I've heard it's a global pandemic, so you never know what power you have in your hands right now.
I will be flying through these slides. I've apologized in advance to the translators.
CIVIX is a national non-partisan, charitable organization working to develop the habits and skills of citizenship within students under the voting age. As it is probably most relevant today, I'll really focus on Student Vote. You'll see in the slides why I think that program is relevant for our discussions.
Turning to the second slide, just as quick background, Student Vote is a parallel election for students under the voting age that parallels official election periods. We've conducted that now for 18 years, for somewhere in the range of 50 levels of elections across Canada—municipal, provincial, territorial and federal. In the recent federal election, we had, I think it's fair to round, just under 10,000 schools register across Canada, with about 30 votes shy of 1.2 million student ballots cast. We use the currency of direct participation, not reach, because if I used reach, I could inform you, with tallied media hits and all that stuff, that we supposedly reached 350 million Canadians in the last election—of which there aren't—so let's go with direct participants.
In the third slide you'll see our geographic spread. I point this out because it's interesting to note that if we include all provinces and territories, we were in 63% of all schools across Canada. If we exclude our lowest jurisdiction, which is Quebec—I can talk about that later, if someone is interested—our average would increase to 70% of all schools in the country. I believe we are on par with matching or surpassing the number of schools that take part in the Terry Fox Run across Canada. I don't know of anyone else who's in more schools. That's fantastic for our democracy.
If you look at the map, you will see a visual display of the lovely democratic pressure we're putting from the north on the United States. Then there's something that anyone who's into politics likes—the results of our federal election in 2019. In terms of the turnout results, it's interesting to note the similarities and the differences on a national level. I'm happy to take questions on that.
In the next slide, you'll see something that you might very interesting—that is, how you fared in Student Vote in 2019. The member of the committee with the most number of schools registered in their jurisdiction is Mr. Lukiwski, who had 47 schools register. I don't know if he's here today.
Actually, you know what? I'm sorry; it was Mr. Doherty. I don't think he's here today either. He had 55 schools registered.
You'll see that in some of your jurisdictions, you'll have as many as just under 8,000 kids participate.
In the next slide you can see the national voting trends of the Student Vote participants over the last number of years. I put this out as valuable just because a lot of groups that are working on what you may call “youth civic engagement” are generalized as being on either the centre or the left. What's interesting to point out here is that other than one election of the last six federal elections, the Conservative Party of Canada obtains the most student votes in the raw ballot count across the country. It's just an interesting thing to point out. We're a non-partisan organization, and I don't like us to be generalized as centre or left or anywhere on the political spectrum.
If you were in our position, and you could reach 1.2 million students under the voting age from nearly 10,000 schools across Canada in the last federal election, I think you'd want to have an understanding of what you were actually aiming for, right? A couple of clues were given to us from previous reports put out by Elections Canada—at least, in this case, the 2011 and 2015 federal elections—from the national youth survey. What it did was draw a picture of what characteristics a young voter has. They have characteristics of being interested in the democratic or political process; being knowledgeable; thinking that voting and participating is a civic duty; talking with their family and friends, or being influenced by their family and friends, or having friends that could even influence them in the political process....
Ruby, I see your hand up. I might as well try to respond there.