Increased Suffrage

Canadians - especially women - and First Nations within Canada have long fought for suffrage and in many ways have won it. However, it is not actually complete. The most recent expansion of suffrage was to prison inmates of all sentence lengths in 2004. One of the longest non-carceral based restrictions was against First Nations - until 1960 (with some suffrage before that for those that gave up status or had served in the armed forces). Although legally being able to vote and being able to easily vote aren't the same thing and POC, women and First Nations often have suffered from reduced access to voting.

So what are the current restrictions (for Federal Elections)?

• at least 18 years old on Election Day
• Canadian Citizen
• Prove Identity & Address (if no ID, someone with ID that knows you personally can vouch for you)

Lower the voting age to 16, giving young people more say in their future and instilling habits of civic participation.

- 2019 GPC Platform

All three of the primary federal restrictions to voting have problems, but the first two are both vastly worse and easier to fix.

• 18 or older: I have the quite strong personal feelings about this one because, I very much wanted to vote quite a few years before I could. Employment standards vary from province to province, but in general all teens at 16 can work without parental permission. Anyone regardless of age can pay taxes if they make enough money. 18 is very much an arbitrary line. While, it clearly doesn't make sense to allow a toddler to vote and there has to be a line somewhere 18 is removing franchise from many that would like to vote and are very much informed. There are many campaigns including Dogwood's Vote 16 BC, and official GPC policy is to lower voting age to 16. I'm not sure that is really enough - I and many friends certainly cared at 12 for example.
  
  I feel strongly the minimum age should be reduced to at most 16 - I'd be quite happy with 14. A large number of polling places are already schools, and it would help inculcate a lifelong habit of civic participation. Running for office, the age limit should be reduced to 16 like other jobs, a 16 year old at least deserves the opportunity to convince you they are the best choice.
   
• Canadian Citizenship: how does it make sense for a Canadian citizen residing in Australia to have suffrage but not a Permanent Resident living in BC for 5 years? Who is more affected by the decisions and direction of the Canadian government? Who is paying taxes in Canada? Who is involved in their community? Certainly, no Canadian citizen regardless of where they may be currently living should lose their franchise, but citizenship should not be the limit.
  
  I strongly call for changing the requirements to vote to allow all Canadian citizens, and all people who have resided in Canada for at least 6 months whether permanent residents or not.

I've long argued for youth franchise - especially after the 2000 election when the Greens under Joan Russow got under 1% of the vote and I was very involved in environmental protection projects at the time (to the point of speaking at the UNEP Children's Conference on the Environment in Victoria a couple years later).

In 2004, since no teachers were organizing it in our small island community, despite being homeschooled, my twin and I organized Student Vote for our local school. The results where somewhat prophetic although it took a long time to come true - 7 years in fact. That was Saanich - Gulf Islands with Andrew Lewis running for the Green party.
 

I did a full report on the results, a snapshop below:

The results for Pender Island are:

On Pender Island 32 students were eligible to vote; of those, 26 cast their ballots! This means that 70.4% of the eligible Pender Island students voted. Whereas only 60.5% of eligible adults voted in this federal election, the lowest percentage of Canadian voters to vote in a national election since confederation! I think this shows that Pender Island youth care about their future and want to be heard; maybe the adults should listen!

Results for our electoral district: