The State of Civic Education: A Roundtable
If the children are our future, will a healthy participatory democracy be a part of that future? How are schools and non-governmental organizations doing in terms of teaching young people (and, for that matter, all people) to understand their society and the various ways we seek to answer the fundamental civic question: how we live together as a public? In this roundtable, the Canadian Parliamentary Review asked five individuals involved in various aspects of civic education to offer their thoughts on where we’ve come from, where we are, and, ideally, where we want to go when it comes to teaching and engaging the public.
*This is an edited and revised transcript compiled from three discussions with participants.
Greg Essensa, Heather Lank, Dimitri Pavlounis, Beatrice Wayne and Diane Vautour
Greg Essensa is Ontario’s Chief Electoral Officer and the CEO of Elections Ontario. Heather Lank is the Parliamentary Librarian at the Library of Parliament. Dimitri Pavlounis is the Research Director at CIVIX. Beatrice Wayne is the Research Director at the Samara Centre for Democracy. Diane Vautour is a Toronto-based teacher who previously worked as an Educational Consultant/ Education Officer for the Ministry of Education in Ontario with civics as her portfolio.
CPR: Could you please tell us a little about your organization and your role in it?
Greg Essensa: I’m Ontario’s Chief Electoral Officer and the CEO of Elections Ontario.
Heather Lank: I’m the Parliamentary Librarian at the Library of Parliament, and I’ve been in the role since 2018. Prior to that, I was in the administration at the Senate of Canada for many years. At the Library we are very much involved in public education programming which we do on behalf of Parliament, so I have a keen interest in this area. The Teachers Institute on Canadian Parliamentary Democracy is a program the Library will have run for the 24th time at the end of this October to the beginning of November 2023. We bring teachers from across the country to teach them about Canada’s Parliament and our system of governance. It’s a program that I’m very excited about and happy that we can finally restart it, post-pandemic. I look forward to talking about some of the tools we’ve developed and initiatives that we’ve undertaken to try to improve civic education in Canada. I’m happy that we’re back in a world where we can actually bring people to Ottawa and give them that experiential learning.
Dimitri Pavlounis: I’m the Research Director at CIVIX. We build resources for teachers to use experiential learning opportunities for students and we run teacher trainings. This conversation comes at a great time because the latest thing that I’m working on is a survey we just completed with about 2,000 teachers on their thoughts on the state of civic education in Canada.
Beatrice Wayne: I’m the Research Director at the Samara Centre for Democracy. We’re a non-profit, nonpartisan organization committed to making it easier to talk about and engage in politics in Canada. Prior to working at the Samara Centre for Democracy, I was a research fellow with the Students Learn Students Vote Coalition in the United States, so I also have a perspective on civic education in the U.S.
Diane Vautour: I teach in the Toronto Catholic District School Board. I’m in my 21st year of teaching. I largely teach in the humanities, social sciences and history. I’ve been teaching civic education for my entire career, so 20-plus years. I also have a background in civic education. I worked as an Educational Consultant/ Education Officer for the Ministry of Education in Ontario with civics as my portfolio. I also worked for a year at Elections Ontario to develop civic educational resources for Grade 5 and Grade 10. I have experience as well in history education, writing textbooks, and online courses.
CPR: What is your opinion regarding the state of civic education in Canada right now?
Greg Essensa: We are certainly seeing declining voter turnout amongst all Ontarians and Canadians. It’s almost a Western democracy phenomenon that we’re seeing this decline in voter turnout. In Ontario, it’s been really highlighted with our most recent provincial election in 2022. We had the lowest voter turnout in our history, and we’ve been on a significant decline for about 100 years. In 1920 we had our highest turnout at just over 78.5 per cent, and this last election in Ontario was down to 43 per cent.
One of the things that I’ve been indicating to the legislature is that we really need to turn our minds towards this and engage people to feel that there is value in their vote.
The 18 to 24- to 35-year-old group don’t vote in the same numbers that the 55 and over vote. That’s been pretty consistent. I do a fair amount of public speaking at colleges and universities and I do hear from students who will say: “I don’t see the political parties speaking to me. I don’t see the issues that are important to me being part of their platforms.”
