At the risk of sounding like an old man yelling at clouds (I'm only 35), don't we have a long history of young people doing remarkably stupid things for stupid reasons as an example of why experience has value? Shouldn't we let kids have the chance to grow out of, say, eating tide pods for clicks on social media before handing them the keys to the kingdom? The legal age of majority isn't perfect, but we already have enough problems with people who are unaffected by the outcome making decisions without adding millions of new voters who have no stake in governance.
The majority of voters in Canada that have the privilege to vote are uninformed as to how our Parliament works, let alone policies, ethics, and the legislative bodies role of our governing system. There should be a knowledge test on governance and policies put forward by parties before any citizen can slip a ballot into a box. To suggest we further compound the lack of knowledge by allowing children, with no idea how to run their own lives, cast a vote for who shall run our country is ludicrous. Perhaps adding a class to the curriculum on how our Government and Parliament works, the need for ethics and competency by those in power, and what the Bill of Rights and our Constitution entails, would be far more beneficial for all. That would ensure the next generation of Canadian's would be far more informed before they place a vote into the ballot box to decide who runs the country.
I don't know whether to take this as a serious column, or meant tongue in cheek. On its face it appears to have identified a single issue, long-range thinking, and proposed various solutions based on the age of people. But nowhere do I see an analysis of the source of the problem or closing the loop to see if the proposed solution would, or does, actually address it.
What gives anyone the idea that giving younger people more voting power will translate to longer term thinking. Is that what teenagers are known for? Is your memory of being a teenager filled with joyful recollection of planning out your retirement income, or perhaps was it more likely about how fun it would be to throw a rock through the school window without thinking about consequences of the next hour, week, or year?
My kids aren't thinking about their long-term future. Politically, they being led by their teachers via semi-woke curriculum to potentially vote based on how the teachers union wants them to vote. Is incentivizing teachers to indoctrinate their students to vote the way they want really what we're trying to do here? We already have that problem at some universities.
As a former young person myself, and a decades-long student of human psychology, it seems to me that young people are neither competent nor long-term thinkers. Teen years are driven by hormones, rebellion, attention, acceptance, friendships, mate-seeking. Some of the most political ones have learned only one thing really well, and have not yet learned that life is complicated.
To quote Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting, "You're just a kid, you don't have the faintest idea what you're talkin' about."
We all knew everything when we were teenagers. As we age we learn a lot more, but know a lot less. Understanding that apparent paradox from experience is what we call wisdom. As we age, we get more worried about the future, not less. We care more about our legacy, and the world we will be leaving for our children.
Standing isn't a viable claim here. Competence isn't even this issue per se. There are very intelligent, knowledgeable young people, even with passion for the future. But they still lack wisdom.
Greta Thunberg cares very deeply about the future. She's young, and passionate, and learns a lot of information. But her fame is unearned. She didn't invent a new solar cell or battery technology. She didn't discover some new climate science. She didn't come up with a brilliant economic plan to rapidly shift to greener energy without causing economic collapse and mass suffering (which is what we're trying to address in the first place regarding climate change).
Thunberg got famous for opportunistic finger-wagging. She's now marched around the world as a symbolic figurehead. Finger-wag at politicians. Finger-wag at industry. Finger-wag at the public. But she contributes nothing to solving any problem. Finger-wagging solves nothing. She's not a long-term thinker, nor are her backers.
If she had wisdom, she'd be promoting young people to get into engineering, sciences, economics and policy development. She'd be putting in the hard work to become competent in these fields and try to solve problems. I hope she does. I hope she doesn't spend her life seeking past glory, doubling-down on finger-wagging, and rejected by her team after she loses her youthful charm and recognize she's never solved anything. I hope she drops it, rolls up her sleeves, and helps solve problems.
The problem is, that's hard work. Promoting hard work to young people doesn't sell well. Young politics doesn't tend to focus on seeking leaders who promote hard work and study as a means to address the long-term future. Instead, they tend to get behind finger-waggers with great talk about about how bad people are and what a utopian future might look like, but nothing about how to get there because they haven't got the faintest clue, nor the wisdom to recognize that they don't. Because they're just kids. As we were.
