Young N.B. students take part in mock federal election

The results of the Student Vote will be released on Oct. 20, following the Canadian federal election on Oct. 19.

“We have been talking a lot about it in class. We were seeing how the leaders would react to these issues”, said Allison More, a Grade 8 student.

“Some of my students, their parents don’t vote”, said Kuhn, “and so a few of them said ‘If you come home and give me some information, I will vote, ‘ and so the whole idea is to increase voter turnout”. Parker said he’s been following the federal election, even though he can’t vote.

“I don’t understand why I can work the election (in the polling stations) but I can’t vote”, said Elida Maley, who did cast a ballot during Student Vote 2015 on Thursday but won’t be allowed to on election day because she’s only 17.

Student Vote is a parallel election for students under the voting age, coinciding with federal, provincial, territorial and municipal elections.

Isak Parker, co-president of the F.H. Collins student council, says he’s been following the federal election, even though, at 15, he’s too young to vote.

“We’ll be more encouraged to vote when we do reach 18”, said Julia, in Grade 7. Across Canada, 700,000 students at 7,000 schools are taking part in initiative.

“They watched me go through the process and vote”, she said. “It was a good experience, to know what it will be like when I can vote”.

Throughout the years our children have asked me who I was voting for and before I began working at a newspaper I would tell them without hesitating. “When you’re younger you kind of completely tune it out when someone else talks (about politics)”, Rex, 16, said.

“We have disagreements over which party you think should run the country”.

Last month our 22-year-old son attended the all-candidates forum at TRU with me and said it was interesting. “Whereas my buddy thinks Justin Trudeau would make a great prime minister”, said Wood.

Student votes took place anywhere from October. 13 to 16. Social Studies 11 students learn about politics and government, the difference between the first past the post system and proportional representation, about ridings and more.

“It’s not really intimidating if they know how the process works”, said Kuhn. “We send them in to Elections Canada and they tally all the votes across Canada, and then they do a comparison, and in 2011 they were pretty close”.

Rani Abdullaziz said she believes the election campaign was divisive in that it attempted to split Canadians along ethnic lines and wishes she could cast a vote.