I think we need to work on the civics program. I personally think we need to have it more involved in all four grades in the high school years, especially in Grade 12 when those individuals are beginning to turn 18. I think it’s critically important that we’re talking about civics, having programs in our educational institutions speaking to the importance of voting in a healthy civil society, and encouraging people to become involved the minute they can be eligible to vote.
Having run elections in our great province into my 38th year, I’ve really seen civics grow over that period. When I first started in the business, it was very, very limited – almost on the level of individual teachers. Now, in Ontario, we have a standardized process in Grade 5, and again in Grade 10 where civics is taught. I think it’s consistent across virtually every province that some form of a civics program, at some level, is taught in the educational system. And I think this is fantastic.
Diane Vautour: In Ontario, the Ministry just revised the Civics and Citizenship Course. It’s a short course in Grade 10. It should probably be a full semester course and it would probably be better in Grade 11.
I like the vision of the curriculum expectations. It does encourage inquiry and places the student as a civic agent or as resident who can and should take civic action. While there are elements of the curriculum that are a bit confusing, and perhaps there’s an agenda at work there, overall, I see civic education as getting students to place themselves in their communities, neighbourhoods, cities, provinces, country and world.
In Ontario, our curriculum allows us to focus on understanding their perspectives, the perspectives of others, and the issues that concern them. The civics curriculum also allows us to work on how they can play a role as a person who has civic power to address issues in their communities and to try to make a difference in the most educated way possible.
There are also ways our curriculum can teach about misinformation, disinformation, and digital literacy. Over my career, this topic has become increasingly important and contentious. I never really had any push back or concern around how civics was taught until after the pandemic. The public discourse is changing and public interest in how civics is taught has increased. That has been good, but also a challenge to navigate.
Heather Lank: My views are fed by people like Diane who are closer to the action on the ground than we are at the Library. One of the nice things with the Teachers Institute is that we have a huge network of teachers across the country who are alumni of the program. We consult with them and the Teachers Advisory Committee (TAC), who advises on the program. We get input about where things are at and what we can do better.
A couple of things have come up that I thought might be worth sharing. One is, and this won’t be a surprise to anyone, that civic education is a huge challenge across the country in our schools. We certainly see it when we welcome school groups to the Hill for tours. We see how little is known about our system of governance, how Parliament works, indeed how democracy works. One of the things we found is that civic education is often taught by relatively inexperienced teachers who are willing to take it on simply because they’re new and somebody says, “Hey, you can you please teach this?” They may or may not know anything about civics.
Another thing we’ve found is that as staffing shortages become an increased problem across the country – teachers who were previously civics specialists are being asked increasingly to teach classes in other fields. So, we have either inexperienced teachers who are doing it as an add on, or experienced teachers who aren’t able to focus on it.
Finally, generally, civics is taught in the context of social studies classes where the focus is often on historical, political, and/or military events. The civic engagement side of things is often secondary and is perhaps not given the attention that some of us think it deserves. The need to promote engagement both within the classroom and outside of it is really important, and the Library’s educational resources and programs are very much geared towards that.
We were fortunate to be able to assist in some ways during the pandemic, with the move to online teaching and parents having to stand in as teachers. We developed and revised a lot of tools to make them usable by parents, teachers and students when they were learning and doing school from home. Leveraging that technology is important to ensure we have tools that resonate with kids, teachers, parents.
Beatrice Wayne: A lot of what Heather said really resonated with what we’ve found at the Samara Centre. Something Heather alluded to at the end – and I think it’s important to undergird in this conversation – is that if we’re talking about the state of civic education in Canada, it’s really important not to only be speaking about it in high school or even in post-secondary school, but to think of it as something that’s broader and ongoing. It’s applicable for adults as well as for youth.
We need to be thinking about how we can build it into different structures. We know from good research that parents are important for developing the civic education of their children. But we also know that youth can actually play an important role in knowledge brokering for their parents, particularly for parents in immigrant communities or underrepresented communities in our political structures.
So, any conversation about the state of civic education in Canada should open a bigger conversation outside of the classroom. Classroom education is important, but it’s not sufficient if we’re thinking about developing a robust civic education structure in Canada.
