Renegade Politics: Advocating for Youth Political Engagement

We have all seen the same pictures in newspapers, community newsletters, and across social media: Youth, standing shoulder to shoulder with a politician, all smiling happily.

Typically, some message is attached to the image about how youth ‘are our future’. Or maybe the rare nod to the notion that youth are already ‘leaders of today’.

And yet, systemically, time and time again, the majority of our appointed and elected officials have failed to include youth in real decision-making. The largest, most marginalized and disenfranchised segment of our population, continuously tokenized for the photo op, yet never actually listened to. Democracy loses out. We need to do better.

In the Rooms of Power

I have spent nearly 30 years politically advocating alongside youth and working in the systems that serve them.

I have brought youth, under 18 years of age, into the rooms of power to sit with the decision makers across our country in multiple jurisdictions and in Ottawa.

I have facilitated consultations so that youth can share the subject matter expertise they possess about what is truly happening in our schools, what matters to them about ‘safety’, the gross lack of mental health supports in both rural and urban communities, the overreach of child protection services, the systemic racism they encounter continuously in the justice system, and sexual violence they are subject to by the adults meant to guide and protect them.

We cannot fix these issues without their input. Yet youth continue to be the only population group we make policies and legislation about without including them. Research continues to demonstrate that those that make attempts at youth-engagement, consultations, or youth-lead initiatives, usually fall short of actual listening.

Consultation, real consultation, takes time and money. And these are not resources typically prioritised for youth services.

In the rooms of power, our legislatures, the House of Commons, the Senate and the Prime Minister’s Office, we need all voices. Not megaphones screaming from the streets outside in protest, but from a respected and dignified seat at the table. With an audience who have the humility to listen.

Optimism for Systemic Change

Despite witnessing these repeated failures of political consultation, I am a brutal optimist. I have indeed seen youth consultation work. I have witnessed some adults truly pause, authentically listen, and most importantly – act on what they learn. Legislation evolves. Youth policies are revised. Regulations change. Systems improve.

I took this mentality of hope into my Ph.D. journey and asked high-ranking political figures who I had seen do it well, why they cared.

Why did they act differently than their political colleagues down the hall? What was the motivation that spurred them to act? What triggered them to improve a policy that could impact the daily lives of sometimes hundreds of thousands youth?

What I learned became the basis of what I want to give back to the youth, political, and human sectors I have worked in: A playbook, the tactics and strategies of how we can act with humanity, curiosity, and humility towards our fellow community members who are typically dismissed. A passion to create inclusion can result in real systemic change.

The steps to create inclusion are easier than we realize, and would evolve our democracy by leaps and bounds.

Renegade Politics became a mindset. And the book became a combination of a political-tell-all career memoir with the rigor of Ph.D. research interviews and reflections, full of shock and hope, all to create systemic impact.

For Democracy

I am painfully aware of how paternalistically most adults still dismiss the need to involve youth in decision-making. So why does youth engagement matter in our political decision-making?

The answers depend on the values of the audience: You will save tax payer dollars and make a more cost-effective program or service if you involve the end-user. You have a human rights treaty and moral obligation to uphold the human right of participation in decision-making.

Whether pragmatic and economically driven, or altruistic and moral, take your pick. Either way, democracy functions better when it is accessible to everyone.

Take note of recently retired (only due to the maximum service term reached) Senator Marilou McPhedran’s words, shared with me in Renegade Politics. She spoke about the connectivity between a healthy democracy and youth political engagement:“We’ve become an old country with a democracy that is in crisis. The mobilization and the agency of youth in this country is one of the most predictable, reliable pathways to the revitalization of our democracy.”

Senator McPhedran set her mandate based on the guidance of youth. Working to lower our voting age was one of the hallmarks of her tenure in the Red Chamber: Sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds pay taxes on their paycheques and are incentivized to work by governments of all parties via funded employment subsidies.

Youth are actively recruited by the government to enlist in the Canadian Armed Services and can be deployed for domestic emergency response efforts at sixteen. And youth have been voting for political party leadership at age fourteen.

Yet youth are still not generally viewed by the public in Canada as being competent to vote in general elections, and no party, or the Senate, wants to be the one to move on this reform. In the most recent efforts this spring, the Senate had the chance with Bill S-222. Yet perhaps concern for what a still-new Prime Minister would do about the purpose of the Senate and its independence, the Senate rejected moving the Bill to committee – a critical juncture. This would have been the opportunity to open the doors of the Senate proceedings to Youth directly. To bring testimony about why voting and enfranchisement is critical to their citizenry. Again, our political system closed the door on them. Research and optimism stay alive in the pending Committee work to come as the presented alternative.

All parties talk out of both sides of their mouths on the issue of democratic voting for youth — happily bolstering party membership and stuffing leadership ballot boxes, yet denying participation in the general election which would allow youth to participate in the election of their Member of Parliament.

A democracy that does not evolve is at-risk. The more we marginalize youth from political processes, the more democracy dies by a thousand cuts.

Turning Privilege into Mindset

The act of reading this is a point of privilege: You have leisure time to read. You have autonomy over your off-hours. You have earned this time of course, being educated, civically engaged, being economically secure if not advantaged. Doors were also opened for you; social connectivity supported your aspirations.

What I have learned in my own privileged experiences at the University of Toronto completing a Ph.D. and working in executive and legislative oversight roles, is that the world gets better when those of us with power use it to help others. Because simply critiquing that ‘the system is broken’, that we need education reform, child protection overhaul, evolution of our judicial legislation, safety efforts everywhere, and responses to expanding AI and technology use and privacy considerations, is not enough. We cannot call for reform while not hearing from the people living these experiences. It is a failure of democracy, and quite simply, it makes for bad policy.

Political and civic engagement must include participatory human rights engagement. The time and money to consult with those most vulnerable to rapid social change and systemic shortcoming between services must be provided. We are all accountable. We are all decision makers. Yet in interviewing them, the highest-ranking politicians and civil society leaders of our country tell me they are not the decision-makers. This is not good enough. This is not a healthy democratic approach.

The Renegade Approach

In my own stories and those of others, you will read in the book that this type of political advocacy needs recognition of who opened doors for you to create change when you were younger, as well as a desire to do that for other youth now. It will take intergenerational collaboration to fix our systems — for everyone.

We will need more Renegades; we will need more brave voices to challenge the “it is what it is” mentality. We will need calls at the highest level for accountability and enforcement. Over and over and over again, to promote an attitude that change is possible and that we are all responsible for delivering it.

Advocacy is not for the faint of heart. In the rooms of power you step into, because you have the privilege to, invite those you know normally would not be included. Ask who else needs to be consulted, who else needs to be there. Be a Renegade. Make the system better. Our democracy will be stronger for it.

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Author’s Note: Wraychel Gilmore’s Renegade Politics: Advocating for Youth Political Engagement explores how young people and their allies can influence public policy. Learn more or purchase a copy through Dundurn Press.