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By Mel Rothenburger

ARMCHAIR MAYOR

ROTHENBURGER: The argument for giving 16-year-olds the vote gets more convincing

Sep 28, 2019 | 6:58 AM

THE DAY MIGHT NOT BE far off when 16-year-old Canadian kids will be trekking to the voting booth — or voting online — to have their say in elections.

What was considered a hair-brained idea up to a couple of years ago is suddenly gaining traction. A private member’s bill sponsored by Vancouver MP Don Davies in 2016 called for it, and B.C. Green Party leader Andrew Weaver made his third attempt with a private member’s bill last year. Weaver pointed out that 16-year-olds vote in several other countries.

At least two federal party leaders are in favour of giving 16-year-olds the vote. Elizabeth May of the Greens likes the idea, and NDP leader Jagmeet Singh has made it part of his election platform.

And, just a couple of days ago, delegates to the Union of B.C. Municipalities convention in Vancouver voted to ask John Horgan’s government to give 16-year-olds the vote in municipal elections.

The main rationale seems to be born out of a desperate hope that younger voters would be so excited to have the right to vote that they’d head for the polls in droves and boost the sagging turnout in elections.

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There are better reasons to give 16-year-olds the vote, such as that they deserve it. Contrary to some who rely on old science that the teenage brain isn’t fully developed, kids at 16 today are much more capable of decision-making and leadership than they get credit for.

Proof positive of this is Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish girl leading a movement to save the planet from climate change.

This kid is phenomenal. She’s done more to raise awareness about the issue than anyone else in history. On Friday, she met with Justin Trudeau in Montreal and told him he isn’t doing enough to save Mother Earth. (As she acknowledged afterward, she says that to every politician she meets.)

After their meeting, Thunberg headed to a massive Climate Strike rally in the city, where she addressed hundreds of thousands, telling them the world is in an emergency situation that can no longer be ignored.

Trudeau and May were also at the rally. Singh was at a similar rally in Victoria.

None of this would be happening if not for Greta Thunberg, and a great many other 16-year-olds just like her, including Kamloops kids who have left school on several occasions to march in support of the cause championed by Thunberg.

Earlier this week, she angrily told world leaders at a United Nations climate action summit in New York: “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words…. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth — how dare you!”

How can someone so young be so intelligent, forceful and articulate? How can a 16-year-old galvanize people all over the world to rise up in unity?

Maybe it’s her youth that makes climate-change deniers so afraid of her. She’s been mocked on rightwing TV shows. One Fox News commentator called her ”mentally ill.” (Thunberg has Asperger’s, a form of autism; it is not a mental illness.) Maxime Bernier called her “mentally unstable.” I’ve seen similar remarks from our local trolls.

Even Donald Trump took a swipe at her in a tweet. Then, of course, there are the conspiracy theorists who have decided no 16-year-old could possibly be so smart; she must be the victim of manipulation by evil leftists for their own devious purposes.

The world these days is all about leftists and rightists and Thunberg must be a leftist because she believes in the science of climate change. But she’s not the only kid who stands a good chance of changing the world for the better. School walkouts in the U.S. have raised the profile of calls for tighter gun controls.

Malala Yousafzai, the amazing Pakistani girl, needs no introduction. And there are many examples of teenagers who have made life-changing discoveries in the areas of science and medicine and fought for social causes.

I admit there have been times I’ve had doubts about 16-year-olds helping decide who governs us. The fact they’re allowed to drive isn’t much of an argument given the way in which a lot of them act behind the wheel. And would it really make lifelong voters out of them? We thought that would happen when 18-year-olds got the vote, but it didn’t.

But that doesn’t mean the voting age shouldn’t be dropped. Fact is there’s no reason not to give 16-year-olds the right to vote along with the rest of us. Surely, they can do just as well at it as older voters.

This will take time, of course. Kamloops resident Tom Rankin has an idea how we could give kids a vote in the meantime. We do it by proxy: ask a kid who he or she would vote for, and then go mark our ballot accordingly. It’s an intriguing thought.

Anything that would disabuse people of the notion of mandatory voting would be a good thing, and maybe extending the vote to teenagers would help do that. Forcing people to vote on threat of being fined would only create a huge body of uninformed voters. Better not to vote at all than to vote in ignorance.

Rather than lowering the quality of democratic decision making, 16-year-olds would raise it. Greta Thunberg has helped convince me of that.

Mel Rothenburger is a former mayor of Kamloops and newspaper editor. He publishes the ArmchairMayor.ca opinion website, and is a director on the Thompson-Nicola Regional District board. He can be reached at mrothenburger@armchairmayor.ca.

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Editor’s Note: This opinion piece reflects the views of its author, and does not necessarily represent the views of CFJC Today or the Jim Pattison Broadcast Group.