90 consultation sessions with them, and 13 of these youth formed a special advisory leadership group that pored through all of this data and came up with a series of recommendations for how the government should respond to the concerns of youth. If we turn to page 50 in that report, we find recommendation 5(c), which is to urgently lower the voting age in Canada from 18 to 16. I think the very least we could do for these young people who engaged in this process in good faith is to vote for this bill at second reading, send it off to committee, hear from expert witnesses and show these young people that we are listening and that their voices and participation matter. In conclusion, I want to thank all of the people who have been a part of this #Vote16 movement, who have spoken in support and my friends in all of the parties who have at least given a curious ear. I want to thank the folks at #Vote16 Canada, Children First Canada and UNICEF Canada for their advocacy in support of this bill. I want to thank my team, especially James Hammond and Ben Tassell, for their help; Senator Marilou McPhedran for her leadership; and so many others. I ask my colleagues in all the parties to please vote for this bill. It would make Canada stronger.
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