Another area of my research is voting at age 16, on which political scientists have done a pretty good analysis because we have cases of countries, or regions within countries or municipalities, where the voting age has been reduced to 16. What we basically found is that young people, on the whole, if they begin voting at 16, other things being equal, generally are more likely to vote than if they began voting at 18 simply because they're more likely to be in their own family, still living with the rest of their family where their parents are more likely to be voting and they'll join them, or in a community of people who are participating in one way or another. Once they get to be 18—and by their first election, they could by 19 or 20—they are likely to have left their parents' home. They might be in a different city and will certainly be thinking about other things—relationships and so on—and in fact tend to vote less. That is pretty pretty clear in all of the cases we've looked at.
The question is to what extent does that creates a habit that will continue through life. There is some disagreement on how much of an effect it has.
Then other question is, if they vote at 16, are they likely to be less knowledgeable than if they started at 18? Are they actually not voting? Basically, the fact is they're no more knowledgeable necessarily, but they're not less knowledgeable either.
So my basic feeling, to answer your question directly, is that this would be something we should think about seriously, combining it with more serious efforts of political civic education at the ages of 14, 15, 16 particularly. Unfortunately—I shouldn't say unfortunately, as it's in the nature of our federal system—education is a provincial matter and I would like to see provinces take the initiative on something like this, combining greater effort to civic education with voting at 16, and then moving toward doing that federally. That's where I would put the emphasis in answering your question.