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Federal Politics

Youth a New 'Electoral Powerhouse' in Canada

New study shows Trudeau owned much of their 2015 vote -- so what'll he do with it?

Susan Delacourt 20 Apr 2016iPolitics

Susan Delacourt is one of Canada's best-known political journalists. Over her long career she has worked at some of the top newsrooms in the country, from the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail to the Ottawa Citizen and the National Post. She now writes for iPolitics, where this article first appeared.

Politicians like to tell Canada's young people that they should take their voting rights seriously -- because they're "the future."

That future may have arrived already -- through the 2015 election -- according to a new study out right now by Abacus Data and the Canadian Alliance of Student Associations. Youth turnout jumped by 12 percentage points between the 2011 and 2015 elections -- and the study suggests that it may be time to stop labelling Canada's young people as politically disengaged and apathetic.

The study's report, titled "The Next Canada," suggests that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau may well owe his majority victory to the large number of people aged 18-25 who showed up at the ballot box last fall -- and that this infusion of youth into Canadian politics may be here to stay.

"The 2015 Canadian election may have been the start of a political awakening of a new electoral powerhouse in Canada," it states. "2015 has proven that they can and will show up when asked to participate, and when political leaders reach out, engage and offer them a reason to vote."

So even before Trudeau's cabinet was being sworn into power at Rideau Hall in early November, touting the arrival of "generational change" in the corridors of power, a new generation had already been mixing things up weeks earlier at the ballot box.

Given all the attention paid to massive regime change in Ottawa and the Liberals' big comeback story -- from a distant third to first place in the fall campaign -- the story of the sizeable increase in voter turnout in 2015 has been treated so far largely as an interesting footnote.

And because the official election results are only reported by geography and party affiliation, we've had to wait for deeper demographic studies such as this one to figure out why the 2015 campaign attracted nearly three million more voters than the previous election. Where did all these new voters come from?

It seems a lot of them were first-time voters, or young people who hadn't bothered to vote in 2011. It also appears that Trudeau himself provided some of the motivation -- perhaps because a 44-year-old leader had a youth advantage over his rivals, or maybe because the Liberal campaign was aggressively pursuing young voters through non-traditional social media. The study also credits youth-vote advocacy organizations for the spike in turnout in 2015.

Trudeau owned the youth vote -- now what?

About 45 per cent of Canadian voters between 18 and 25 supported the Liberals in the 2015 election, the Abacus/CASA study found, while only 25 per cent voted for the New Democratic Party and 20 per cent voted Conservative. (Another five per cent voted for the Bloc Québécois and four per cent for the Green Party.)

The Liberals' apparent ownership of the youth vote is itself a bit of a surprising turnaround. Their support among young people was just 17 per cent in 2011, when the party made its most disastrous showing ever in an election.

But in 2015, they were taking young people's votes away from the New Democrats and, to a lesser extent, the Conservatives. According to this study, 43 per cent of young voters who backed the NDP in 2011 went to the Liberals this time, and another 20 per cent of former young Conservative voters migrated to the red team.

"One could credit young voters with giving the Liberal party its majority government," states the Next Canada study.

The survey, based on an online sample of 1,000 young Canadians polled in February, is billed as the first real glimpse into the "political preferences, priorities and opinions of Canada's youngest cohort of voters." Its findings on the 12-percentage-point boost in youth turnout are based on a Statistics Canada study released earlier this year.

Contrary to the popular clichés, says the study, Canada's young people are paying attention; one in three described themselves as politically engaged and about 52 per cent said they followed news about national politics very or somewhat closely.

So here's the question posed by these results: Now that Trudeau owns much of the youth cohort's support, what does he do with it?

As one of my favourite Seinfeld episodes wisely noted, it's not just the taking of the (car) reservation that's important -- it's the holding on to it that matters.

If Trudeau's government wants to tap into youth issues, policy-wise, the Next Canada suggests that it focus on (no surprise) creating job opportunities for them and making post-secondary education affordable. Like older voters, young Canadians are also concerned about the health care system and cutting taxes, too.

All of those concerns, by the way, rank higher on their scale of interest than legalizing marijuana. A full 63 per cent said job-creation should be a priority, compared to 20 per cent who said pot laws should be on the immediate to-do list for Trudeau's government. (Boom goes another cliché about what young voters are thinking.) When they were asked about current challenges, a big one cited was the cost of food. Their concerns about food costs, in fact, ranked slightly higher than concerns about the cost of education.

Of course, it's always possible that this surge of young voters will fade away as surely as all the excitement over the new government. But we do know that voting is a bit of a habit; young voters turn into older voters, and maybe now that these 18 to 25-year-olds have had a taste of democracy, they'll stick with it as they move into middle age.

If that's the case, maybe that 2015 election will turn out to be a vote for the future.  [Tyee]

Read more: Federal Politics

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