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Should Parents Get the Right to Vote for Their Kids? · The Missing Middle Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_02: What if I told you we could make our democracy stronger by representing every citizen who lives here in Canada?
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_02: Would you go for it?
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: Because I'm a Gen Xer, my reflex is to say no, I would think it's a trap.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_01: But I also took improv in high school, so I'm gonna say yes, because that's the rule.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_01: I love the idea of making democracy stronger, so I'd love to hear what you have in mind.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: Demographics, hosted by Mike Moffat and Kara Stern.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_02: We've talked a lot on the missing middle about how baby boomers vote in far higher numbers than millennials and Gen Z.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_02: And what that means is politicians listen to older voices a lot more and try to cater to their interests because they're more reliable votes for them.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_02: This plays out in various ways, including by increasing entitlements like old age security and higher spending we're doing on healthcare compared to things like education spending, which benefits younger people typically.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_02: But what if there's a way to represent the interests of young people right from the minute they were born?
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm sure many of you are now picturing a baby going into the voting booth, uh, like a somehow even less entertaining version of the movie Baby Stay Out, which is John Hughes's worst movie by far.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: But I'm guessing you're suggesting something a little bit more uh practical here, like a parent voting on their child's behalf.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_02: Today on Demographics, we're going to explore the idea of giving parents the right to cast a ballot, not just for themselves, but by proxy for their children, and how that might incentivize politicians to represent all citizens right from the moment they're born.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_02: Mike, you recently wrote an article in the Globe and Mail about the kerfuffle that broke out when the Shopify co-founder Toby Luc Gao tweeted about taking away the rights of retirees to vote because they were no longer contributing to the economic growth of the country.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_02: And we did a whole episode of Classonomics about it.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_02: But what stood out for me wasn't the problem portion of that episode, but the solutions proposed, particularly one that you mentioned involving proxy voting.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the proposed solutions in the piece, including the proxy voting one, were like kind of tacked onto the bottom, but they were actually the inspiration for why I wrote it.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_01: In response to Luke's tweet, there was a lot of online discussion that I saw that was adamant that democracy was all about one person, one vote, with many citing that often angrily at Lucas, saying, you know, that you're an awful person because you don't believe in one person, one vote.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: Many of them cited section three of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, that every citizen of Canada has the right to vote in an election of members of the House of Commons or a legislative assembly.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: But meanwhile, there are roughly 7 million Canadian citizens who have no vote, who are excluded from our electoral system entirely due to their age.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: So I found it deeply weird that on the one hand, people are absolutely appalled at the idea of putting an upper age limit on voting and say, well, that violates one person, one vote, but have no problem whatsoever with a lower age bound on voting.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_01: And that seems to be okay.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: So the disconnect struck me as deeply weird.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_02: That's fair.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_02: Although I I mean, as someone with two young kids, I can say that probably their voting patterns would not be great.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_02: It'd be for like more cookies and more treats and maybe more screen time.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_02: That that's what they would want the politicians to care about.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_01: And that's where the proxy part comes in.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: So parents would vote on behalf of the kids in the best interest of kids.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_01: Because who gets to vote actually matters and not just for them as individuals, but it also impacts what policies are likely to be uh enacted and which are not.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_02: And as your globe piece makes clear, demographics impact public policy.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_02: So over their lifetimes of baby boomers, they've benefited from being able to influence the world they live in just by the sheer size of the demographic cohort and the political strength they hold.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_02: So they kind of had like strength in numbers.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_02: And now that they're nearing retirement in large numbers, it means the types of political issues that they're interested in changes.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_02: And that has an impact on the whole economy.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: When the economy is doing well, as it was for much of the baby boomers' adult lives, you know, GDP was growing, unemployment was low, governments tend to get rewarded at the ballot box for a strong economy.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: And that's not necessarily because voters are putting the country's economic interests ahead of their own self-interest.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's because those voters generally understand that a strong economy is good for them and good for their families.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: But an aging population changes that math.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_01: A 2026 study by Oxford's Tim Vlandis found that older voters are less likely to punish governments for poor economic performance and more likely to reward governments for increasing financial supports to families, particularly financial supports for seniors.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: And as the population gets older, that changes the political incentives.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: Economic growth becomes less important, while policies that provide direct financial benefits to seniors become more important.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_02: I can see how this plays out when I would hear about the elbows up thing that happened with the Liberal Party.