Canada should follow U.K.'s initiative to lower voting age to 16, says senator
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Let’s lower the voting age cap actually. Also the age cap for holding positions in politics.
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I don’t outwardly oppose the idea, but to be perfectly honest with myself I do not think I was mature enough at sixteen for my opinion to matter at a macro scale.
Some people aren’t mature enough at 56 and they’re still allowed a vote.
Honestly if you can get a drivers licence at 16 you should be able to vote too. And just because we open it up to them doesn’t mean they’ll all automatically actually do it.
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I think it could be good. I don’t think it’s a popular position, though. Everyone and their mom is ready with a personal anecdote about how they used to be lazy and ignorant in high school (they’re dedicated and informed now, though, of course) and, as we all know, all teens are the same, so none of them deserve the right to vote.
It’s a real weak excuse too, because the lazy and ignorant ones are welcome to not vote as usual, but maybe some informed students will. Of course there will also be plenty of conservative weirdos pushing their worldview on their children who will push them to also vote conservative, but hey thems the breaks.
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You could post some numbers that back you that kinda crazy take…
I mean, you realize where the word “boomers” comes from, right?
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I could defintely see 16 year olds voting against their best interests, such as lower drinking ages, less school years, easier school circulums. Ending school at grade 10 might sound like a great idea to a 16 year old and the mp pitching it could convince older canadians it would save a lot of taxes as well, all well significantly impacting that new generations education potential.
Is that worse than the adults in Alberta repeatedly voting in governments that allow foreign companies to take Alberta oil out of the province for fractions of a penny on the dollar while failing to put away sufficient reserve funds to clean up their messes in the province leaving those adult voters and their future children holding a many tens of billions of dollars cleanup bill?
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I think there’s something to be said for allowing kids to participate in the political system while we still have them in school to teach them about it. Maybe it would help voter turnout rates.
I don’t know for you but the school parliament give me a pretty good lesson on the actual political landscape : elected people don’t change shit
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My main point:
No vote, no tax.
I would be fine with not charging workers under 18 tax.
When I was that age saving for university wasn’t easy and staying life off with a bunch of debt and no guaranteed job isn’t fun.
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No, we shouldn’t. More voting isn’t necessarily better. It’s similar to the arguments people make for mandatory voting, which is also a bad idea.
We don’t need more noise in the voting process.
If anything I’d want to restrict the franchise to people with a certain level of knowledge but I don’t think it’s possible to do that in a just way.
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I would be fine with not charging workers under 18 tax.
When I was that age saving for university wasn’t easy and staying life off with a bunch of debt and no guaranteed job isn’t fun.
But they DO pay tax so they should have a voice since they are being taxed without representation.
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no. most 16-year-olds don’t know anything. yeah yeah most people don’t know anything in the first place, but teenagers know even less.
all this is going to do is boost whatever vote their family has
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Some people aren’t mature enough at 56 and they’re still allowed a vote.
Honestly if you can get a drivers licence at 16 you should be able to vote too. And just because we open it up to them doesn’t mean they’ll all automatically actually do it.
Driver’s license is a weird thing to tie to voting imho. Serving in military makes sense to me though.
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I mean, you realize where the word “boomers” comes from, right?
I mean, you realize people tend to die as they age, right?
The largest age cohort in America are millenials, not boomers.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/296974/us-population-share-by-generation/
But, Boomers outvote millenials by a silly margin. Silly takes like “there are more boomers” probably don’t help.
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No. Because the boomer generation was so massive that their voting power surpassed any other generation. Even if they don’t even all go vote, they still buried the X and millennials combined.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/296974/us-population-share-by-generation/
I mean, apart from millenials outnumbering boomers, and the fact that Gen X + millenials would outnumber them more than 2:1, uhhh, sure?
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No. And I’ll explain by way of a quick example.
Every lunch hour, high-schoolers from the local comp cut across my work’s parking lot on their way to 7-11. A group of them, the same boys for the most part, laugh and sig heil each other while using their fingers to make fake hitler moustaches.
Does this make them nazi’s? No. It makes them teenagers who do something idiotic because it’s “edgy” and their peers are doing it. 16 year olds have zero concept of the real world implication of their actions. Their brains are neither fully formed enough or emotionally mature enough to vote responsibly rather than just decide to be a dick bag because it’ll make their friends laugh.
At best you’re going to end up with a lot of spoiled votes writing in Eric Cartman. And at worst, they’ll actively vote in the asshole that makes honest voters made because that’s the “edgelord” thing to do.
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I could defintely see 16 year olds voting against their best interests, such as lower drinking ages, less school years, easier school circulums. Ending school at grade 10 might sound like a great idea to a 16 year old and the mp pitching it could convince older canadians it would save a lot of taxes as well, all well significantly impacting that new generations education potential.
When have those things ever been on a ballot?
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I would rather limit voting to between the ages of 20 and 60.
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no. most 16-year-olds don’t know anything. yeah yeah most people don’t know anything in the first place, but teenagers know even less.
all this is going to do is boost whatever vote their family has
18 is correct because it aligns with graduating highschool; which we’ve defined societally as the benchmark for being able to contribute to society.
The majority of contemporary civic education is in highschool not middle school as well. If we’re going to lower the voting age we need to revamp our entire school system first.
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Every ballot should have a random set of 10 questions on it at the top that needs to be answered correctly for the vote to count. Anyone who is too young or old or uneducated to answer properly is not able to vote.
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Every ballot should have a random set of 10 questions on it at the top that needs to be answered correctly for the vote to count. Anyone who is too young or old or uneducated to answer properly is not able to vote.
Im sure a literacy test would never ever be abused.
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How about a compromise? Make the voting ages 24-74 Anyone 14-24 Can vote for a “Minister of Youth” who is a cabinet minister and anyone over 74 can vote for a “senior’s minister”?
Everyone gets representation and no one is subjected to the ideology of the immature or anyone who has given up on life.
