Chris Selley: And now, the same old, dismal arguments for lowering the voting age
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One of the most common arguments for allowing 16- and 17-year-olds to vote was repeated by Scott Stirrett, CEO of Venture Canada, in the Globe and Mail recently: 'Some argue that 16- and 17-year-olds aren't mature enough to vote. But we already trust them with serious decisions. They can drive. They can consent to medical treatment. In criminal court, they can be tried as adults.'
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They can drive with significant restrictions, and they also tend to be quite bad at it. So that analogy doesn't really work, unless we're going to give them half or two-thirds of a vote. They can consent to medical treatment … but they can also be overruled if doctors deem they're not mature enough to consent to the treatment in question. So that argument doesn't work either. They are very rarely tried as adults in criminal court, and only in extreme cases — it seems odd to invoke young murderers and rapists in the cause of democratic reform — and the Supreme Court just made it harder to do so.
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Oddly, as Jesse Kline noted in these pages, this argument never seems to come with any broader emancipation agenda. There are a heck of a lot of things 16- and 17-year-olds can't do, in large part because we don't trust their judgment. They can't legally drink alcohol or buy tobacco or cannabis in any province. They can't get married without parental consent (the rules vary by province). They can't gamble. We certainly don't trust them to sit on juries. We don't let them see certain movies in cinemas, at all or without parental supervision.
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And amidst the debate at Westminster, the Conservatives raised a point I had never thought of before: The most conspicuous thing 16- and 17-year-olds can't do with respect to democracy is run for office. The new British regime doesn't change that.
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'Why does this government think a 16-year-old can vote but not be allowed to buy a lottery ticket, an alcoholic drink, marry, or go to war, or even stand in the elections they're voting in?' Tory MP Paul Holmes asked in the House of Commons.
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It's a bloody good question, and it undermines the whole idea of lowering the voting age. But it's the way things have gone. Austria didn't lower the age to stand for office when it lowered the voting age in 2007. Nor did Germany or Belgium, when they lowered the voting age to 16 for European elections. If I didn't know better, I would suspect they didn't really trust under-18s to participate fully in democracy at all.
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As is the case with proportional representation, many on Team 16 are clearly motivated by partisan interests. Young people have traditionally voted left. It's an interesting time in Canada in that regard, however, considering how comprehensively the Canadian centre-left has failed the millennial, gen-Z and gen-alpha generations, and driven them away from the Liberals and New Democrats. Clearly there are people who honestly believe 16 is an appropriate voting age.
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