From the researcher’s perspective, the macro perspective, the simple word to describe civic education is: insufficient. Although youth are often thought of as apathetic, they are more likely to engage in direct action like attending a demonstration or signing a petition. But they don’t necessarily see the connection between these types of actions and electoral politics. Strengthening civic education means finding ways to help draw that connection between the issues they are passionate about, and how to use our political structures in Canada to advocate on behalf of these issues.
Dimitri Pavlounis: For civics to be meaningful in students’ lives, they need to see its relevance outside the school and beyond the school. School is one part of it, but we also don’t want to put the entire burden of citizenship on the education system.
If we’re looking at schools specifically, in some provinces, citizenship is explicitly named as the overarching goal of education itself. Most provinces and territories name citizenship as a cross-curricular competency. If you look at the stated outcomes in the policy documents, we’re doing okay.
But, in practice, citizenship is under-resourced. Alan Sears, who’s a civic education expert here in Fredericton with me, called this an unfunded mandate. Since teachers are provided with little support to achieve the stated outcomes, citizenship is deprioritized. The quality of civic education is often left up to the priorities and interests of the individual educators, similar to what Greg mentioned as being the norm decades ago.
We have some superstar civic educators who are providing some excellent civic education across Canada, but it’s incredibly unequally distributed. That’s something that we really need to think about. And, to go back to Heather’s point, a lot of this happens with just the teachers themselves – teacher interest and general teacher knowledge.
One of the things that has been striking to me is how untrained teachers are in these topics. When we surveyed teachers, only a quarter of them even somewhat agreed that their pre-service education included any type of formal training in civics and citizenship. This is true even in the three provinces that have an explicit high school civics class.
I don’t know if the assumption is that because they are citizens, via osmosis, they must know how to teach citizenship. But that’s ridiculous. We have spoken to some experienced teachers who teach pre- service teachers and they’ve found that the 22-year- olds coming into their programs have the same level of civic knowledge as their Grade 4s.
This is a systemic issue. This isn’t a blame the teacher issue. Teachers aren’t being trained, so how are they going to teach civics when they might not even know the three levels of government or when they have never been asked to think deeply about citizenship. We’ve acquired trainings like what the Teacher Institute provides but, unfortunately, you can’t provide the Teacher Institute to every teacher in the country.
Heather Lank: I wish we could, Dimitri, absolutely. I like your point that we need to think about the metrics, what we want to assess, and where we want to see the improvement. Reducing it to or limiting it to just voter turnout during elections simplifies it in a way that is probably inappropriate for that broader concept of citizenship.
Democratic engagement between elections can be as important as actually showing up at the voting booths. What does that mean, and what does that look like? One of the things I speak to people about is the opportunity for input in Parliament at committees.
This entails submitting briefs, appearing as witnesses, and talking to parliamentarians between elections about particular policy issues.
This engagement is meaningful and important, even if you don’t get the outcome that you wanted every time; your voice was heard, there’s a record of what you had to say. That can inform debate the next time that policy issue comes up for review, and it can change the minds of certain people in the room.
Beatrice Wayne: I very much agree with that. Even if, as Heather says, you don’t feel like your particular point of view made a sort of tangible change in this particular instance, you learn from doing it. You learn how to advocate for yourself going forward, how to write briefs, for example, or how to participate in other aspects of political engagement that you can take forward into your life.
There are many studies that show that when going to a particular demonstration or when signing a petition, a person may not even be aware of what level of government they are appealing to with this action. That’s such a critical level of knowledge to have. It allows them to be heard in their communities outside of voting.
One other thing, to build off Dmitri and Heather’s points about under-resourced teachers – last year, when we were working with the Social Science Educators Network of Canada, we heard repeatedly from these experienced teachers that they wished for more resources to really make civic education content engaging. It’s entirely up to the teachers themselves or organizations they partner with to create more exciting, interactive, interesting material about civic education. And they’re extremely hungry for it.
Heather Lank: We certainly find that with the resource fair we have as part of the Teachers Institute. Teachers are hungry for tools to be able to teach and from which to learn themselves.
