What happens to a democracy when nearly a fifth of its population is completely excluded from the ballot box?
In this episode of The Missing Middle, Cara Stern and Mike Moffatt unpack how disenfranchising 7 million young citizens actively skews Canadian public policy. As our demographic profile ages, politicians face a clear incentive: cater to older, reliable voters with short-term entitlements while deprioritizing the critical long-term economic growth, housing, and education investments that younger generations desperately need.
To fix this structural imbalance, we explore the provocative idea of proxy voting for children. Essentially, this allows primary caregivers to cast ballots on behalf of their kids from birth. We examine how treating children as full citizens could force politicians to represent every Canadian, how existing tax law (like the Canada Child Benefit) already provides a seamless blueprint for designating primary caregivers, and why the biggest obstacle to electoral fairness isn't logisitics, but political self-interest.
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Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast, lightly edited.
Cara Stern: What if I told you we could make our democracy stronger by representing every citizen who lives here in Canada? Would you go for it?
Mike Moffatt: Because I’m a Gen Xer, my reflex is to say no, I would think it’s a trap. I also took improv in high school, so I’m going to say yes, because that’s the rule. I love the idea of making democracy stronger, so I’d love to hear what you have in mind.
Cara Stern: We’ve talked a lot on The Missing Middle about how Baby Boomers vote in far higher numbers than Millennials and Gen Z. What that means is politicians listen to older voices a lot more and try to cater to their interests, because they’re more reliable votes for them.
This plays out in various ways, including by increasing entitlements like Old Age Security and the higher spending we’re doing on healthcare compared to things like education spending, which benefits younger people. But what if there’s a way to represent the interests of young people right from the minute they were born?
Mike Moffatt: I’m sure many of you are now picturing a baby going into the voting booth, like an even less entertaining version of the movie Baby’s Day Out, which is John Hughes’s worst movie by far. But I’m guessing you’re suggesting something a little bit more practical here, like a parent voting on their child’s behalf.
Cara Stern: Exactly. Today on DemograFix, we’re going to explore the idea of giving parents the right to cast a ballot not just for themselves, but by proxy for their children, and how that might incentivize politicians to represent all citizens right from the moment they’re born.
Mike, you recently wrote an article in the Globe and Mail about the kerfuffle that broke out when Shopify co-founder Tobi Lütke tweeted about taking away the rights of retirees to vote because they were no longer contributing to the economic growth of the country. And we did a whole episode of Classonomics about it. But what stood out for me wasn’t the problem portion of that episode, but the solutions proposed, particularly one that you mentioned involving proxy voting.
Mike Moffatt: The proposed solutions in the piece, including the proxy voting one, were tacked onto the bottom, but they were actually the inspiration for why I wrote it. In response to Lütke’s tweet, there was a lot of online discussion that was adamant that democracy was all about one person, one vote, with many citing that angrily at Lütke, saying you’re an awful person because you don’t believe in one person, one vote. Many of them cited section three of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, that every citizen of Canada has the right to vote in an election of members of the House of Commons or a legislative assembly.
But meanwhile, there are roughly 7 million Canadian citizens who have no vote, who are excluded from our electoral system entirely due to their age. I found it deeply weird that on the one hand, people are absolutely appalled at the idea of putting an upper age limit on voting and say that violates one person, one vote, but have no problem whatsoever with a lower age bound on voting. The disconnect struck me as deeply weird.
Cara Stern: As someone with two young kids, they probably wouldn’t have great voting patterns. It would be for more cookies, more treats, and maybe more screen time. That’s what they would want.
Mike Moffatt: And that’s where the proxy part comes in, so that parents would vote on behalf of the kids in the best interest of kids. Who gets to vote actually matters, not just for them as individuals, but it also impacts what policies are likely to be enacted and which are not.
