Meaza Damte believes that kids will surprise you. In preparation for filing a lawsuit in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice that aims to lower the federal voting age, she’s spoken to many of them. 

In an interview with The Varsity, Damte, a second-year U of T student in the Faculty of Law, talked about her work with Justice For Children and Youth in partnership with the David Asper Centre for Constitutional Rights, working toward lowering the voting age in Canada. 

Motivations

Damte completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Calgary, where she also worked part time at a childcare facility. This inspired her to co-found a nonprofit that focused on educating children and youth on domestic abuse and healthy relationships.

Her experience in her undergrad really opened her eyes to “just how much youth are underestimated by adults.” She explained that the current reasons for why the voting age is set at 18 are rooted in excuses such as that children are too immature or uninformed. However, in her experience, “that’s actually not the case.”

A media release from Justice For Children and Youth argued that Section 3 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms states that all Canadian citizens have a right to vote in federal and provincial or territorial elections. It added that Section 15 states that everyone is equal before and under the law without discrimination based on age. 

The motion has been filed in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, and the court date for it is pending. Damte said that while she was working on the case, they anticipated that the case could take a long time. That’s why they’ve recruited participants as young as 12 years of age, to ease the concerns that some of the older participants would turn 18 and already have the right to vote before the case draws to a close. 

Damte acknowledged, “It’s definitely going to be a very drawn out process.”

Getting involved 

To prepare for the case, Damte spent her summer interviewing clients as young as 12 years of age. When interviewing, Damte realised that since a lot of the participants are young, they’re looking at the future in the long term, whereas the adults who are voting have narrowed down their focus to their needs. 

“I think the advantage of having children and youth is [that] they have that long-term focus, because they ultimately have to deal with the ramifications of a lot of these laws.” She said that two of the biggest areas of concern for participants were about climate change and education. 

Lowering the voting age could allow children and youth to have a voice and impact on what they’re learning and how they’re learning it — which is important, she pointed out, since “they’re the ones wholly subjected to it.” Some participants also voiced the shortcomings they faced during the pandemic in terms of the quality of education they were receiving, the things they were missing, and the other challenges that they faced. 

Awareness of children’s individuality

Damte believes that most of the time, children and youth are seen as legal, political, and moral agents only in relation to their parents. She thinks the next big step is recognizing children as people with capacity to reason, think, and feel like adults. 

“I think that [in] the time that we live in, children and youth have lost the luxury of being politically unaware,” she said. Today’s generation has been overwhelmed with a constant flow of news and information. 

Damte knows that there will be a population of youth who will have no interest in voting, and for her, “that’s totally fine.” She acknowledged that many adults who have the right to vote choose not to. She said it’s not about making voting mandatory, but rather about giving youth the option to vote. If this isn’t passed, as Damte said, “the status quo will just continue — and to me, personally, that is a very, very deeply scary thought.”