The British government's proposal to lower the voting age from 18 to 16 before its next general election has reignited debate over the issue in Canada.Arlyn McAdorey/Reuters
Is it time to raise the voting age?
The question may seem impertinent: Lately the discussion has tended more in the opposite direction. The recent proposal by Britain’s Labour government to lower the voting age from 18 to 16 has set off another flurry of debate over whether Canada and other countries should follow suit.
Advocates tend to talk about it as if it were inevitable, the logical next step after lowering the voting age from 21 to 18, as many countries did in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
And yet in all that time almost no one has taken that step. Should Labour’s proposal pass into law, Britain would become just the second OECD country to give children the unrestricted right to vote in national elections. (Austria is the other. Greece allows 17-year-olds to vote in certain circumstances. Scotland, Wales, Estonia, Israel and Germany allow it in subnational elections.)
So it is, at the least, an objectively radical step. It is one, moreover, that is at odds with other legal and social trends. The age at which a person is deemed able to consent to sex, in law, has been rising, not falling, in recent decades, in Canada (where it was raised to 16 from 14 in 2006) and elsewhere.
So, too, has the age at which someone can be held fully responsible for their crimes. Indeed, the push is on to treat accused persons as old as 24 as “emerging adults,” eligible to be tried as juveniles, as they are in many European countries. (It would be amusing to discover how many of those who insist, correctly, that a child lacks the reasoning capacity to be tried in adult court also think they should be given the vote.)
No one is proposing to lower the age at which it is legal to consume alcohol: Again, the trend has been, if anything, to raise it, reversing the trend of earlier decades. The federal government recommended, as part of its legalization package, a minimum age of 18 for consumption of cannabis. Most provinces set it at 19; Quebec, at 21.
Likewise for military service: the trend internationally has been to raise the age of eligibility, generally to 18, not lower it. (You can serve at 16 or 17 in Canada, but only with parental consent.) The minimum driving age is still 16 in most provinces, but new tests and restrictions have been added, in light of the documented greater tendency to mayhem and carnage among 16- and 17-year-old drivers. In many countries it has been raised to 18.
So there is, at the very least, no broad trend toward lowering the age of responsibility for important life decisions, and no consensus on what that age should be. It differs across countries, and across issues.
What, then, is there about voting, that recommends a lower standard – lower than it was, lower than it is in other countries, lower than it remains for other responsibilities? What new information has emerged to suggest that what was previously an acceptable age restriction is no longer? Why is 16 better than 18?
It’s true that voting does not present the same immediate personal risk as some other decisions – to drink, have sex, join the military, donate an organ, take out a mortgage etc. – that are commonly presumed beyond a child’s capacity to make. Neither does it entail the same potential impact on another individual as, for example, serving on a jury (minimum age: 18).
But voting has enormous implications for the whole of society, and every aspect of life. The choices we make at the ballot box will affect us, for good or ill, not just in the here and now, but potentially for decades. Though any one vote may not change much, thousands of votes can. Lowering the voting age to 16 would add more than 900,000 voters to the potential electorate, an increase of more than 3 per cent, or roughly 2,700 voters per riding, on average.
It seems more than strange that it should remain illegal for a child to, say, get a tattoo on their own, but legal for them to vote to shape our laws. But, responds the voting-age reductionist, children are also affected by those laws. Their interests are at stake, as much as adults. Therefore they deserve the vote.
Opinion: Canada should follow Britain and lower the voting age to 16
But we do not only consider interests when we assign the right to vote. We also take competency into account. And, what is more, most reductionists agree that we should. Otherwise they would not propose 16 as the minimum age, but zero.
Unless you are prepared to argue that babies should be given the vote, then it is just a matter of where you draw the line. At the moment the line is at 18. There may be no objective significance to that number, but it’s not obvious what other number would be superior – or whether it should be higher or lower. You say it should be 16. And I say it should be 25.
Much has happened since 1970, when the voting age was last changed. And virtually all of it has been in the direction of limiting the life experience of the average young adult, sheltering them from the sorts of responsibilities they would have faced at the same age in any previous era.
Young people today leave their parents’ home later, for example, than did previous generations. As of the 2021 census, 62 per cent of those aged 20 to 24 lived at home; in 1981 it was 42 per cent. They start work later, too. Today’s generation typically take their first regular job at about 22 or 23, versus the 17 or 18 that was common in the early 1970s.
None of this is meant as criticism. The job market is tighter today, and places more of a premium on higher education. Housing is more expensive. Nevertheless it is undeniable that your average 18-to-20 year-old had more life experience 50 years ago than today. They had encountered more of the circumstances necessary to developing mature judgment, and to understanding the issues on which much of politics turns.
That isn’t all that has changed since then. What has also changed is our understanding of brain development. Advances in neuroscience in recent decades, particularly in brain imaging, have confirmed that the prefrontal cortex – the part of the brain that governs impulse-control and long-term planning – “continues to evolve up until 24 years of age.” Adolescence is now considered to extend, accordingly, from 10 to 24.
Those adolescent brains, what is more, are now under assault as never before, via social media and the related phenomenon of misinformation and disinformation. That’s a problem for the whole population, but it’s especially acute among adolescents, where “problematic social media use” (PSMU) is most heavily concentrated.
I know what you’re thinking: Some old people also suffer from cognitive defects. But what is the exception among the old is the rule among the young. When an old person shows signs of impaired judgment or an inability to connect cause and effect, we call it dementia. When an adolescent does we call it … adolescence.
Which, remember, is what we are talking about here. It is debatable whether the data supported allowing 18-year-olds to vote in 1970. It is even more debatable in 2025. But to be considering lowering it further is simply bizarre.
What, at any rate, are the evidence and arguments in favour of lowering it, to match the evidence and arguments produced here for raising it? “Some 16-year-olds are as mature as any 18-year-old?” Sure, and some 14-year-olds are as mature as any 16-year-old. You can make that argument at any age. It amounts to saying that, wherever the bar is set, it should be lower.
It’s possible to wave all this away – to say that any discussion of life experience or cognitive ability is irrelevant and offensive; that the vote should be open to all, regardless of competence; that the right to vote is inherent, not contingent; that whoever is affected by the laws has the right to participate, through their elected representatives, in their framing.
But if so, you cannot also make the argument for setting the bar at 16 – or any other age. Again, you have to go all the way to zero. Or if you don’t have the stomach for that, then you have to consider measures such as giving parents extra votes, as a proxy for their underage children: so-called Demeny voting, after its inventor, the demographer Paul Demeny.
Alternatively, perhaps you are inclined to say that 18 may be an arbitrary number, but it’s the one we have; that in the absence of compelling evidence of the need for change, we should probably leave well enough alone; that if virtually no other advanced democracy has seen fit to lower it further, they may have a good reason; that Canadian teenagers do not necessarily possess a special maturity not given their counterparts in other countries.
But if that sounds too boring, if it is time to reconsider the voting age along with everything else, then there should be no presumption that the only way it can go is down, and lots of reasons to think it should be raised rather than lowered – though Canada’s roughly 3.6 million 18-to-24 year-olds may have something to say about it.