Cara Stern: And as your Globe piece makes clear, demographics does impact public policy. Over their lifetimes, Baby Boomers have benefited from being able to influence the world they live in just by the sheer size of the demographic cohort and the political strength they hold. They have strength in numbers. Now that they’re nearing retirement in large numbers, it means the types of political issues that they’re interested in changes, and that has an impact on the whole economy.
Mike Moffatt: Exactly. When the economy is doing well, as it was for much of the Baby Boomers’ adult lives—GDP was growing, unemployment was low—governments tend to get rewarded at the ballot box. That’s not necessarily because voters are putting the country’s economic interests ahead of their own self-interest; it’s because those voters generally understand that a strong economy is good for them and good for their families. But an aging population changes that math.
A 2026 study by Oxford’s Tim Vlandas found that older voters are less likely to punish governments for poor economic performance and more likely to reward governments for increasing financial supports to families, particularly financial supports for seniors. As the population gets older, that changes the political incentives. Economic growth becomes less important, while policies that provide direct financial benefits to seniors become more important.
Cara Stern: I can see how this plays out when I would hear about the “elbows up” thing that happened with the Liberal Party. I heard a lot of Boomers saying things like, “We don’t care what it takes, we need to get off of our dependency on the US.” And I heard younger people being a lot more concerned about the job losses that would come.
Mike Moffatt: That’s a perfect example. You don’t have to be directly concerned about job loss if you are past working age. The incentives that different voters have from a self-interest point of view differ based on their age.
Cara Stern: So while Boomers historically voted in large numbers for pro-economic growth policies, now that they’re retiring, we see prioritization of entitlements that they might get to make their retired lives easier and tax policies that directly benefit them. But those tax policies are often paid for by younger generations.
Mike Moffatt: Absolutely, with increasingly generous Old Age Security benefits being a prime example of this phenomenon.
Cara Stern: The obvious fix is for more young people to step up, run for office, and turn out to vote. Millennials and Gen Z together outnumber the Boomers. If they showed up to vote, that would actually help their own generation. It’s kind of like fighting fire with fire. That’s what the Baby Boomers did. I’m thinking of Bob Rae, who became the leader of the NDP in Ontario when he was only 34, and he was premier when he was only 42.
Mike Moffatt: To a certain extent, that happened. If we look at the last federal election, all three of the federal party candidates were Gen Xers born in the 1970s. That can certainly help, but none of that addresses the fact that 7 million Canadians are excluded from the electoral process.
We also have to understand that the interest of a 25-year-old might not necessarily be aligned with a 15-year-old or a 5-year-old. In a world where women couldn’t vote, we wouldn’t suggest that having more 25-year-old men vote is a sufficient solution to advancing the issues of a 25-year-old woman.
I’m not against more young people running for office—that’s a good thing—but it doesn’t fix the core issue here, which is that we’re excluding 7 million people from the process, and the fact that those 7 million people skew young causes our voting pool to skew old.
Cara Stern: That’s fair. There are solutions that represent the interests of more young people that don’t necessarily have them running for office themselves. I would love to see a five-year-old in office, but I don’t know how likely that is. They might get my vote!
Realistically, I’ve talked to many politically engaged people who find that there are many reasons why it’s not only hard to get elected young, but you take on so much risk and sacrifice. Especially in today’s social media world, it can be really brutal.
Mike Moffatt: It can be. If that young person wants to win, they still have to appeal to an electorate that is disproportionately old. Prime Minister Trudeau, a relatively young prime minister, increased Old Age Security. We can’t simply think that if you’ve got a politician in their 30s with kids under the age of 18, that they will necessarily cater to that population, because they have to follow where the electorate is.
Cara Stern: In the article, you mentioned we could lower the voting age by having parents cast ballots for their children in their household. I never heard of this idea until you brought it up to me. Where did it come from, and what is the history of it?
Mike Moffatt: It’s actually a rather old idea. The concept of proxy voting for children goes back to at least the 1840s, with advocates having a variety of motivations for advancing this idea. In Canada, the modern conception of the idea is closely associated with Miles Corak, a University of Ottawa alum and fellow economist now at the City University of New York. Back in 2012, he wrote a blog post on the idea, which we’ll link to in the show notes.
