Young British Columbians are getting a lot of attention these days from the political elite.
The use of various social media forms so popular with the younger crowd has sky-rocketed as candidates running for the respective leadership of the ruling B.C. Liberals and the opposition New Democrats are hitting the campaign trail in the search for memberships and votes.
Mike de Jong, who is running for Premier in seeking the leadership of the B.C. Liberals, wants to take a seemingly more radical step.
He wants to lower the voting age to 16 from 18 to counter declining turnout, a proposal supported by two of his rivals, Kevin Falcon and George Abbott, both of whom have their own ideas to reach more disinterested and dissatisfied citizens, including younger voters, through measures such as online voting.
All this lavish attention should make the hearts of young British Columbians, forgive the pun, go all a-twitter.
Melissa Stathers, who attends Grade 12 at Summerland Secondary School, certainly does not mind this outreach by the political class.
She supports plans to lower the voting age in suggesting that such a move might be overdue.
The group of British Columbians who would become eligible to vote under de Jong’s proposal deserve the recognition in light of their contributions to the economy and society of British Columbia.
“We (under the current voting age) pay taxes,” said Stathers.
“We work and courts start to recognize young people as adults. So why shouldn’t we be allowed to vote? This is the next step.”
Others countries albeit only a handful have already taken that step.
Ecuador became the latest jurisdiction to lower its voting age to 16 in 2008, joining recent converts Austria (2007) and Brazil, where the age of eligibility dropped to 16 in 1988.
Stathers, who plans to attend university after graduation this year and recently claimed a scholarship, suggested that the clichéd image of the disinterested teenager is exactly that -- an unjustified stereotype.
“Younger people are probably more interested (in politics) than what people give them credit for,” she said.
Global concerns such as human rights and poverty, as well as more local issues generate a lot of interest, said Stathers, who argues that a lower voting age would capture the initial enthusiasm of teenagers for political issues at the time.
Classes such as Civics 11 stoke a lot of interest among teenagers, yet they lack an outlet, said Stathers in refuting the often-heard criticism that younger voters lack the inclination and intellectual capabilities to participate in the ‘adult’ conversation of politics.
Stathers admits that her generation may not value current democratic rights as much as the generation of her parents or grand-parents, because they had to struggle for them.
But this does not mean that they cannot become active, full-engaged citizens at an earlier age, she said.
Certainly B.C.’s political parties already think so. De Jong’s party permits 14-year-olds to vote in leaderships.
New Democrats permit 12-year-olds to joint the party and vote for its leaders.