Lowering the voting age to 16 is actually quite reasonable.
Old enough to work, old enough to vote.
Recently, the Labour government of the United Kingdom, led by Prime Minister Kier Starmer, announced they would be using their majority in the British House of Commons to amend Britain’s voting age, lowering it from 18 years old down to just 16.
This represents the fulfillment of a core promise in Labour’s election platform, and will be implemented before the next general election. Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner justified her government’s move very simply: “I was a mum at 16, you can go to work, you can pay your taxes and I think that people should have a vote at 16.”
From my perspective, I agree with Deputy PM Rayner wholeheartedly. I’ve always appreciated the American sentiment that there should be “no taxation without representation”, even if the Americans who owned other human beings as slaves didn’t seem to grasp the meaning.
And with a successful push to lower the national voting age in Britain, peer nations are now seeing increased rumbling from advocates who seek similar change. In Canada, that includes non-affiliated Senator Marilou McPhedran, who has been a champion of the issue for many years.
So, should Canada drop our own voting age from 18 down to 16? And how did Canada get to a voting age of 18 in the first place? As it turns out, that standard is much newer than you would think.
In 1969, the United Kingdom became the first country to lower their voting age from 21 down to 18, matching a reduction that same year in the age of majority. Shifting cultural norms in this time meant that people were changing their understanding of what “adulthood” is, and with that change in cultural consensus came a change in the legal framework.
Just two years later, the United States passed the Twenty-sixth Amendment to their constitution, lowering the voting age for national and subnational elections from 21 down to 18. The change was driven by public opposition to the Vietnam War, and anger that men 18 to 20 could be drafted by leaders they weren’t allowed to help select. “Old enough to fight, old enough to vote” soon became an iconic slogan.
Canada, for our part, amended the Canada Elections Act in 1970 to lower our federal voting age from 21 down to 18. However, each province only followed suit at their own pace, some first only going down to 19 before finally hitting 18. British Columbia would be the final province to go down to 18, and only in 1992.
So ultimately, our modern debate about going from 18 to 16 is nothing new. Democracies have to set the minimum age somewhere, because an infant who hasn’t said their first words is clearly not going to be casting a ballot. But a 16-year-old is very competent; they are only two years away from legal adulthood, and they can understand the complexities of the world around them.
And wouldn’t you believe it, there are many places around the world where they can vote…and Britain, believe it or not, is already one of those places.
The United Kingdom largely consists of four countries: England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. In the latter three, the British government has willingly devolved certain powers and authorities to that country’s subnational legislature, which has its own elected officials.
Two of these subnational legislatures, the Scottish Parliament in 2015 and Wales’ Senedd Cymru in 2019, have lowered the voting age in their jurisdictions from 18 to 16. While you must still be 18 in Scotland or Wales to vote for your national MP, you can vote at 16 for your subnational representative, and also for your local council in municipal elections.
Further, in all three of the British Crown Dependencies, the voting age has been 16 for even longer. This includes the Isle of Man in 2006, and both Jersey and most of Guernsey in 2007 (the rest of Guernsey would wait until 2022).
Clearly, since all these changes occurred, the United Kingdom has not collapsed. There has not been an observable difference in electoral results, contrary to fearmongering, and life continued on largely as it did before, with the positive exception that democracy became more inclusive of the British public.
But many nations have gone even further than the United Kingdom, and fully lowered the voting age with no asterisks or conditions. When Brazil adopted their democratic constitution in 1988 after decades of military dictatorship, Article 14 of the document granted voting rights to all aged 16 and older.
In Austria, all citizens who are at least 16 can vote not only in their national and subnational elections, but also for the supranational elections to the European Parliament. And while Greece did not go all the way down to 16, they did pass legislation in 2016 to make their new voting age 17.
Ultimately, there is a sound argument to be made that if you are old enough to work or pay taxes, then you are old enough to have a vote in how those taxes are used. As I’ve already stated, “no taxation without representation” is a good rule for democracies to live by.
And across the vast majority of Canada’s provinces and territories, 16 years of age is the primary cutoff which has been set for being “old enough to work”. Technically, some subnational jurisdictions in Canada do not have a minimum age to work, but limit what kind of work someone under 16 can perform.
Alberta, uniquely, sets the ability to work in most fields even lower, at just 15 years old. And when it comes to nominating the candidates you’ll vote for, every national party of significant allows voting members to be just 14, with some provincial parties going all the way down to 12.
With that considered, I think being old enough to legally work is a reasonable standard. And clearly, Canadians have no objections to collecting tax dollars from working 16-year-olds. Yet somehow, Canadians seem to have objections to treating their fellow taxpayers as deserving of equal rights.
The Globe and Mail’s Andrew Coyne makes the intentionally provocative argument that perhaps the voting age should be raised back up to 21 in Canada. In an unsure tone that isn’t clearly discernable as a joke, Mr. Coyne says that if there is current debate around lowering the voting age, surely he is just valid in proposing an increase.
I’m not sure exactly what point Mr. Coyne thinks he was making, by telling young Canadians that he does not respect their perspective or world view. When he suggests that younger Canadians may harm society “potentially for decades” with their vote, what he’s really saying is that he considers people who vote differently from him to be harmful to society.
What can you call that, except for fascism? The right to vote is not solely for people you agree with; indeed, if everyone agreed on everything, we would not need democracy!
As you get older, your perspective shifts and changes, and I’m certainly no exception to the gravitational pull of time. Young people see things differently, and that’s good. That’s why we need to hear them and really listen to them, because their perspective is a unique one, and we will become wiser by increasing the diversity of our thoughts.
I supported lowering the voting age to 16 when I was a teenager myself, and I still support lowering it to 16 now that I am an adult out in the world. I’m glad that Britain is blazing this path yet again, and I hope that just as Canada followed them from 21 down to 18, we will also soon follow them down to 16.