Vote 16 Bill

Honourable senators, I wish to begin by acknowledging, with thanks and admiration, the work of Senator McPhedran, who has championed this legislation with patience, rigour and genuine conviction. She started this work before I entered this chamber, and I hope to see it carried forward.

This bill is as much about the conversation it drives as the change it seeks. Today, I am pleased to add my voice to that conversation.

I rise in support of Bill S-222, an act to amend the Canada Elections Act to expand the federal voting age to 16- and 17‑year-olds. As a senator, a Canadian by choice and someone who has spent a career building bridges between cultures, economies and, today, generations, I rise to do something that some of my distinguished colleagues may find rather startling — to trust young people more than we currently do.

Yet I believe you will find — as I have — that this is not merely a defensible proposition; it is an overdue one, and I intend to make that case today with evidence, personal experience, conviction and — if you will indulge me — just enough humour to keep us all awake.

As the co-founder of Lifeline Syria Fund, I helped coordinate the private sponsorship and resettlement in Canada of thousands of Syrian refugees. Of those newcomers, the younger ones were consistently among the most impressive — the most energized, the most eager to contribute and the most determined to understand and participate in this society.

I came to this country as an immigrant myself. I know what it means to stand at the margins of a governance system — to observe its workings, to be shaped by its decisions and to possess no formal mechanism by which to participate. The right to vote, when I finally exercised it, was not a bureaucratic formality. It was an act of belonging, of being counted, of being — in the fullest, most democratic sense — here.

To me, this bill is not merely about a ballot. It is about the vitality of our democracy and the full inclusion of a generation of energized, capable and deeply affected citizens in the formal processes that will govern their futures far longer than our own.

Before I turn to the evidence, I would like to take you on a short journey that begins in our own childhoods. Those of us who belong to the baby boomer generation — and I count myself warmly among its distinguished ranks — grew up in a world that, by today’s standards, was technologically — let us say — charmingly modest.

Our toys were wooden, plastic or — if we were particularly fortunate — battery powered. Our calculators were our fingers, and if the arithmetic grew complicated, we had pencils.

I recall with some fondness — and I share this with the chamber in a spirit of full transparency — that the first so-called portable computer I was able to acquire came during my first university summer break away from home. I was 21 years old. It was, in fact, an electrically powered electronic calculator with red light-emitting diodes displaying numbers — a device with the ergonomic grace of a small brick, capable of performing precisely six operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, a percentage function and a square root function.

I was thrilled. I used it and carried it everywhere to the amazement of my classmates and professors alike. I believed, not entirely without justification at the time, that I was living in the future. I was not living in the future. I was living in 1972.

Then there was the computer. Honourable senators, I had the privilege of attending a fine school of engineering, and that institution was the proud custodian of what was at the time considered a magnificent technological achievement: an IBM System/370 mainframe computer that occupied an entire climate‑controlled floor of the main university building. It was a machine of immense physical presence and modest intellectual output accessed through punch cards. These were small pieces of cardboard onto which one typed coded instructions. Then you fed them into the machine in careful sequence and waited, sometimes for hours. One misplaced character, one card slightly out of order, and the machine would produce a printout of spectacular uselessness and you would begin again. It happened to me several times.

We called this computing. We were very proud of it.

I tell you this not to mock the ingenuity of that era. Those engineers and scientists were brilliant people doing extraordinary work within the constraints of their time. I tell you this because of what it means in contrast to where we stand today.

The smartphone currently sitting in the pocket of a 16-year-old student in a Canadian high school — a device they have used since early childhood with the casual fluency of breathing — is not merely more powerful than that mainframe; it is incomparably more powerful. We are not talking about a marginal improvement but the difference between a birch bark canoe and a nuclear submarine.

The processing power, memory, connectivity and access to real-time global information — it all fits in a rectangle the size of a deck of playing cards.

Honourable senators, I want to dwell on this for a moment because it is not merely a charming generational anecdote; it is a substantive democratic argument. There is a cognitive and informational gulf between what our generation had access to at 16 and what today’s 16-year-olds possess that is, without exaggeration, historically unprecedented. No prior generation in human history has arrived at adolescence with such deep exposure to information, such facility with analytical tools and such an intuitive grasp of complex, interconnected systems.

These young people can code, edit videos and build applications. They manage digital platforms with audiences larger than many newspapers. They fact-check in real time because they grew up in an environment where misinformation was abundant and critical evaluation was a survival skill. When a political claim appears on their video feed, they do not wait for the morning paper. They open three browser tabs, consult two databases and have formed a reasoned opinion before the commercial break.

Are we seriously asking whether they are ready to vote? With respect, honourable senators, I had a six-function calculator, and I was considered prepared for adult civic life.

Let me now move from the personal to the empirical. As a telecommunications and electrophysics engineer who has spent a career making decisions on facts, I have done my own fact‑checking on cognitive development, and what I found reinforces this bill’s premise. As Senator Black astutely observed, we apply no knowledge test to voters of other ages. The question before us is not whether 16-year-olds are perfect reasoners; it is whether they are capable of the deliberate, reflective act of democratic choice. And the answer is yes, they are.