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_02: I heard a lot of boomers saying things like, we don't care if what it takes, we need to get off of dependency on the US.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_02: And I heard younger people being a lot more concerned about the job losses that would come.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_01: That's a perfect example.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: You don't have to be directly concerned about job loss if you are past working age.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_01: So the incentives that different voters have from a self-interest point of view differs based on their age.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_02: So while boomers historically voted in large numbers for pro-economic growth policies now that they're retiring, we see prioritization of like entitlements that they might get to make their retired lives easier and tax policies that directly benefit them.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_02: But those tax policies are often paid for by younger generations.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: With increasingly generous old age security benefits being a prime example of this phenomenon.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, the obvious fix is for more young people to step up and run for office and turn out to vote.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_02: Millennials and Gen Z for sure together outnumber the boomers.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I don't know where Gen X fits into this or you're left behind again.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_02: But, you know, if they showed up to vote, that would actually help their own generation.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_02: So it's kind of like fighting fire with fire.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_02: And that's what the baby boomers did.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, like I'm thinking of Bob Ray right now, who became the leader of the NDP in Ontario when he was only 34 and he was premier when he was only 42.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and to a certain extent that happened.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, if we look at the last federal election, you know, the last all three of the federal party candidates were all Gen Xers.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: They were uh all born in the 1970s.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, that can certainly help, but none of that addresses the fact that 7 million Canadians are excluded from the electoral process.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_01: We also have to understand that the interests of a 25-year-old might not necessarily be aligned with a 15-year-old or a five-year-old.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the same way that we wouldn't suggest in a world that women couldn't vote, that having more 25-year-old men vote is a sufficient solution to advancing the issues of a 25-year-old woman.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm certainly not uh against more young people running for office.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: You know, that's that's a good thing.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: But it doesn't fix the core issue here, uh, which is that we're excluding 7 million people from the process and the fact that those 7 million people skew young that causes our voting pool to skew old.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_02: That's fair.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_02: Like there are solutions that represent the interests of more young people that don't necessarily have them running for office themselves.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_02: I would love to see a five-year-old in office, but you know, I don't know how likely that is.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, they get might get my vote.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_02: There might be some pretty cool policies coming out of that.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_02: But realistically, I've talked to many politically engaged people who find that there are many reasons why it's not only hard to get elected young, but you take on so much risk and so much sacrifice.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_02: And especially in today's social media world, it's like it can be really brutal.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: It can be.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_01: And if that young person wants to win, they still have to appeal to the electorate who is disproportionately old.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, we we we saw this.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_01: Prime Minister Trudeau, you know, one uh relatively young prime minister, uh, increased old age security, right?
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: So we can't simply think that, oh, well, if you've got a politician in their 30s with uh kids under the age of 18, that they will necessarily cater to that population because they have to kind of follow where the electorate is.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_02: So in the article, you mentioned like we could lower the voting age by having parents cast ballots for their children in their household.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_02: So I never heard of this idea until you brought it up to me.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_02: And I thought we could start with like where it came from, what the history of it is.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_01: So it's actually a rather old idea.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, the concept of proxy voting for children goes back to at least the 1840s, with advocates having a variety of different motivations for advancing this idea.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_01: In Canada, the modern conception of the idea is closely associated with Miles Korak, who is a University of Ottawa alum and a fellow economist who's now at the City University of New York.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: Back in 2012, he wrote a fantastic blog post on the idea, which we'll link to in the show notes.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_01: Now, globally, the idea, or at least the modern conception, is most closely associated with demographer Paul Demony in his 1986 article, Population and the Invisible Hand.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: So Demini originally published this to help with fertility rates.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_01: He was concerned even back in the 80s, but Miles Korak takes it a step further.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: He actually argues that it's about basic human rights because, like I've been arguing, that kids are citizens too, but right now their voices just aren't being heard in the voting booth.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: And the core idea here is simple that just like existing voters, children would also have a ballot they could cast.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_01: But unlike voters who have the mental capacity to make an informed choice on their own, here the child's primary caregiver would fill out the ballot on behalf of the child, you know, the same way that a parent makes decisions and fills out paperwork on behalf of their children in other domains.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_02: When I first read that this was meant to increase fertility rates, I was like, is someone having another baby just to get another vote?