This is a hugely fun column. I imagine free day care, university, and mortgage deductions would be enacted the day before yesterday. Also proactive euthanasia laws: Sign here if you *want* to be resuscitated, starting at age fifty/sixty.
I think the real problem re: the absence of long-range thinking isn't the age of the voter, but the human desire for instant gratification. This applies to politicians who don't want to raise taxes for unsexy infrastructure maintenance (cross fingers the bridges and dams won't collapse in my 3-4 year mandate). Also to people: We *say* we care about climate change but are people in their twenties, thirties and forties *really* willing to pay astronomical prices for fruit and veggies out of season, or take a sailboat to Europe with Greta rather than fly? :)
"If it also encourages people to have more children, we can consider that a happily benign effect."
Does it strike you that there's a shortage of people on the planet? There were 2.5 billion people on Earth in 1950. There are eight billion people now. Every Canadian, because of his high standard of living, is one of the worst per capita emitters of carbon in the world. And you may not have noticed, but every major Canadian city is extremely unaffordable to live in if you compare median income to median home price.
The human race has many problems, but "too few humans" isn't one of them.
Universal suffrage, one person one vote, versus weighted voting? Hmmm.
Now I can appreciate the link between the age of majority, of full legal responsibilities, and voting, and how it's worth considering the pros and cons of shifting the appropriate age for all that. However, the idea of weighted voting sounds like a wriggling can of worms clearly keen to bust out of any attempt to confine its parameters.
Surely every criteria of human difference could be made out to be a matter for weighting differently depending upon the preferences of voters. Along with weighting votes by age, why not by weight, by height, by wealth, by colour, by language, by religion, by and by, on and on.
The whole point of democratic voting is to register preferences, where every individual act of preference is equal to every other: the standard universal suffrage model. If some preferences are to be weighted as more valuable than others, how will this arrangement of weighted preferences be decided? Who gets to vote? How will their votes be weighted? And isn't this kind of what dictatorships are typically about, privileged minorities lean on the scales to generate their preferred outcome? The idea of distorting the inputs in order to get the output you want? Kinda what's going on in the U.S. right now, and typically described as the corruption of democracy.
Reminds me of those convoluted academic PR models where folks fall asleep before they can figure out what the implications are.
Anyway, the whole idea of democracy based upon weighted voting rights, is either an indication of the decline of democracy, or that someone sucked a little too hard and a little too long on the bong last night, stood up too quick and is showing symptoms of dizzying delirium. Hey wouldn't it be fun if we...meanwhile, everyone else has fallen asleep!
"Having all votes count the same seems such an obvious way of doing things that it rarely goes unchallenged."
Is this really what is intended here? Surely the sense is that it is rarely challenged not "unchallenged". 'Rarely goes unchallenged' suggests it's always being challenged, which is not how I read the intention here.
I wonder what harm some people think would befall this great nation of ours if 12 year-olds, 14-year-olds, or 16 year-olds voted?
All of the reasons given for not lowering the voting age that touch on the alleged lack of competency of young people, all apply equally to people of every age.
Stupidity, ignorance, immaturity, and gullibility are not legal barriers to people over the age of 18 voting, why should they be applied to younger people?
There is a fundamental issue that is also not being addressed here. What is the basis for discounting the value of a persons franchise? Implicitly it seems to be how long they are expected to live in the society. If this is the case should we discount the voting rights of other people too?
i) Young people with terminal diseases?
ii) Young people who are planning to emigrate from the country?
iii) People who engage in risky behaviors and have reduced life expectancies (for example those who refuse vaccinations)?
I started the article thinking it was a horrible idea.... but I sort of like the partial and increasing votes for 11 to 18 years old (if only to make a generation invested in their enfranchisement!) And we'd end up with 30 yos with kids having the most power when they are at a point in their lives with the most hope. Hmm. I kinda like that.
