I wish I could say that the title of this blog is dramatic, but quite frankly, it’s not.
We all occupy intersecting identities and carry a variety of lived experiences. Consequently, we rely on the provincial government to support our needs in these identities. For example, if you are a driver, you’re likely visiting Service Ontario every once in a while. If you or a loved one has made a hospital visit to address a medical concern, then you’ve interacted with Ontario’s healthcare system. If you’re a student, you might be an OSAP recipient. If you have a disability, you could be on ODSP. If you’re both an OSAP and ODSP recipient, then your levels of funding are affected by one another.
And that’s why you, existing as you are, is political. Who you are affects the ways you experience various laws, policies, and services under government oversight as well as the relationships you have with communities and businesses. Conversely, who you are also informs the government about what laws, policies, and services they should be improving to make your quality of life better and how they should do it. This remains true in one of your identities as a student in Ontario.
Youth Electorate
As of April 2024, the population of Ontario is 15,996,989[1]. Those aged 15-24 make up 12.8% of that, meaning it’s about 2,047,615 people[2]. Now, given that the voting age is 18, it’s hard to know much of the 12.8% are eligible voters, but the point is that there are millions of young people in the province. As a whole, this much of a count has the ability to seriously alter the outcomes of an election. And the October 2024 election in British Columbia is a perfect recent example of that.
The results of the provincial election in BC were achieved by a narrow margin. The difference of votes between the winning party and the runner up was 33,321[3]. That is the size of the Western or Waterloo undergraduate student body. So imagine, if all eligible Western students or all eligible Waterloo students went out to vote, that could have entirely changed the outcome of the election in BC! And if we multiplied this across all campuses in Ontario, the impact of the youth vote could be stronger.
While youth are an influential electorate, the voter turnout for those 18-24 years old has been less than ideal. Ontario doesn’t publish data that breaks down the ballots cast by age, but let’s look federally. The federal election in 2021 saw 46.7% of those aged 18-24 vote, the lowest of any other age bracket[4]. That means just over half of eligible young voters did not cast their ballot. Being eligible to vote goes beyond your civic responsibility - it means you have the right to do so. Accessing the right to vote is filled with, unironically, political organizing and advocacy. In Ontario’s first elections, only men who were 21 years or older and owned land were allowed to vote[5]. It was only in 1960 that voting became universal (i.e. included women, racialized, and religious communities), which is certainly within the lifetime of at least one person you know.
Voting is Advocating
The interactions between young people and politics has been drastically shaped by the digital landscape. The Young Politicians of Canada found that 40% of Ontario students get their news from TikTok[6]. I feel like we tend to absorb a lot of politics based on what we see in the news and that makes us feel removed from the political system as a whole. But politics is not meant for us to consume as entertainment from our screens. And I get that it’s easy to distance ourselves from it because of this, but that essentially means you carry some sort of privilege where what happens during and after an election doesn’t have a significant impact on your life. This is certainly not the case for so many underrepresented and marginalized groups. And remember my example of the BC election? Not voting can influence an election just as much as voting can. 33% of 18-24 year olds reported that they did not vote in the 2021 federal election because they were “not interested in politics.”[7] Well…if you care about some social issue, you are certainly interested in politics even if you don’t realize it.
The Young Politicians of Canada also found that 70% of youth reported advocating on issues important to them[8]. As a student voter you hold immense power by choosing who to elect, to represent and fight for policies and programs that address these issues. But even then, any social, economic, or community issue shouldn’t have to happen to you for it to matter to you. The student body, as a collective, has proven time and again the power it holds to stand up for one another regardless of whether they have been directly affected by an issue - take the 2021 nationwide campus walkout to address gender-based violence as an example. Students do care about one another, and voting with your post-secondary education in mind is another way to show that.
Now I might be yet another millennial yelling at you to go and vote. And I do want to be a little annoying about it. Because we’re not necessarily marching into Queen’s Park everyday, so voting is how you advocate and make your voice heard. We vote to show up for our family, friends, colleagues, peers, neighbours, and partners. We vote for those who cannot. And we vote to be active participants in a democracy, a privilege that so many around the world do not have access to. You already care about so much - just show it in this one other way.
References:
[1] Ministry of Finance, “Ontario Demographic Quarterly: Highlights of first quarter,” Government of Ontario, last update June 20, 2024, https://www.ontario.ca/page/ontario-demographic-quarterly-highlights-first-quarter
[2] Elections BC, “2024 General Election Results,” Elections BC, last updated November 8, 2024, https://electionsbcenr.blob.core.windows.net/electionsbcenr/Results_7097_GE-2024-10-19_Candidate.html
[3] Elections Canada, “Voter Turnout by Gender and Age,” Elections Canada, last modified October 31, 2023, https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=res&dir=rec/eval/pes2021/evt&document=ig&lang=e
[4] Student Vote, “History of Voting Rights in Ontario,” CIVIX, n.d. https://studentvote.ca/on2022/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Handout-8.1.pdf
[5] Prisha Dev, “‘Do youth still care?’ How to get the youth to vote more in Ontario,” Global News, February 9, 2025, https://globalnews.ca/news/11001365/do-youth-still-care-how-to-get-the-youth-to-vote-more-in-ontario/
[6] Statistics Canada, “Table 2 Reasons for not voting by age group and sex, 2021 federal election,” Government of Canada, last modified February 16, 2022, https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/220216/t002d-eng.htm
[7] Prisha Dev, “‘Do youth still care?’ How to get the youth to vote more in Ontario,”