Yes, polarization and lack of trust hamper meaningful participation in democracy, although I think that in countries like Canada, people still, by and large, show up to the polls and vote, including young people, and that's encouraging.
What's disadvantageous to a healthy democracy is if citizens, especially young people, increasingly feel as though institutions aren't working on their behalf or helping them advance in their lives. This creates a rife environment for foreign actors and non-state actors to simply amplify polarization.
To counter this, there are Canadian civil society groups that work with specific communities across this country to help empower citizens to participate in their democracy in a meaningful way. There are groups focused on youth. There are groups focused on diaspora communities. There are groups focused on migrants, which integrate them and assimilate them into the norms of Canadian civic life. However, they are under-resourced.
This is one of the main vulnerabilities that the Canadian democracy fund backers are trying to address for this reason. I know this as a representative of a civil society organization that operates in Canada. Funding is complicated here. Canadian philanthropy is not at the same level, for example, as American philanthropy or even European philanthropy. There's a real resource gap in doing this work at scale in Canadian communities, and this is something that the government and the committee can help address.