Wow!! What a great idea!! When I was 16 I was driving drunk, smoking weed and generally doing all the stupid things that most kids my age were doing. If I’d had 10 votes then I guess I’d have voted for the “young” candidate that promised that the stupid, illegal things we were doing would become legal. Perhaps that’s why Junior’s only accomplishment in 7 years has been to legalize weed.
Robert Heinlein, of course, attracted a lot of criticism for his thought experiment in "Starship Troopers" that only federal service veterans be allowed to vote. (He stressed in his defense that while they had to let you serve, somehow, no matter how disabled, 95% of federal service volunteers were not good enough for *military* service and had to put in two years cleaning bedpans or testing experimental drugs, etc. This is NOT plain in the novel itself, which implies only ex-military can vote, and more so in the movie.)
His book of essays "Expanded Universe" is where the defense appears, and to stress that he was an SF writer doing thought experiments, he offered several more: only the rich can vote; only the poor can vote, etc - how would each work out?
His final two are "only women can vote" - men had it that way, for centuries, lets' try the other shoe. And, my favourite - only *mothers* can vote, the only humans with a provable connection to the future. (Essay written before DNA testing.)
Another, though, would let kids vote: just test people on a few literacy and numeracy skills, and you can vote as long as you pass, be you 13 or 113. (Lots of people would lose the ability to vote with age that way, too.)
These are all fun experiments, but the bottom line for me is that voting is not service to the State, where the best people should be sought for their wisdom to guide us. It just legitimizes the existence of the State, by giving it the informed consent of those governed. Each person governed should get a vote. Giving anybody two lets them move to oppress those with one.
The younger the voting age, the more goodies will be dispersed by the elected at the expense of the long term. Let's keep voting to only by the grumps.
So you're saying we should just have Facebook, Instagram, youtube and twitter pick for us? Without political ads we are now going to have to subsidize TV the way we do with the press. What the hell -- I'll be dead in 20 years.
At the risk of sounding like an old man yelling at clouds (I'm only 35), don't we have a long history of young people doing remarkably stupid things for stupid reasons as an example of why experience has value? Shouldn't we let kids have the chance to grow out of, say, eating tide pods for clicks on social media before handing them the keys to the kingdom? The legal age of majority isn't perfect, but we already have enough problems with people who are unaffected by the outcome making decisions without adding millions of new voters who have no stake in governance.
The majority of voters in Canada that have the privilege to vote are uninformed as to how our Parliament works, let alone policies, ethics, and the legislative bodies role of our governing system. There should be a knowledge test on governance and policies put forward by parties before any citizen can slip a ballot into a box. To suggest we further compound the lack of knowledge by allowing children, with no idea how to run their own lives, cast a vote for who shall run our country is ludicrous. Perhaps adding a class to the curriculum on how our Government and Parliament works, the need for ethics and competency by those in power, and what the Bill of Rights and our Constitution entails, would be far more beneficial for all. That would ensure the next generation of Canadian's would be far more informed before they place a vote into the ballot box to decide who runs the country.
I don't know whether to take this as a serious column, or meant tongue in cheek. On its face it appears to have identified a single issue, long-range thinking, and proposed various solutions based on the age of people. But nowhere do I see an analysis of the source of the problem or closing the loop to see if the proposed solution would, or does, actually address it.
What gives anyone the idea that giving younger people more voting power will translate to longer term thinking. Is that what teenagers are known for? Is your memory of being a teenager filled with joyful recollection of planning out your retirement income, or perhaps was it more likely about how fun it would be to throw a rock through the school window without thinking about consequences of the next hour, week, or year?
My kids aren't thinking about their long-term future. Politically, they being led by their teachers via semi-woke curriculum to potentially vote based on how the teachers union wants them to vote. Is incentivizing teachers to indoctrinate their students to vote the way they want really what we're trying to do here? We already have that problem at some universities.
As a former young person myself, and a decades-long student of human psychology, it seems to me that young people are neither competent nor long-term thinkers. Teen years are driven by hormones, rebellion, attention, acceptance, friendships, mate-seeking. Some of the most political ones have learned only one thing really well, and have not yet learned that life is complicated.
