There have been a few breakthrough elections in bringing young voters to the polls: Obama in 2008, Trudeau in 2015. There have been elections where young voters stayed home even more than usual, with disastrous results: the Brexit referendum in the U.K.

However, most years 1-in-3 voters between 18 and 24, turnout. In Canada this meant an estimated 35 per cent showed up in 2011, and 30 per cent in the U.S. in 2016, the year of the Trump tragedy.

By contrast, more than 3-out-of-5 adults in the 50-64 age range typically come out to vote. “So what?” you might ask. “They’ll learn when they get a mortgage how important it is to elect a government that serves them.” Psephologists around the democratic world have demonstrated this truth for decades: the 20-year-old no-show is a dutiful voter at 40, and an ardent one at 60.

Not surprisingly, therefore governments spend a lot more time and money on retirement issues than school tuition, on highly inefficient job creation schemes and little on affordable housing, less on transit than highways, pensions vs. student loans or fair minimum wages.

The list of policy dossiers tilted to “old people” is long. It is a rational response by politicians in choosing priorities: those are their voters, ones who complain loudly when not satisfied.

A policy agenda more generationally balanced is possible if young Canadians flex their electoral muscles. Politicians understandably pay more attention to those who helped to elect them, than to those who fail to vote.

If 10 per cent more young Canadians turn out on Oct. 21 than in 2015, that would mean nearly an extra million votes over a “normal” year — a lot more than our tight elections turn on. Then no matter who wins, one can be sure that the issues younger voters care about — affordable housing, pharmacare, lower tuition and easier student loans, climate change, etc. — would get real attention.

It would be ironic indeed if, with three young party leaders to choose from, young Canadians continued to vote with their feet. So what is to be done?

First, despite the curiously anti-democratic view of the Harper government that Elections Canada must not spend any money on encouraging citizens to vote, it has a key role to play. Using young icons from the sports, music and entertainment worlds on social media, Elections Canada could play a powerful role in boosting turnout. Enlisting the social media platforms in this campaign would be a no-brainer.

Young voters move a lot — to university or to a new city for a new job — so the permanent voter’s list discriminates against them. The decision to move away from an enumeration-based voter’s list to a permanent list, supported by random efforts to identify the missing, was unwise. It discriminates against the mobile, the urban poor, as well as young people. Too many voters are simply invisible.

Again, Elections Canada could improve its “top up” efforts by enlisting the support of universities and community colleges, NGOs and large employers. They could offer voters an easy online opportunity — after a privacy screen — to suggest contacting their adult children, and family members who have recently moved, and ask for them to be enumerated.

Finally, the three parties could return to another era when each had “youth organizers” working as key members of their field organizations locally, all young Canadians with a better sense of where and how and with what platforms to best reach their peers.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Refugee support groups, anti-child poverty groups, climate change activists, and human rights advocates all do a better job of motivating young Canadians to donate and join their work. But many of those activists do not vote. The best of those NGOs raise large sums of money, in small donations, and large turnouts for their events, better than the political parties do.

Learning from those NGOs’ success, and moving those turnout numbers by a few percentage points could be transformative to Canadian politics.