It’s not for nothing that parliaments and the politicians who inhabit them have fallen into wide public disdain in recent decades.

The partisan cynicism and selfishness. The chronically immature antics. The inability to delay gratification and think beyond the next electoral cycle. The state of affairs is so discouraging that many despairing voters have simply opted out, leaving election turnouts alarmingly low.

To his credit, Toronto MPP Arthur Potts has suggested one antidote. And it’s a good one. Add more youth.

Potts introduced a private member’s bill Monday in the Ontario legislature that, if passed, would lower the voting age to 16 from 18 for provincial elections.

Granted, private member’s bills seldom pass. But it’s not out of the question the Beaches-East York Liberal is floating a trial balloon for what might be in Premier Kathleen Wynne’s campaign platform in a matter of weeks.

More immediately, Potts raises for debate a worthy proposition.

There is no Solomonic wisdom inherent, after all, in a voting age of 18. Other jurisdictions around the world, including Austria, Argentina and Brazil, provide for voting at 16. Sixteen-year-olds voted in 2014 in Scotland’s independence referendum, which saw youth turnout of 75 per cent.

The current unsatisfactory situation being what it is in Canada and its provinces, older generations can make no claim to having safeguarded the electoral process or parliamentary governance with any special intelligence.

The federal special committee on electoral reform – which reported in December 2016 and was promptly disowned by the Liberal government – heard numerous witnesses suggest lowering the voting age.

“Many argued that it would increase voter turnout and encourage youth voters to participate in the democratic process and to remain active voters throughout their life,” the report said. Inviting youth to vote while they are still in secondary school and still living with their parents would encourage higher levels of registration and enduring engagement, they argued.

Many of those who supported lowering the age also suggested improving civics education in schools.

In Canada, recent surveys have been putting the lie to the myth of growing youth apathy. Young voters turned out in historic numbers in the 2015 federal election, according to research by Samara Canada.

But while turnout of young voters jumped 18 percentage points to 57 per cent, youth remained the generation least likely to be contacted by political campaigners, Samara found.

That insult-and-injury combo of being ignored by politicians, even as the economy offers them the worst prospects in generations, has left many young people feeling alienated from the democratic process. Experts argue that lowering the voting age will felicitously alter the political calculus, creating new incentives for politicians to engage youth and tackle the issues that matter to them and thus to our collective future.

In any event, adding the votes of 16- and 17-year-olds to the electoral mix could hardly make things worse.

If modern politics has made anything clear, with its gridlock and unbridgeable partisan divides, it is that good ideas and good examples are not necessarily dictated by chronology.

Younger voters would, presumably, bring to bear some important attributes – and crusade for some of the major causes - of their generation.

As digital natives, they are fluent in the technology so determinative in modern society.

Young people have grown up, and are vastly more comfortable with the diversity that demographic forecasts say will be a hallmark of the future in North America.

They have a vested interest in tackling intergenerational inequality and the significant threat this widening gap poses to our economy.

And their very future depends, after all, on addressing climate change.

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As recent events in the United States have shown, where Florida teenagers mobilized demands for action on gun control after a murderous rampage at their high school, young people are courageous, idealistic, energetic, passionate.

And, most important, as America’s National Rifle Association discovered when corporate sponsors began bailing out in response, effective.

Potts’s private member’s bill is unlikely to pass, but the idea is worth giving serious consideration in Ontario and beyond. Greater youth engagement means a richer democracy. Lowering the voting age promises to accomplish just that.