moved:
That, in the opinion of this House, the Chief Electoral Officer and Elections Canada should develop materials to facilitate youth voting initiatives and make these available to community groups and schools in order to enable young people to learn more about the Canadian electoral system, and to cast their votes at special boxes in polling stations during electoral events and to make public the vote totals, and that the Chief Electoral Officer provide a report on the activities in this regard annually to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs.
Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak to Motion No. 398 on youth voting and I am pleased that it is seconded by the member for Northumberland.
The motion would direct Elections Canada to further develop its efforts to promote the participation of young Canadians in our electoral process and that Elections Canada work proactively with groups like Kids Voting Canada, scouts and guides, teachers, service clubs and the like to do this.
I believe that a friendly amendment to my motion will be presented by a colleague later in the debate. I am very open to this because I look forward to all-party support for the motion.
I would also seek unanimous consent to table a list of references, websites, books and so on, on this topic of youth voting. The list has been presented to colleagues in all the other parties who are participating. They have agreed to it and have already added some items.
Mr. Speaker, my request is that the table would take this list of references so that the record of the debate would be more useful to young people and they could find websites dealing with this topic.