I’ve been away for a while and only just heard that Preston and Gordon are assembling the reactionary Avengers!
Be not afeard: patriarchy chivalry is alive and well. These two gerontocrats elder statesmen want to salvage Premier Smith’s disaster class referendum by putting an older face on it. While they claim the meta-secession question goes too far, they do want us to take the other prairie grievances very seriously.
The two wise men will convene an online assembly of 60 hand-picked Western “”delegates”” (Preston’s very own quotation marks) to discuss the referendum questions, to debate recommendations prepared by AI from their deliberations, and then to meet with provincial and federal policy makers.
As the original quotation marks imply, no one asked for this. No one “delegated” anything to these people. Apparently, you really can just do things.
Mr. Campbell does have experience using provincial referendums to legitimize populism: asking vague questions to validate uninformed positions on critical constitutional issues, in hopes of drawing the citizens who hold those views into mainstream politics (widening the good ol’ Overton) and ultimately bolstering support for “centre-right” parties (see, e.g. pp. 117-119). How is that working out for them now?
lolololol I’m joking. Obviously, they are doing it all for the kids:
it is also hoped that the Assembly will demonstrate that the communications technologies to which the younger generation are so strongly attracted can be employed to democratically address whatever issues are of greatest concern to them.
Two other old guys on the grind has inspired me…and reminded me of the report from earlier this summer that dozens of Canadian senators rarely show up for work.
The Senate sat for 76 days in the 12 months following the last federal election: about three days/week in each of the 26 sitting weeks. Apparently, that’s asking way too much for the meagre base annual salary of $192,700. Lucky for them the feds haven’t bothered to fix OAS yet. They face mandatory retirement at 75 – too late for both Gordon (78) and Preston (84) – but the average age of a senator is a spry 65 and can collect that sweet sweet Senate money for another decade.
Meanwhile, the unemployment rate among actual youth (15-24) was 14.3% in April, 13.4% in May, and 12.6% in July. The unemployment rate for teenagers (15-19) reached 20.2% in the first quarter of this year. The children may yearn for the mines, but the mines won’t have them.
Since the seniors can’t be bothered to show up for work in the Senate, perhaps the youth could show them how it’s done.
Canadian political institutions are unresponsive to the interests and concerns of young people. That’s a feature, not a bug. Among other things, Canadian youth are disenfranchised: denied the right to vote and limited in their ability to organize and exert political pressure on government. These defects (which include decades of SCC Charter jurisprudence prioritizing individual autonomy) make it easier for older generations to extract wealth and opportunities from them and have serious consequences for our ability to defend our democracy against the existential threats that define our era (forthcoming, 2027 Supreme Court Law Review).
Rather than more opinions from the elderly set, if we want our democracy to survive and maybe even thrive, we need to create more opportunities for youth to exercise their voices and their power.
We could start by supporting the formation and operation of a “youth senate” that provides input on proposed federal laws, regulations and policies. But since the Senate is etymologically and literally a “council of elders”, it will need another name. Perhaps the Juvenate?
Volunteer professionals and other public interest organizations could provide administrative, legal, media, and other assistance. Low-cost digital technologies, potentially including AI tools, could enable large-scale meetings and help to triage, assess, and respond to federal initiatives. Given the Carney government’s penchant for MOUs and press releases and sweeping regulatory reforms, Canada does not lack short-term opportunities to provide proof of concept for a broad-based youth deliberative forum.
The Senate’s own book reports offer clear and concrete benchmarks for the Juvenate’s contributions to public debate.
Of course, a Juvenate would have no formal role in the federal law-making process. It would be just one move among many needed to rebalance the generational playing field in this country: one step in a much longer and unpredictable campaign.
And it would require bold, motivated young people to take that step forward, decide how to organize themselves, and assume the burden of debating, articulating, and advocating for the interests of their generation in a way that can capture the attention of their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. Young Canadians have their own ways of communicating with each other, but their enfranchised elders still prefer to get their news from radio, TV, and Facebook.
Geriatric millennials like me don’t need to yield the political agenda to reactionary septuagenarians. We can yield it instead to our children.
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