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_02: But you know, I can see how it could lead to more family-friendly policies, which might help people who want to have more kids.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_02: Votes of parents over time become more valuable to politicians, whereas right now, like they are not nearly as valuable as retirees.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_02: Like that's a much bigger group and they're they show up more, and so their votes matter a lot more to politicians.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_02: So politicians are much more likely to respond to their concerns than they are to the concerns of parents and really of children.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_02: What do you make of it?
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_02: Like, do you think that parents voting on behalf of their children could increase fertility rates?
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, I your your instinct's right that like nobody is having another child to get another ballot.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: And we complain that people in their 30s and 40s don't vote enough and now all of a sudden they're they're gonna have a kid in order to get a second ballot when many of them aren't using their their first one.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: So that's not what economists are suggesting at all.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: The argument's more subtle here is that if children's interests were included in the electoral system, then you'd start to see policies like enhanced Canada child benefit payments, right?
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_01: That those would become more politically salient and you start to have higher payments, those payments lower the cost of having a child, so families would have more children and so on.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_01: So it's more that it creates this virtuous cycle that including children in the electoral system creates more child-friendly policies, which creates more children.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_02: I could see one big problem with the system, which is I know that as a teenager, my politics were quite different from my parents.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_02: And I just loved arguing with them about politics.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm thinking about like if I was a teenager and I was like, dad, go vote for me, vote for this party, he might actually go and just get two votes that go against what I actually wanted.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, now I I find that a deeply weird argument because every day parents make decisions in the best interests of their child, you know, medical decisions about what school they should go to, whether or not to open an education savings account for the child, and so on.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't get this idea that the decision of how a child's ballot casts is somehow more consequential to the child than whether or not the child is vaccinated, a decision we currently trust parents with.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_01: Particularly at the same time, people also argue that voting has little value in Canada's first pass the post system, and that most elections at the writing level aren't particularly close.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_01: So I think we have to place some faith in parents that they'll do the right thing, in part because our entire society already places faith in parents to do the right thing.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: Otherwise, society simply doesn't work.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I don't think it's that weird if the whole purpose is giving every citizen a chance to vote and to have that them represented.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_02: Like we know on average that younger people do tend to vote differently from older people.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_02: So if we're not actually giving them the option to vote when they feel ready or lowering the voting age at all, then it's not really about representing votes of children.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_02: It's really just a weighted voting system.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: It's not really increasing the ballot power of parents, but rather the parent has their own ballot plus perhaps another ballot or two that they're using as a proxy for their kids.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_01: And there is an expectation, a requirement that they act in the best interest of their children.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_01: If I have an older family member with dementia, let's say, and I'm tasked with making financial decisions on their behalf, that elderly person's money doesn't suddenly become my money and it just kind of gets pulled all together.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: I have a fiduciary duty to act in the best interest of the person I'm representing.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_02: There's no enforcement here.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_02: So it is just giving a weighted vote to parents.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_01: Sure, because there's no way to really kind of determine whether or not they voted that way.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_01: But that doesn't mean that therefore 100% of the votes are like if we had uh had lax enforcement on uh again, these kind of financial things, it doesn't mean that 100% of people making financial decisions on behalf of somebody with dementia is gonna steal all their money, even if uh enforcement is lax, right?
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_01: There is still an expectation to act in a way that meets that child's best interest.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_01: And as well, you know, you mentioned kind of like oh, older people have different voting behaviors than than younger people, but you know, you know, older people is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, right?
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_01: That we're not giving proxy votes to a lot of 97-year-olds and so on, right?
