TORONTO – Meet the next generation of Canadian voters – the post-national digital natives whose political sensibilities are supposedly so far removed from those of today’s electorate.
Or not: A survey of thousands of high-school students across the country provided exclusively to Global News finds teenagers are far more similar to their parents’ generation than you’d think. In many cases, they’re more fiscally conservative and more nationalistic when it comes to natural resources and foreign trade.
They’re more likely to advocate lowering taxes and capping income taxes, and they put a premium on paying down the deficit, ASAP. They’re more satisfied than their parents’ generation with the way both federal political parties and the national media represent them.
Many of them think Ottawa should shut down foreign takeovers if the foreign company’s government-owned. They’d rather spend more on health care and protecting the environment, less on arts and culture (and the CBC).
Drill deeper into these responses and you see deep rifts between Canada’s regions – in perceptions of government, taxes and these students’ own economic futures.
The survey was a natural extension of the student votes Civix has been holding at federal and provincial elections, says the non-profit’s president Taylor Gunn.
“How the government spends public funds, or how it doesn’t spend public funds, puts it on the political spectrum,” he said. “It was really an exercise learning about their own political values.”
Civix reached out to schools it had worked with before and provided teachers with a condensed course plan in budgetary processes and government finances. It featured commentary from all parties, but some students noted their conservative leanings may be thanks in part to the way they were taught (Flaherty features prominently in educational videos, for example. Gunn says these clips were largely nonpartisan, however).
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Important caveat: This survey of 4,425 students in 400 schools across the country can’t quite be seen as representative of all Canadian teens, everywhere – schools who had worked with Civix before volunteered for the initiative, which creates a selection bias, says Harris Decima’s Brian McCauley.
“We can’t say these results are representative of the student population in Canada, because obviously you’d need to randomly select them. … That said, they do line up pretty well with a randomly selected group of the Canadian population.”
Either way, it’s an interesting indication of how relatively well-off teenagers who’ve been through a crash course in budgetary processes see themselves, their government and their country.
Their answers hew close to sentiments of the general population, but also indicate the impacts of years under a government that touts fiscal conservatism and deficit-slaying above all else (its critics would argue there’s a disconnect between the message and government action, but Canada’s undeniably doing better than many other countries hit by the financial crisis).
The sock in the gut the global economy has sustained since 2008 appears not to have soured these kids on capitalism or the free market, but it has made them wary of doing business with other countries.
Mr. McCauley was worried, initially, about phrasing the questions in a manner teens would understand. He needn’t have been: “There wasn’t a lot of confusion,” he said. “The responses were a lot more in line with the general population than we would have expected. … It looks like they put a lot of thought into those answers.”
Mr. McCauley said he wouldn’t necessarily call these kids conservative – especially given their support for government involvement in the economy – but said their sympathy for wealthy Canadians is notable.
“It was surprising to see the students were much more sympathetic to above-average-income Canadians. I suspect it’s mostly just because they haven’t had to pay taxes.”
The students’ apparent contentedness with the status quo also came as somewhat of a surprise: “Standard wisdom tells you that students are not represented well in Canadian media or the parties are older and they don’t actually speak to what Canadian young people care about, and that doesn’t seem to be what students feel,” Mr. McCauley said.
So what gives? In part, it could be that teens have more complex and heterogenous views than we thought. Or, he suggests, “if you’re not really paying attention then I think that you’re probably more in the camp of the status quo. And if you are paying attention, then you do get views from different sources and you’re more aware of what opposition parties are saying, And so that might influence how you feel about politics.”
While he won’t say whether he thinks the voting age should be lowered, he argues this exercise demonstrates how important it is to teach teens this material. And he’d like to see the project, the bulk of whose funding ($175,000) came from Heritage Canada, continue.
If nothing else, the budget consultation got teenagers psyched about federal finances: In a Facebook post after meeting Flaherty and “getting bombarded with nationwide media coverage,” Ontario student Angelo Duraisingam wrote, “I can say this is one of the best days of my life.”
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