Globally, the modern conception is most closely associated with demographer Paul Demeny in his 1986 article, Population and the Invisible Hand. He originally published this to help with fertility rates, as he was concerned even back in the 80s. But Miles Corak takes it a step further: he argues that it’s about basic human rights because kids are citizens too. Right now, their voices just aren’t being heard in the voting booth.
The core idea is simple: just like existing voters, children would also have a ballot they could cast. But unlike voters who have the mental capacity to make an informed choice on their own, the child’s primary caregiver would fill out the ballot on behalf of the child, the same way a parent makes decisions and fills out paperwork on behalf of their children in other domains.
Cara Stern: When you said this was meant to increase fertility rates, I was like, is someone having another baby just to get another vote? But I can see how it could lead to more family-friendly policies, which might help people who want to have more kids. Votes of parents over time become more valuable to politicians, whereas right now they are not nearly as valuable as retirees’ votes. Retirees are a much bigger group and they show up more, so their votes matter a lot more to politicians. Do you think that parents voting on behalf of their children could increase fertility rates?
Mike Moffatt: Nobody is having another child to get another ballot. We complain that people in their 30s and 40s don’t vote enough, and now all of a sudden they’re going to have a kid in order to get a second ballot when many aren’t using their first one? That’s not what economists are suggesting at all. The argument is more subtle: if children’s interests were included in the electoral system, then you start to see policies like enhanced Canada Child Benefit payments become more politically salient. Higher payments lower the cost of having a child, so families would have more children. Including children in the electoral system creates a virtuous cycle: child-friendly policies create more children.
Cara Stern: I see one big problem with the system: as a teenager, my politics were quite different from my parents, and I loved arguing with them about politics. If I was a teenager and told my dad to vote for a party, he might actually go and get two votes that go against what I actually wanted.
Mike Moffatt: I find that a deeply weird argument, because every day parents make decisions in the best interest of their child—medical decisions, choices about what school they should go to, whether to open an education savings account, and so on. I don’t get this idea that the decision of how a child’s ballot is cast is somehow more consequential to the child than whether or not the child is vaccinated, a decision we currently trust parents with.
At the same time, people argue that voting has little value in Canada’s first-past-the-post system and that most elections at the riding level aren’t particularly close. We have to place some faith in parents that they’ll do the right thing, in part because our entire society already places faith in parents to do the right thing. Otherwise, society simply doesn’t work.
Cara Stern: I don’t think it’s that weird if the whole purpose is giving every citizen a chance to vote and have them represented. On average, younger people tend to vote differently from older people. If we’re not actually giving them the option to vote when they feel ready, or lowering the voting age at all, then it’s not really about representing votes of children—it’s really just a weighted voting system.
Mike Moffatt: It’s not really increasing the ballot power of parents, but rather the parent has their own ballot plus another ballot or two that they’re using as a proxy for their kids. There is an expectation and a requirement that they act in the best interest of their children. If I have an older family member with dementia and I’m tasked with making financial decisions on their behalf, that elderly person’s money doesn’t suddenly become my money and get pooled together. I have a fiduciary duty to act in the best interest of the person I’m representing.
Cara Stern: There’s no enforcement here. So it is just giving a weighted vote to parents.
Mike Moffatt: Sure, because there’s no way to really determine whether or not they voted that way. But that doesn’t mean 100 percent of the votes are misused. If we had lax enforcement on financial matters, it doesn’t mean 100% of people making financial decisions on behalf of somebody with dementia are going to steal all their money. There is still an expectation to act in a way that meets that child’s best interest. You mentioned that older people have different voting behaviours than younger people, but “older people” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there—we’re not giving proxy votes to a lot of 97-year-olds.
Cara Stern: As a 14 or 15-year-old, I had a lot of opinions that differed from what my 40-something parents wanted.
