Issue link: https://takingitglobal.uberflip.com/i/1365931
essence, non-reciprocal, and lowering the voting age is necessary on account of equity. Throughout the National Youth Dialogue project, the most frequent argument we encountered against lowering the voting age is that we - young people - are politically uninformed or apathetic, to which we have at least three objections. The first is that political knowledge is not a precondition for suffrage, in that many adult voters also lack education. If the goal of the government were solely to account for the views of the educated, would only university-educated adults be able to cast ballots? How would we determine what qualifies as 'educated' enough? Who would make those decisions? The premise of this disfranchisement - that certain citizens do not have the proper education to vote - should be questioned. In effect it is arguing that people with lower education are incapable of making rational voting decisions. This is obviously not the case. System- wide we recognize that your level of education should not disqualify you from voting. It appears to us that the concern over the quality of a voter's choice and its relationship to effective government is only an issue when talking about voting age. Therefore, promoting representation on this principle is not contingent on practical outcomes. Youth deserve the right to vote regardless of whether others feel that their vote is wise or foolish, or whether they believe youth will turn out to vote. A second objection is questioning whether youth are as ignorant as is often stereotyped. Maybe it is true that not all of us read the Globe and Mail each morning, but there are a variety of other ways in which young people already participate in politics. Though we may not have lived for as many years, we still have relevant life experiences which shape our respective political outlooks. Hundreds of thousands of youth have marched across Canada for the advancement of climate activism, and many others signed petitions on the cause. From an empirical perspective, a 2012 Stats Canada report found that two-thirds of