CELPIP Listening Part 6 Practice Test: The Ballot at Sixteen

NARRATOR: Every few years, the proposal resurfaces in Canadian politics: lower the federal voting age from eighteen to sixteen. Supporters treat it as an overdue correction, opponents as a gimmick dressed up as a principle, and the argument has a way of revealing more about what we believe citizenship requires than about teenagers themselves.

NARRATOR: Political scientist Lucia Moreau contends that the strongest argument concerns habit rather than rights. Voting, she maintains, is learned behaviour, and the first election matters enormously. At eighteen, many young people have just left home, moved to an unfamiliar city and lost track of where they are even registered. At sixteen, most still live with their families and sit in classrooms where elections can be discussed, so a first ballot could be cast with support close at hand. She points to Austria, where younger first-time voters have tended to turn out in greater numbers than those just a few years older. She concedes that not every teenager would vote wisely, adding drily that the same is true of their elders. It is an appealing argument, though Austrian teenagers move through classrooms quite unlike ours, a difficulty Moreau passes over rather quickly.

NARRATOR: Constitutional lawyer Arjun Bedi accepts that a first vote can shape later ones, but he doubts that this settles anything. He doesn't suggest that sixteen-year-olds are unintelligent, and he grants that some follow politics more closely than their parents do. Still, society has decided, he observes, that sixteen is too young to sign a binding contract, buy alcohol or serve on a jury, precisely because adolescents are thought to need protection from adult consequences. Either that protection is warranted, in which case the ballot should wait, or it isn't, in which case a great many other laws deserve reconsideration. Teenagers, he adds, may be unduly influenced by parents and teachers, an anxiety that has somehow never been applied to adults who simply vote as their spouses do.

NARRATOR: What neither camp can offer is a reliable forecast. Turnout among sixteen-year-olds might well be impressive at first and fade once the novelty wears off, and no one can say how many young people actually want this responsibility. Still, the burden of proof seems to fall on those who would keep people out rather than on those who would let them in. Sixteen-year-olds pay sales tax, hold jobs and will live longest with the decisions made today. Whether that entitles them to a ballot remains debatable, but it ought, at the very least, to earn the question a more respectful hearing than it usually receives.