On the fiscal side, which, as a businessman, I take seriously, Statistics Canada reports that 27% of 15- and 16-year-olds are employed nationally. In Quebec, that figure rises to a remarkable 40%. These young workers contribute through sales taxes, user fees, motor fuel taxes and Employment Insurance premiums, directly funding the social safety net that protects all Canadians, and they have absolutely no voice in how those contributions are allocated. Taxation without representation, honourable senators, is a principle we resolved rather dramatically in the 18th century. I will not belabour the historical parallel, but it remains a reasonably compelling argument.

At the age of 16, young Canadians can drive a motor vehicle, which requires judgment, spatial reasoning and rapid decision making at 100 kilometres per hour on the Trans-Canada Highway. They can consent to medical treatment, leave school, enter the workforce and pay taxes. In some circumstances, they may be tried as adults. We ask them to bear adult accountability. The least we can do is grant them a voice in the laws that create that accountability.

Austria has allowed 16-year-olds to vote in national elections since 2007. Young voters there turned out at higher rates than 18‑ to 20-year-olds, were better informed and were more deeply engaged with policy substance. Scotland, Wales, New Zealand, Germany, Argentina, Ecuador and Brazil are all serious democracies that looked at the evidence and acted on it. Canada can do the same.

Some in this debate suggest that an appointed body should not initiate changes to the Canada Elections Act and that doing so would usurp the power of the people or impose reform from the top down. Section 91 of the Constitution Act, 1867, grants the Senate equal legislative authority with the House of Commons, except in matters of money bills. Senators of all affiliations have, throughout our history, introduced public bills that became law or shaped policy. We are not only a chamber of sober second thought but also, since Confederation, a chamber of initiative.

As Senator Martin recalled, the voting age has changed before, lowering from 21 to 18 in 1970, with relatively limited controversy, reflecting the judgment that democratic thresholds must adapt to changing conditions. We find ourselves again at such a moment.

By supporting this bill at second reading, we are not unilaterally changing the law. Every bill requires the support of both chambers. We are opening the door, inviting evidence, expert testimony and rigorous public discussion. We would be welcoming young Canadians into institutions that have too often kept them at arm’s length. If we could engage our youth in the formal processes of democracy, we would cultivate a new generation of leaders. That is not a risk. That is an investment.

Honourable colleagues, there is a young person — I am certain of it — watching these proceedings today, perhaps because of a school assignment or perhaps because something in the news caught their attention, and they reached for that supercomputer in their pocket — the one that makes the IBM mainframe I used in my studies look like a paperweight — and found their way here. That young person is informed. That young person has opinions shaped by more information than I had access to at any point in my own education, and that young person has grown up navigating extraordinary complexity with remarkable grace.

This bill says to that young person: We see you. We take you seriously. We believe your voice belongs in this democracy, not someday, not eventually, but now.

I began today by confessing that I once considered a six‑function calculator the pinnacle of portable technology. I have since updated my understanding of what young minds are capable of. I respectfully suggest it is time for our electoral law to do the same.

Yes, please.

Thank you.

Lowering the voting age to 16 is not a radical act. It is a generous one. It is a democratic one. Given everything we know about young people, their world and the extraordinary tools and minds they bring to it, it is, I would argue, simply the right thing to do.

I urge every honourable colleague to support this bill and send it to committee where experts, scholars and the young Canadians most affected can be heard. Let us prove that this Senate is a place where the future is welcomed, not feared.

Let the process work, let the evidence speak and let this generation know that we have not forgotten that this is, ultimately, their country too.

Thank you. Meegwetch. Shukran.

Senator Al Zaibak, would you take a quick question?

If we have time, I would be happy to.

Thank you for your speech. In it, you spoke about the transition period in 1970 — the year I was born, actually — when the federal voting age in Canada went down from 21 to 18 years of age. We don’t have a federal age of majority in Canada, but we do have provincial ages of majority, and I’m wondering if you realize that 1970 was a time when many provinces lowered their age of majority from 21 to 19 or 18. British Columbia did that in 1970. The drinking age at that time also changed in tandem with the age of majority. So, for example, in Ontario, it went down to 18 in 1971. Were you aware that that transition period was a time when many provinces were also changing both the age of majority and the drinking age from 21 to 18 or 19?

Thank you for the question, senator. That preceded my arrival to this country. Thank you for enlightening me about the circumstances and what happened at that time, but I don’t know if you are making a suggestion about something related to this era.

Will the senator take one more question?

I’d be happy to.

My question follows on what Senator Batters asked. In my speech — and you referenced some of the things I said — I mentioned that the process of making those changes happened over a long period of time and that the provinces had made the changes, so it was a natural change, and nobody questioned it. In other countries where the age of voting has been lowered federally, it happened at the municipal and provincial levels, so it was not a top-down change; really, it is a national change. Did you also see those facts in your research? I did cite some of that in my speech.

I did. Thank you so much for reminding me of that. My suggestion here is to open the door. It is not a top‑down process. It’s opening the door to every segment of our society to contribute to the debate. That may take it to other levels of government. I don’t see any contradiction between what happened then and what we are trying to do now.