Elections Canada bureaucrats are going to spend between $100,000 and $250,000 to figure out why so many young people are not bothering to vote.
Great, another massive waste of tax dollars, from the folks who brought you election gag laws.
First off, why do these bureaucrats even care about the voting habits of Canadians?
Seems to me, the people at Elections Canada should solely concern themselves with the nuts and bolts of doing their job - ie make sure there are enough ballots printed.
Whether or not people decide to vote is a personal matter and none of the government's business.
Besides I can guarantee you that after spending all that money, Elections Canada will decide that it should spend yet even more taxpayer money on some lame-brained media campaign urging young people to vote.
It will likely feature some unknown Canadian rap singer saying something like: "Hey kids, voting is cool!"
And it won't work.
The fact is young people are politically apathetic for a very good reason: they don't like the political choices being offered.
No amount of Elections Canada hectoring is going to change that.
Young people will only vote in greater numbers if politicians inspire them to vote.
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12 comments:
I'm with you on this 100%.
I think youth don't care because our culture does not require that they care. If you give people the choice to be lazy, they will be.
Young voters tend to vote Liberal.
This is a boost for their Liberal buddies and tax-payer funded as well.
NeilD
Now this we can agree on!
Maybe elections Canada should spend more time collecting the monies owed to them by the Liberal leadership candidates whom they have given "extensions" to instead of looking for new ways to spend their (opps).....our money!
The article mentioned that many of the youth that don't vote now, do vote when they get older. Basically, they don't vote because other things are more important to them at this stage of their lives. What I fear is Elections Canada will get the idea to make the elections internet voting. Then we will get huge numbers of young people voting without any thought of who or what they are voting for: not to mention the problem of some clever hacker voting millions of time just to screw up the system. In the meantime, many seniors may not know how to vote or have internet available to them. So the group that is more informed and interested will be left out or sorely hampered.
You beat me to it Alberta Girl.
Alberta Bob
old white guy says. i have been voting since i was old enough to do so. every year i find that the parties are running people who are not smart enough or moral enough to tell me how i should live. in the last election not one candidate was worth voting for. maybe the youth are starting to be critical like us old folks. folks politicans are there to work for us. not us for them.
I agree, EC should quit with the make work/waste $$ project because it has a simple answer, kids don't care. They are not taught to care.
Social Studies, Canadiana,debates, meaningful school elections, patriotism...are all things of the past in our schools now and they'd rather push propaganda like "An Inconvenient Truth" or Texting 101 than History and Civics.
I watched a Civic election unfold in Calgary that had kids come out in hordes because of FB and Twitter. When I asked many of them why they voted (these kids ARE NOT tax payers)they said it was because of the bandwagon effect of those mediums. They knew mostly nothing of the issues nor cared about finding out.
That is frightening and that is where the school system, media and parents have let their kids down, imo. We deserve better!
If they want want more people to vote they should add a none of the above choice to the ballet and make it binding.
Liberals control elections Canada and they are being used again in any way possible to help ensure a Liberal victory in the coming election. Thus, spend money to drum up possible Liberal voters, the apathetic, ill-informed and idealistic are ideal Liberal supporters. (real conservative)
If the majority of young people don't vote, maybe it was a mistake to lower the voting age in the first place. It would be interesting to know if the number of 'older' people voting has dropped or if its the lack of young people that makes the overall percentage of voters go down.
So we have a lot of comments indicating that lack of informed participation in elections is a significant problem but when the government agency most connected to voting wants to study it they are somehow not minding their business? Come again?
Not that you don't get sidetracked and rant at something unrelated (election gag laws) along the way of course.
Whether people decide to vote or not is the government's business - it's the basis of our whole form of government for goodness sakes! If people aren't voting because they can't get time off or we would change the voting times and make a three hour rule - oh yeah, we did that but we needed to know about the issues first.
Yes, I'm with the commenter that says no way to internet voting. That's a stupid idea (let's do a secret ballot - so we can't verify anything - and do it online in a way that it's impossible to guarantee security for - that's going to build confidence in a disputed election).
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