To quote Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting, "You're just a kid, you don't have the faintest idea what you're talkin' about."
We all knew everything when we were teenagers. As we age we learn a lot more, but know a lot less. Understanding that apparent paradox from experience is what we call wisdom. As we age, we get more worried about the future, not less. We care more about our legacy, and the world we will be leaving for our children.
Standing isn't a viable claim here. Competence isn't even this issue per se. There are very intelligent, knowledgeable young people, even with passion for the future. But they still lack wisdom.
Greta Thunberg cares very deeply about the future. She's young, and passionate, and learns a lot of information. But her fame is unearned. She didn't invent a new solar cell or battery technology. She didn't discover some new climate science. She didn't come up with a brilliant economic plan to rapidly shift to greener energy without causing economic collapse and mass suffering (which is what we're trying to address in the first place regarding climate change).
Thunberg got famous for opportunistic finger-wagging. She's now marched around the world as a symbolic figurehead. Finger-wag at politicians. Finger-wag at industry. Finger-wag at the public. But she contributes nothing to solving any problem. Finger-wagging solves nothing. She's not a long-term thinker, nor are her backers.
If she had wisdom, she'd be promoting young people to get into engineering, sciences, economics and policy development. She'd be putting in the hard work to become competent in these fields and try to solve problems. I hope she does. I hope she doesn't spend her life seeking past glory, doubling-down on finger-wagging, and rejected by her team after she loses her youthful charm and recognize she's never solved anything. I hope she drops it, rolls up her sleeves, and helps solve problems.
The problem is, that's hard work. Promoting hard work to young people doesn't sell well. Young politics doesn't tend to focus on seeking leaders who promote hard work and study as a means to address the long-term future. Instead, they tend to get behind finger-waggers with great talk about about how bad people are and what a utopian future might look like, but nothing about how to get there because they haven't got the faintest clue, nor the wisdom to recognize that they don't. Because they're just kids. As we were.
This is a hugely fun column. I imagine free day care, university, and mortgage deductions would be enacted the day before yesterday. Also proactive euthanasia laws: Sign here if you *want* to be resuscitated, starting at age fifty/sixty.
I think the real problem re: the absence of long-range thinking isn't the age of the voter, but the human desire for instant gratification. This applies to politicians who don't want to raise taxes for unsexy infrastructure maintenance (cross fingers the bridges and dams won't collapse in my 3-4 year mandate). Also to people: We *say* we care about climate change but are people in their twenties, thirties and forties *really* willing to pay astronomical prices for fruit and veggies out of season, or take a sailboat to Europe with Greta rather than fly? :)
"If it also encourages people to have more children, we can consider that a happily benign effect."
Does it strike you that there's a shortage of people on the planet? There were 2.5 billion people on Earth in 1950. There are eight billion people now. Every Canadian, because of his high standard of living, is one of the worst per capita emitters of carbon in the world. And you may not have noticed, but every major Canadian city is extremely unaffordable to live in if you compare median income to median home price.
The human race has many problems, but "too few humans" isn't one of them.
Universal suffrage, one person one vote, versus weighted voting? Hmmm.
Now I can appreciate the link between the age of majority, of full legal responsibilities, and voting, and how it's worth considering the pros and cons of shifting the appropriate age for all that. However, the idea of weighted voting sounds like a wriggling can of worms clearly keen to bust out of any attempt to confine its parameters.
Surely every criteria of human difference could be made out to be a matter for weighting differently depending upon the preferences of voters. Along with weighting votes by age, why not by weight, by height, by wealth, by colour, by language, by religion, by and by, on and on.
The whole point of democratic voting is to register preferences, where every individual act of preference is equal to every other: the standard universal suffrage model. If some preferences are to be weighted as more valuable than others, how will this arrangement of weighted preferences be decided? Who gets to vote? How will their votes be weighted? And isn't this kind of what dictatorships are typically about, privileged minorities lean on the scales to generate their preferred outcome? The idea of distorting the inputs in order to get the output you want? Kinda what's going on in the U.S. right now, and typically described as the corruption of democracy.