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_02: Fair.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_02: But I mean, me as a 15-year-old, I had a lot of opinions that differed from what my, I guess at the time, 40-something parents wanted.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_01: And the our solution to that was basically to exclude you from the system.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_01: Not only are we excluding you from the system, we are excluding the daughters of the system that actually have parents who will do the responsible thing.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll admit, like all of this is messy.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's not clean and neat.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_01: There are administrative issues to deal with.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_01: But trying to solve these messy issues by simply excluding seven million people from the electoral system feels a little bit like trying to kill a house fly with a cruise missile.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_02: So if we did find a way to make the system a reality, what are the some of the consequences, like good and bad, that you can think would come out of it?
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_01: I think it would change our politics and our priorities and actually live up to the spirit of one person, one vote, which again, online people think is really important, unless that that one person is 17, and in which case, you know, forget them.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_01: But I also think it would be very educational for children.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I typically take one or both of my kids uh to the ballot box with me and try and educate them on elections and democracies and and and what the party stand for.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_01: But now, you know, if we were to implement a system like this, if they had a vote, even if it's just by proxy, they're gonna become more invested in the process.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, my daughter and I can work together, we can discuss the candidates and the issues and work together in determining their ballot.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_01: And hopefully that then creates a tradition where when they're in adulthood, they continue voting.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_01: So I see it as a way of increasing the the voter turnout of people in their 20s and 30s because you introduce them to the concept early and they continue on with those patterns through adulthood.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_02: There's one other argument that Korak made that I wanted to highlight, and that's that he argued that custodial parents should be able to vote on behalf of their children, but that mothers specifically should get the full proxy vote for each child in their care.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_02: And there's actually some precedent for that idea.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_02: In Canada and elsewhere, we often direct economic resources that are meant for children straight to mothers.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_02: And that's based in part on research showing that when mothers have more bargaining power in the household, spending tends to shift in ways that better reflect children's needs.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_02: So, what do you think of that idea?
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_01: Well, there's not just precedent for the idea, as you point out, it's how our system already works.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: Because there is this common objection to the idea of proxy voting that we'd have to somehow figure out which parent should get the vote or is it split 50-50, you know, what happens if there's shared custody of a child in a divorce situation and so on.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_01: But all of those issues have already been settled in other domains, and particularly in our tax and transfer system.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_01: In tax law, there's a concept known as the primary caregiver.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_01: To go back to our Canada Child Benefit example, in Canada, only the primary caregiver can apply for the Canada child benefit.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: And by law, in a heterosexual relationship, the female parent is automatically presumed by law to be primarily responsible and they must apply for the benefits, uh, or they have to fill out paperwork to shift the primary caregiver over to the other spouse.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: For our kids, for example, I couldn't apply for the C C B, but my wife could, or she could do the paperwork to designate me as a primary caregiver.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_01: Now, you know, for same-sex couples, shared custody arrangements, there are different rules, but the fact is there's rules and there's a whole host of case law to draw from.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_01: So we wouldn't be starting this from scratch.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_01: The same rules that exist for tax law, hoard them over to voting law.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, so on the whole, like I don't mind necessarily the idea of proxy voting.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_02: My big problem with it is it feels like completely reinventing the wheel here.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_02: Like it seems like there's already things that work well in other countries that improve our electoral system, that get the same sort of like increased turnout, which increased turnout would definitely help with some of the outcomes we're looking for, because we would get younger people and get parents to be more likely to go out and vote.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_02: But we know that Canadians are reluctant to change the electoral system at all.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_02: Like we have a first past the post system where unless you're in a swing riding, your vote does not matter to politicians at all.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_02: They have zero reason to try to appeal to you.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_02: So swing ridings have outsized influence in policy.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_02: And the Trudeau government ran in 2015 on a platform that included changing that system.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_02: And then as soon as they were elected, they dropped it.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_02: Given how hard it is to change the electoral system to one that already exists and works in many countries, why would Canadians have the will for this type of reform?