Mike Moffatt: Sure. And our solution to that was basically to exclude you from the system. Not only are we excluding you from the system, but we are excluding children who actually have parents who will do the responsible thing.
I’ll admit all of this is messy. It’s not clean and neat, and there are administrative issues to deal with. But trying to solve these messy issues by simply excluding 7 million people from the electoral system feels a little bit like trying to kill a housefly with a cruise missile.
Cara Stern: So if we did find a way to make the system a reality, what are some of the consequences, good and bad, that you think would come out of it?
Mike Moffatt: I think it would change our politics and our priorities, and actually live up to the spirit of one person, one vote—which online people think is really important unless that one person is 17, in which case, forget them. But I also think it would be very educational for children. I typically take my kids to the ballot box with me and try to educate them on elections, democracy, and what the parties stand for. If we were to implement a system like this and they had a vote, even if it’s just by proxy, they’re going to become more invested in the process.
My daughter and I could work together: we can discuss the candidates and issues and work together in determining her ballot. Hopefully, that creates a tradition where when they’re in adulthood, they continue voting. I see it as a way of increasing the voter turnout of people in their 20s and 30s, because you introduce them to the concept early and they continue on with those patterns through adulthood.
Cara Stern: There’s one other argument that Corak made that I wanted to highlight: he argued that custodial parents should be able to vote on behalf of their children, but that mothers specifically should get the full proxy vote for each child in their care. There’s actually some precedent for that idea. In Canada and elsewhere, we often direct economic resources that are meant for children straight to mothers, based in part on research showing that when mothers have more bargaining power in the household, spending tends to shift in ways that better reflect children’s needs.
What do you think of that idea?
Mike Moffatt: There’s not just precedent for the idea—that’s how our system already works. There is a common objection to the idea of proxy voting that we’d have to figure out which parent should get the vote, or if it is split 50-50, or what happens if there’s shared custody in a divorce situation. All of those issues have already been settled in other domains, particularly in our tax and transfer system. In tax law, there’s a concept known as the primary caregiver. To go back to our Canada Child Benefit example, in Canada only the primary caregiver can apply for the Canada Child Benefit. By law, in a heterosexual relationship, the female parent is automatically presumed by law to be primarily responsible, and they must apply for the benefits or fill out paperwork to shift the primary caregiver status over to the other spouse.
For our kids, for example, I couldn’t apply for the CCB, but my wife could, or she could do the paperwork to designate me as the primary caregiver. For same-sex couples or shared custody arrangements, there are different rules, but a whole host of case law already exists to draw from. We wouldn’t be starting this from scratch; we could port the same rules that exist in tax law over to voting law.
Cara Stern: On the whole, I don’t necessarily mind the idea of proxy voting. My big problem with it is it feels like completely reinventing the wheel. It seems like there are already things that work well in other countries that improve our electoral system and get increased turnout. Increased turnout would definitely help with some of the outcomes we’re looking for, because we would get younger people and parents more likely to go out and vote.
But we know that Canadians are reluctant to change the electoral system at all. We have a first-past-the-post system where unless you’re in a swing riding, your vote does not matter to politicians at all. Swing ridings have outsized influence in policy.
The Trudeau government ran in 2015 on a platform that included changing that system, and as soon as they were elected, they dropped it. Given how hard it is to change the electoral system to one that already exists and works in many countries, why would Canadians have the will for this type of reform?
Mike Moffatt: I think there are two parallel issues here: one is the electoral system, and two is who’s allowed to vote. You can make those decisions independently. Even if you thought there were another electoral system that produces fairer outcomes than first-past-the-post—whether proportional representation, ranked ballots, or whatever—it still matters who gets to vote and who doesn’t. Even the most ardent proportional representation supporter would admit that a PR system where voting was limited to people who are at least six feet tall would be unfair, even if it eliminates concerns about swing ridings and gerrymandering. Setting arbitrary limits around who can vote and who can’t is deeply unfair, even if you happen to like the particular electoral system.
