Good evening.
I've come down from Ladysmith, from up island, especially to present to you.
I'm occasionally invited to speak at high schools, where I get the whole school on the floor of the gym. I ask them the question right at the beginning, “When you think about the future, what do you feel, hope or worry?” Out of 400 kids, I'm getting only five hands going up to say they feel hopeful. Then I give them a whole presentation about exciting stuff and how we can tackle climate change and things like that, and that changes their views.
The point is that there's an epidemic of hopelessness happening in our schools. They're not engaged politically, and if they are engaged and they know the history, they'll know that in the last 100 years every government has been either Liberal or Conservative. Also, out of the last 33 elections since the year 1900, in peacetime only three have had a true majority. The two in wartime got just over 50%. Nine elections out of 10 have had a forced majority, which has not been a democratic result, when the majority of Canadians have not been represented by the parties they elected. This is deeply disturbing.
I get involved, like other people, in strategic voting. I see how it splits friends. It puts people who have the same values at each other's throats and creates anger and distress. It's not a pleasant thing to do, to have to vote against someone you don't want to vote against, blah blah blah.
My concern particularly is how to get more young people engaged. I do believe, like other people have said, that we need to extend the votes to 16-year-olds. Currently, if you have not voted before you leave school, you go into that kind of black hole, pretending you're not an adult, and adults vote so you're not going to vote but maybe when you're 30 you'll get around to it. If your first election is while you are at school, you'll get used to it, and you'll get used to the discipline, the rigorous debating, and the challenging of positions. Then you're hooked and you're involved in electioneering.
Another issue around this is that one-third of Canadians don't own property, don't have parents who own property, will never inherit, and will be renting all of their lives, unless we have a changed system. Renters vote far less. The voter turnout among renters is much lower. If we had either mandatory voting, as in Australia, where they have a turnout rate of 94%, that would solve the problem. Alternatively, there could be a $100 voting tax credit, so when you vote you get $100, and if you don't vote, you lose it. Also, it's tax revenue neutral, so it doesn't increase government costs at all, but it's an incentive for people who have to take time off work at low wages to come to vote, and it's a way of saying that voting matters to us.
Finally, I think on campaign financial reform we also need to make sure that if any party wants to bring back the ability of powerful interests to finance elections, we lock in a two-thirds majority against that happening, so we stay with good finance control. There are top penalties for attempted voter manipulation, such as robocalls, and we have a new system of mixed member proportional voting.
Thank you very much.