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think there's two parallel issues here.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_01: Like one is the electoral system, and two is who's allowed to vote.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_01: And you can make those kind of decisions independently.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_01: And even if you thought there were some other electoral system that produces fairer outcomes and first pass the posts, you know, whether it's uh proportional representation, rank ballots, or whatever, it still matters who gets a vote and who doesn't.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I think even the most ardent proportional representation supporter would admit that a PR system where voting was limited to people who are at least six feet tall would be unfair, even if it eliminates concerns about swing ridings and gerrymandering and all that.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_01: You know, just setting kind of arbitrary limits around who can vote and who can't is is deeply unfair, even if you happen to like the particular electoral system.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_02: I would think a six-foot-tall limit is a lot more arbitrary than the age that someone is old enough that we consider them an adult in society.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_02: And a lot of the outcomes you're trying to get here, I think you can get at with a much more simpler system or much more uh tried and true system in other places.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_02: I was thinking about how sometimes you and I get into arguments about things like proportional representation or high-speed rail, because I get the sense that you're like, this is never gonna happen.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_02: Why are we talking about it?
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_02: When I'm thinking about proxy voting, my thought is this is never gonna happen.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_02: Why are we talking about it?
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_02: Like, do you think that there's any chance of it ever happening?
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, I I think proxy voting is absolutely the high-speed rail of electoral reform where you look at it and go, you know what, this is a way to give rights to children.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_01: Because you you mentioned the sort of outcomes here.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, this changes outcomes, but I also see this as a human rights issue, right?
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_01: That you have seven million Canadians who are excluded from the process.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_01: I I see that as problematic.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_01: But you're absolutely right that this is high in the list of issues that make for an interesting intellectual exercise, but will probably never happen.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_01: First, you have the status quo bias that we just can't imagine a world that's sufficiently different than the one we live in.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_01: Had those reforms been successful in the 1840s and we had proxy voting in place for the last 180 years, then I think today we would be absolutely appalled at the notion that we we've taken votes away from children.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_01: Like we that would just sound monstrous.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_01: You know what?
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_01: I I think those little snivelling brats, uh, we we should take them out of the process, right?
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_01: I think people would be appalled by that idea, but they're not because that's how we've always done things.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_01: So the status quo bias is real.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_02: It makes me think of this article you sent me about this.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_02: That was an archive from I think it was about a hundred years ago, where they were talking about whether children should get the vote.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_02: And it was kind of like, we should maybe consider giving women and children the right to vote.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like, yes, those are two equivalent things, of course, you know, the women's brain power.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_01: But but the argument uh that was made against uh giving married women the vote was that it would be essentially giving two votes to the husband.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_01: That makes married men's voting power twice as much as single men, and that's unfair.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_01: So it is interesting that the same arguments that were used a hundred years ago to disenfranchise women are now being used uh to disenfranchise children.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_02: It's a difference between women and children.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_01: We can just Well, well, absolutely.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_01: And and to be fair, nobody is suggesting that we should have proxy voting for women.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_01: Just I just want to be very, very clear about that.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_02: We can sit here all day and be like, this system's better, that system's better, but our system is designed that the people in power have the power to keep themselves in power.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_02: So they're not gonna vote for something that gives them less power.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_02: And in a way, like that's what all these discussions end up coming down to, right?
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_02: That's the eternal problem that we're not gonna get a fairer system anytime soon because you need to get people on board who would be giving up some of their power.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's the practical problem here that uh any change like this one takes power away from the powerful and gives it to the powerless.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_01: And who's more powerless than children?
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_01: And if people are voting in their self-interest, you know, why would they adopt an electoral system that uh increases the pool of voters and gives them less proportional say?
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_02: So to sum up this conversation, baby boomers and older generations vote in much larger numbers than millennials and Gen Z.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_02: And as they age, this voting power means that our economy is being pulled in a direction where economic growth is deprioritized and younger generations are suffering as a result.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_01: So, proxy voting, where parents could represent their child by casting a vote in elections on their behalf, could lead to policies that better reflect the needs and wishes of Canada's future generations and Canada's children and make Canada a more representative democracy.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_02: But it's probably not coming to a polling station near you anytime soon.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you so much for watching and listening.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_02: Our producer is Meredith Martin and our editor is Sean Foreman.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_01: And if you have any thoughts or questions about the filmography of John Hughes, please send us an email to missing middle podcast at gmail.com.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_02: And we'll see you next time.