Cara Stern: I would think a six-foot-tall limit is a lot more arbitrary than the age that someone is considered an adult in society. A lot of the outcomes you’re trying to get here could be achieved with a simpler or more tried-and-true system used in other places.
I was thinking about how sometimes you and I get into arguments about things like proportional representation or high-speed rail, because I get the sense that you think it’s never going to happen, so why talk about it? When I’m thinking about proxy voting, my thought is this is never going to happen, so why are we talking about it? Do you think there’s any chance of it ever happening?
Mike Moffatt: I think proxy voting is absolutely the high-speed rail of electoral reform: you look at it and go, “this is a way to give rights to children.” This changes outcomes, but I also see this as a human rights issue. Having 7 million Canadians excluded from the process is problematic. You’re right that this is high on the list of issues that make for an interesting intellectual exercise, but will probably never happen.
First, you have this status quo bias where we can’t imagine a world that’s sufficiently different than the one we live in. Had those reforms been successful in the 1840s and we had a proxy voting system in place for the last 180 years, today we’d be absolutely appalled at the notion that we take votes away from children. People would be appalled by that idea, but they’re not, because that’s how we’ve always done things. The status quo bias is real.
Cara Stern: It makes me think of an article you sent me from about 100 years ago, talking about whether children should get the vote, saying we should maybe consider giving women and children the right to vote — as if those are two equivalent things.
Mike Moffatt: The argument that was made against giving married women the vote was that it would essentially give two votes to the husband, making married men’s voting power twice as much as single men. It is interesting that the same arguments used 100 years ago to disenfranchise women are now being used to disenfranchise children.
Cara Stern: There is a difference between women and children.
Mike Moffatt: Absolutely. To be fair, nobody is suggesting that we should have proxy voting for women—I want to be very clear about that.
Cara Stern: We can sit here all day and argue about which system is better, but our system is designed so that the people in power have the power to keep themselves in power. They’re not going to vote for something that gives them less power. That’s the eternal problem: we’re not going to get a fair system anytime soon, because you need to get people on board who would be giving up some of their power.
Mike Moffatt: That’s the practical problem here: any change like this takes power away from the powerful and gives it to the powerless. And who’s more powerless than children? If people are voting in their self-interest, why would they adopt an electoral system that increases the pool of voters and gives them less proportional say?
Cara Stern: To sum up this conversation, Baby boomers and older generations vote in much larger numbers than Millennials and Gen Z. As they age, this voting power means that our economy is being pulled in a direction where economic growth is deprioritized, and younger generations are suffering as a result.
Mike Moffatt: Proxy voting, where parents could represent their child by casting a vote in elections on their behalf, could lead to policies that better reflect the needs and wishes of Canada’s future generations and children, and make Canada a more representative democracy.
Cara Stern: But it’s probably not coming to a polling station near you anytime soon.
Thank you so much for watching and listening. Our producer is Meredith Martin and our editor is Sean Foreman.
Mike Moffatt: And if you have any thoughts or questions about the filmography of John Hughes, please send us an email at [email protected].
Cara Stern: And we’ll see you next time.
Additional Reading/Listening that Helped Inform the Episode:
Tobi Lutke’s idea that pensioners be excluded from voting is offensive. The concern behind it isn’t
Citizenship as a privilege or as a right: should children be given the vote?
Should Children be Given the Vote?: Miles Corak at TEDxWaterloo 2013
Why we should give children the vote
Do Husbands and Wives Pool Their Resources? Evidence from the United Kingdom Child Benefit
Brought to you by the Missing Middle Initiative
Perhaps the best investment is in civics literacy - for ALL ages. Is this still taught in schools? Building the economy is important for ALL ages and each cohort participates in different ways and most adults earning an income pay taxes. To imagine that different age groups think the same or experience the same challenges is naive. Perhaps promoting systems thinking and critical thinking is time better spent and a better investment.