Canada's interim Chief Electoral Officer has been floating the idea of lowering the voting age to 16 in order to encourage better voting habits among youth.  While this may sound like a plausible scenario on the surface, I have to wonder if we've really thought about this proposition, especially when you look at the crisis of civic literacy that our country faces overall.  If we can't trust our current crop of voters to engage with the system properly, is lowering the voting age merely addressing symptoms rather than the actual democratic malaise?

It should be noted, first off, that youth voting was up by a lot in the last election, and that was likely to a number of factors.  For one, there Elections Canada made a dedicated outreach effort to post-secondary campuses across the country, and did a great deal of work in order to clear some of the hurdles that prevent this demographic from voting in the first place.  Much of it has to do with the confusion around addresses and whether they have to cast an absentee ballot from their parents' riding, or if they were to cast a ballot for the local candidate at their campus.  By putting focus on this issue, with satellite polling stations at 39 campuses across the country, it did a lot to bolster that youth turnout.  This is important context to have when it comes to looking at how to better engage youth voters.  There was also a much clearer narrative choice in the 2015 federal election than has been seen in the previous few something that not every election can say, no matter how often the parties will insist that this election, whichever one it happens to be, is really crucial.  This time it was much more apparent on its face that there was a clear choice, and that helped increase turnout.

With this in mind, however, I think it bears noting that part of the problem we face is that young voters aren't being taught correctly how to engage with our system.  There is a persistent school of thought out there that fetishizes a general election as the end all and be all of our democracy, whether that's with voter turnout or the complaints around "false majorities" and votes "not counting" as put forward by proponents of electoral reform.  There also seems to be a bit of amnesia around the fact that when Canada lowered the voting age from 21 to 18 back in 1970 that voter turnout rates plummeted, and there's no reason to see why this would be any different if we lowered the voting age from 18 to 16.  When it inevitably tumbles even further, wiping out the gains of the previous election, we will get a whole new round of hand-wringing from the turnout nerds (to employ a Colby Cosh-ism).

Said turnout nerds will then point to Australia, where mandatory voting has raised turnout to something in the area of 94 percent, praising that as an effective measure of the health of their democracy.  When you look, however, at how many Australians are members of political parties, which is where the actual ground-level democratic work actually happens in a system like ours (particularly in the areas where their hybridized system resembles ours), and it's in the low single-digits.  And this is part of where we should instead start focusing our efforts.

The way we teach basic civics in this country is abysmal.  Ontario is the only province that offers a dedicated civics course, and even though it's mandatory, it's is usually taught too young, and with an unpopular companion course.  It's also had actual problems over the years where it offered the wrong definitions of things like Parliament, and again, it keeps the focus on the act of voting.  The problem is that our democratic ecosystem is much broader than that, and casting a ballot in a general election is generally the end part of the system rather than the be-all-and-end-all that it is often portrayed to be, and this is where I think that we need to focus more of our efforts, particularly in getting youth involved.

Hand-in-hand with this problem of ballot fetishization is this notion that conflates just what democratic engagement is, particularly where youth are concerned.  We tell youth that doing things like signing petitions and attending rallies counts as being engaged, but at the same time, we have a tendency to denigrate the partisan side of the process, which is really where the system flourishes.  We don't teach youth that the real action of democracy happens at the riding level with grassroots electoral associations.  This is where candidates are decided on, and policy gets debated that feeds into the party's process the input into the democratic machine.  Of course, this has slowly been perverted with the accumulation of power by party leaders who have been selected in a manner that encourages the consolidation of power, and now the development of policy platforms at the top end rather than from the bottom up, but I have little doubt that we've allowed this to happen because we have grown ignorant as to the vital importance of the grassroots riding association.

And where this conversation should be leading to is the fact that with many parties, they encourage youth participation and will allow party members to vote as young as 16 in nomination races and on policy development especially parties with a youth wing (though the Conservatives have eschewed such a thing).  And this is where we should be directing our 16-year-olds to start their democratic engagement rather than simply at the ballot box.  We need to stop being afraid to tell them that joining a party is by far the best way to get involved.  We need to give them enough resilience and confidence that they don't get discouraged when things don't go their way in those situations off the start.  And we need to remind them that this bottom-up process is how our democracy is supposed to function.  If we can engage youth at this level, where it's supposed to happen, we may actually combat that democratic malaise at its source rather than angling for another gimmick to drive turnout that will only disappoint in the end.