A private bill to give 16-year olds the vote is back in Parliament

if you are legal enough to be allowed to work and it not considered child labor, and paying taxes on that income, then vote often!

Should child actors be allowed to vote?
- are they legally responsible for managing income? or are they emancipated?
Hm, if I understand you right, you're saying that there's there's a sort of threshold of governance (eg you mention legally being allowed to work, and being required to pay taxes) that, once met, requires that those under such governance must have representation in the government. So, by that logic, would you then be okay with children not being allowed to vote if, say, they weren't allowed to work, and didn't have to pay taxes?
- If a child is still legally the responsibility of its parents or guardians then the guardians would be responsible for making sure they vote in the best interests of the child. See also what’s happening in America (my country of residence) - a lot of fascists are voting in ways that will directly harm their lives. I could make an argument those decisions harm the children as well.
  I feel like the line of questioning is a trying to head down a reductio ad absurdum path..

A quiet benefit of lowering the voter age imo is that it allows families to vote together (physically not ideologically) while they still definitely share a home. This allows a culture of voting to grow which I think could really help voter turn out in the long term.

It could also lead to abusive situations where a child is restricted from certain freedoms or punished for voting for the wrong candidate. Children could be coerced into voting for whatever candidate their parents want. Maybe dad thinks the cons are gonna give him a big tax break but the kid thinks the NDP will bring rent prices down by the time they want to move out for college.
- I can certainly understand your concern, and I think the definitive way to solve that is to have voting integrated into schools (which are often polling stations already)., but i think that doesn't make sense until voting age is lowered.
  That said I think our system is already fairly resistant to coercion. If dad says vote CPC kids says "yes sir" and votes NDP and there is no possible way for dad to know the kid is lying.
  I'll point out that there was a similar concern during suffrage and it turned out to be a non-issue.
- Votes are private

If you are considered responsible enough to drive a murder machine, you should be able to vote.

The average 16 year old doesn’t have a high school diploma.
The average 16 year old hasn’t had a job these days.
- These days? 16 year olds “these days” have jobs just like they did in “those days,” and having a high school diploma or a job shouldn’t have anything to do with a person’s ability to vote.
  I’d also say there are more people over 16 who are far less qualified emotionally to vote than 16 year olds who want to vote.

The only ones that'll vote will probably be the children of religious nutjobs being used by their parents to stack the vote. None of the rest give a fuck about voting until they're 30 anyway.

If I had to change the voting age, I would personally be more inclined to raise it rather than lower it.

Totally agree.

I understand the logic, that Parliament is making decisions that is going to affect the future lives of our youth, but I would worry about young people who have grown up devouring a steady diet of TikTok, youtube and Instagram making voting decisions before they've really understood how much the messages they ingest have been massaged, curated and shaped in order to manipulate them. There's far too much rage baiting, shilling and astroturfing on socials but the hard fact is that the really effective stuff is getting harder to discern and AI and algorithms are making it harder and harder to figure out what's real and what's not.

- Fair question. Whether or not some age groups are more susceptible to propaganda is an empirical question. If you know of data, please share.
  Critical thinking keeps developing into the early 20s, so not have the full supply of that is a potential knock against younger voters.
  Something I've seen from my more conservatively-oriented family members is that significant financial and domestic difficulties help them see the falsehoods in right-wing propaganda. When things are better, they might be more amenable to anti-immigrant talk (and the like) to prop up their ego. But when they're truly struggling (with affordability issues) they seem to see the irrelevance between their real issues and the parties the Right tries to scapegoat (e.g., immigrants; not billionaires, neoliberalism, etc.). If this theory holds, then not facing affordability issues due to living with parents could be another knock against young voters if it makes them more susceptible to right-wing propaganda.
  Those are just speculations. I'd love to see some data!
- No worse than the adult population. […]
  At what age would you say that a child (ie someone that is not an adult) brain is equal, in terms of rationality (assuming that is a sufficient metric to gauge one's fitness for voting in an election), to that of an adult brain? Or are you saying that a child brain of any age is equal to an adult brain?
At 16 I certainly would have voted like my parents because they had made me think the same way they did and any other way was wrong.
In hindsight, every choice they made was the wrong choice that brought in further conservative politics, austerity and the destruction of our social safety net.