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Young voters could swing the results in Canada’s upcoming election if they go to the polls, but that’s something the demographic doesn’t traditionally do as much as their older counterparts.
Data from Elections Canada shows that during the 2021 general election, 46.7 per cent of electors aged 18 to 24 cast a ballot. That’s lower than any other age group.
Those numbers have been declining in the last few elections. Turnout among that demographic was about seven points lower in 2021 compared to 2019, and more than 10 points lower than 2015.
At Ottawa’s Carleton University, students who identified as not fully engaged in this election said it’s because of awareness and education.
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“I’m just not that interested in politics in general, there’s a lot going on and there’s so many different sides of it and I just don’t wanna be wrapped up,” said Catherine O’Hall, who recently became eligible to vote.
Her friend Jade John said time restrictions have kept her from getting more information.
“It’s not something that you just see in front of you, so you have to go searching for it, and I don’t have time to go search,” she said
Georgia Westwoods could have voted in the recent Ontario provincial election, but she didn’t.
“I had no idea, I’d never heard about it, hadn’t seen anything about it,” she said, adding that her age group feels disconnected from politics.
“I don’t really know a lot. I feel like a lot of people don’t, especially my age. I feel like a lot of candidates don’t really, like, look toward us, I guess. I feel like it’s kind of hard to know where we stand.”
Reach them where they are, say young voters
In recent years, political parties have been turning to social media to try and pull that youth vote, but the voters CBC spoke with in Ottawa say more is needed.
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“We don’t watch the news, we don’t do any of that. So we’re not really aware of what is going on. If it’s not on social media, we don’t know,” said John.
And it’s not just being on social media, said O’Hall: the message has to hit right.
“I’ve been seeing party leaders’ statements and stuff like that, but it’s just not intriguing, I guess you would say. It’s not eye-catching, like, I wouldn’t stop and watch it. I just keep on scrolling,” she said.
Westwoods suggested hiring Gen Z interns to help craft a better message in order to reach the demographic.
Trying to change the numbers
Advocates for voter turnout in younger generations are trying to combat that lack of awareness and argue that the declining youth vote is not about apathy.
“It is a misconception that youth don’t want to vote,” said Amanda Munday, executive director of the non-profit New Majority.
“What we found is that it’s not that young people aren’t willing to vote, we see passionate and excited young people who really care about the issues. What’s going on is barriers to voting and information access.”
Munday said that when New Majority speaks with younger voters, more than half the time, the person is not aware that an election is happening, but in an on campus survey conducted in the summer, only four per cent of more than 10,000 people polled were unwilling to vote.
“The assumption [is] that every household is having conversations about voting and that people know what to expect, what to do, how to do it. That information isn’t talked about in every household,” Munday said.
The group has discovered that the most critical issues to youth in this election are affordability, mental health care, the climate, and, more recently, Canadian sovereignty. Next Generation attempts to explain to the youth that they can make a difference on those issues by voting.
“Gen Z and millennials are the electoral majority in the upcoming federal election. This is new, for the first time in generations, we’ve seen from [Statistic Canada] since 2021 that now Gen Zs and millennials are a larger electoral majority than baby boomers,” Munday said.
“But what we have is a is a demographic who doesn’t have the same patterns of behaviour over many different elections to vote, so we need to get them there because we know that they can be the decision makers in elections.”
Source: cbc
