The Young Want In

The data has been crunched and the trend is clear. In the last election, the young showed up in droves to vote. Susan Delacourt writes:

That future may have arrived already already — through the 2015 election — according to a new study out right now by Abacus Data and the Canadian Alliance of Student Associations. Youth turnout jumped by 12 percentage points between the 2011 and 2015 elections — and the study suggests that it may be time to stop labelling Canada’s young people as politically disengaged and apathetic.

The study’s report, titled “The Next Canada,” suggests that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau may well owe his majority victory to the large number of people aged 18-25 who showed up at the ballot box last fall — and that this infusion of youth into Canadian politics may be here to stay.

After bemoaning the apathy of the young, the powers that be are taking note:

About 45 per cent of Canadian voters between 18 and 25 supported the Liberals in the 2015 election, the Abacus/CASA study found, while only 25 per cent voted for the New Democratic Party and 20 per cent voted Conservative. (Another 5 per cent voted for the Bloc Québécois and 4 per cent for the Green Party.)

It helped that the Liberals had a young leader. But they also were more attuned to the values of the up and coming generation. They want government to begin "creating job opportunities for them and making post-secondary education affordable. Like older voters, young Canadians are also concerned about the health care system and cutting taxes, too."

I suspect that climate change is also on the top of their agenda. The times they are a changin'. And the young want in.

Image: cbc.ca

The Young Could Be Game Changers

The Canadian Press reports that pollster Nick Nanos and former Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page are working on a project to increase youth turnout in the next election. Nanos has gone back and looked at the data he gathered during the last election. He's reached some startling conclusions:

Just over 60 per cent of eligible voters actually cast ballots in 2011. Among those under 30, fewer than 40 per cent bothered to vote.

Working with Kevin Page, the former parliamentary budget officer, on a project aimed at engaging youth in the political process, Nanos has mined data from his daily polling during the 2011 campaign as well as research done for the Institute for Research on Public Policy to answer the question: What if 60 per cent of young people had voted?

His answer: Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservatives likely wouldn't have won a majority.

But, besides affecting the outcome, Nanos believes that young voters would have influenced the debate:

More importantly, he says the political debate would have been more hopeful and would have revolved around a broader range of issues if young people had been more engaged in the process.

"What we find is that their concerns are much more diverse than older Canadians who are fixated on jobs and health care," Nanos said in an interview. "So if you're a younger Canadian, you're twice as likely to say that the environment is a top national issue of concern. You're twice as likely to say that education is a top national issue of concern."

His analysis also suggests older Canadians "are very cynical, they have less confidence in finding solutions" whereas younger people "are actually much more hopeful, have a higher level of confidence in finding solutions."

The Harperites must be looking at the same data. That's why they want to shut down Elections Canada's efforts to encourage voting.

The kids scare the Conservatives -- because they know they could be game changers.