Beyond waiting till they're allowed to vote, they have quite a few years in which they can have their voices heard. Since being a relatively young person at the 1992 Rio conference, I've noticed that there has been a sea change since then both in terms of the climate getting worse and also in terms of the voices being heard by much younger people than I was back then as a university student.
It's a positive change to see that movement and mobilization of young people having their voices heard and, of course, the democratization of information through the Internet and so on has facilitated that. Are we just going to allow them to voice their concerns, or are we going to act on them? That's really the question now, and that's why we ended the report on lesson number 8 in terms of intergenerational equity, because we do hold this planet and this country in trust for the future generations. We need to figure out how to make decisions that further that trust rather than breach it.
I can't give you specific examples of all the ways of doing that, but it is something that really needs to be done. We need to take seriously our obligations to future generations rather than just using it as a mantra or a buzzword. It's been codified in Canadian law already, but it hasn't been operationalized.