Reminds me of those convoluted academic PR models where folks fall asleep before they can figure out what the implications are.
Anyway, the whole idea of democracy based upon weighted voting rights, is either an indication of the decline of democracy, or that someone sucked a little too hard and a little too long on the bong last night, stood up too quick and is showing symptoms of dizzying delirium. Hey wouldn't it be fun if we...meanwhile, everyone else has fallen asleep!
"Having all votes count the same seems such an obvious way of doing things that it rarely goes unchallenged."
Is this really what is intended here? Surely the sense is that it is rarely challenged not "unchallenged". 'Rarely goes unchallenged' suggests it's always being challenged, which is not how I read the intention here.
I wonder what harm some people think would befall this great nation of ours if 12 year-olds, 14-year-olds, or 16 year-olds voted?
All of the reasons given for not lowering the voting age that touch on the alleged lack of competency of young people, all apply equally to people of every age.
Stupidity, ignorance, immaturity, and gullibility are not legal barriers to people over the age of 18 voting, why should they be applied to younger people?
I’d settle for adoption of effective adherence to the concept of one person one vote in Canada.
There is a fundamental issue that is also not being addressed here. What is the basis for discounting the value of a persons franchise? Implicitly it seems to be how long they are expected to live in the society. If this is the case should we discount the voting rights of other people too?
i) Young people with terminal diseases?
ii) Young people who are planning to emigrate from the country?
iii) People who engage in risky behaviors and have reduced life expectancies (for example those who refuse vaccinations)?
I started the article thinking it was a horrible idea.... but I sort of like the partial and increasing votes for 11 to 18 years old (if only to make a generation invested in their enfranchisement!) And we'd end up with 30 yos with kids having the most power when they are at a point in their lives with the most hope. Hmm. I kinda like that.
As I suspected - the comments section is full of adults forgetting that most adults are total f'ing morons.
Give kids the right to vote at 16, give them 10 votes with a declining scale, and take away the right to vote at 75 in return for OAP.
The current system has got us here, why expect it can get us out?
Wow!! What a great idea!! When I was 16 I was driving drunk, smoking weed and generally doing all the stupid things that most kids my age were doing. If I’d had 10 votes then I guess I’d have voted for the “young” candidate that promised that the stupid, illegal things we were doing would become legal. Perhaps that’s why Junior’s only accomplishment in 7 years has been to legalize weed.
Robert Heinlein, of course, attracted a lot of criticism for his thought experiment in "Starship Troopers" that only federal service veterans be allowed to vote. (He stressed in his defense that while they had to let you serve, somehow, no matter how disabled, 95% of federal service volunteers were not good enough for *military* service and had to put in two years cleaning bedpans or testing experimental drugs, etc. This is NOT plain in the novel itself, which implies only ex-military can vote, and more so in the movie.)
His book of essays "Expanded Universe" is where the defense appears, and to stress that he was an SF writer doing thought experiments, he offered several more: only the rich can vote; only the poor can vote, etc - how would each work out?
His final two are "only women can vote" - men had it that way, for centuries, lets' try the other shoe. And, my favourite - only *mothers* can vote, the only humans with a provable connection to the future. (Essay written before DNA testing.)
Another, though, would let kids vote: just test people on a few literacy and numeracy skills, and you can vote as long as you pass, be you 13 or 113. (Lots of people would lose the ability to vote with age that way, too.)
These are all fun experiments, but the bottom line for me is that voting is not service to the State, where the best people should be sought for their wisdom to guide us. It just legitimizes the existence of the State, by giving it the informed consent of those governed. Each person governed should get a vote. Giving anybody two lets them move to oppress those with one.
The younger the voting age, the more goodies will be dispersed by the elected at the expense of the long term. Let's keep voting to only by the grumps.
So you're saying we should just have Facebook, Instagram, youtube and twitter pick for us? Without political ads we are now going to have to subsidize TV the way we do with the press. What the hell -- I'll be dead in 20 years.