Dimitri Pavlounis: It’s resourcing. But even if teachers have the resources, are they given the time to implement them, properly, in a meaningful way? Project-based learning is more time consuming than learning out of a textbook, but it’s more meaningful. In Nova Scotia now, they have a project-based component to their mandatory civics class, which is interesting because everybody must do it. New Brunswick now is trying to implement that as well. But again, that takes so much time to do.
I’m thinking especially of the Ontario half-credit civics course. What can you do in that class? Especially if students are coming in not having any knowledge. What can you meaningfully do in half of a semester? Not a lot.
CPR: When we’re looking at education curriculums, what are some concrete ways that we can improve in the ways in which we teach civics to students?
Greg Essensa: I think there’s a lot more we can do. I’ve been fairly consistent in my comments to the legislature. We teach it in Grade 5 and grade 10. I’m wholly supportive of the Grade 5 program. I think that that’s the appropriate age to begin to teach the youth about civics, voting and the importance of our democratic process here in Ontario and in Canada.
But where I think we can do more is in the high school area. I’ve recently made a recommendation to the legislature that civics be taught in all four grades of high school, not just Grade 10. You’re ending dedicated civics instruction when someone is 15 years old and still quite a way away from being able to vote. Academic studies have shown that if we get someone to vote at 18, we are likely to have a habitual voter for life. If we miss them at 18, we may not see them again until they’re 30.
It’s so important to get that information into the hands of the youth and ensuring that when they turn an eligible elector that they’re on the register, that that first election doesn’t matter what level, provincial, municipal, federal, that they get out and they exercise their right to vote that first time and likely then turn them into a consistently voting Ontarian and Canadian for the rest of their life.
Diane Vautour: In Ontario we are fortunate to have the mandatory civics course in the secondary curriculum Greg mentioned. I agree with Dimitri that it is too rushed and too short. If it was made into a full-year course, they could put in all of the things the government wants these students to learn, such as research skills, inquiry skills, digital literacy skills, and civic engagement, plus all of the content about how government works and how to contact your government. Covering all of that content in nine weeks is impossible. And, I agree with Greg. It would be nice if we taught it in a year in which they became eligible voters.
But the benefit of 15-year-olds is that they’re not jaded yet. They’re not overly cynical. They’re still quite curious and learning. So, to give them the foundation that is needed to inspire a love of politics or an interest in civic issues is important. Really, we have just that one short opportunity and when it’s wasted, it’s wasted.
We have a lot of demand. Teachers do want to do a good job, but they are not supported within their school boards or by the Ministry with release time or any professional development. To be honest, in my whole career it hasn’t existed. It’s not given a lot of attention or funding as opposed to math, science or any of the STEM courses.
However, it is something that affects all kids and affects our society as a whole. We have seen since the pandemic that there’s a lot of misinformation, there’s a lot of misconceptions, there’s a lot of pushing of various agendas. Students need to learn how to navigate it, and they need to do it in a safe space. I think that is the reason why there should be more attention, more funding, and a full credit given to it.
Beatrice Wayne: I’ll build off what Dimitri and Diane were just saying because we can talk about innovative things that we can do in the classroom, but it’s all tied to funding and resourcing. Often, funding around this has been short term, so it’s really hard to create and implement long-term programs when it’s not consistent funding that can be relied on. My dream wish list would be a federal initiative to fund civic education consistently, perhaps through Heritage Canada, so we could develop more robust programs and then test them out. We have ideas of what works well, but we don’t have long-term research and testing to perfect or improve these initiatives.
Also, as Dmitri said, experiential learning opportunities are really impactful. SSomething like Project Citizen in the US where students identify a policy problem in their community, research it, identify a solution and advocate for it to an appropriate public authority could have a powerful impact in Canadian classrooms. Project-based civics education like this are one of the strongest ways to really make politics relevant to students. But you need funding, training, and resources for teachers to be able to do that or other related programs like mini publics in the classrooms or participatory budgeting in the classrooms. These are all exciting ideas that would be great to implement, but they need funding.
Heather Lank: I agree that the issue of cost and funding is certainly something that needs to be considered. With that in mind, in the development of many of our resources, we’ve consciously chosen not to charge users so as not to have cost be an impediment. For example, we have something called Parliament: The Classroom Experience, which is a virtual reality experience of Parliament, very much a civics education tool that was launched earlier this year. We ship VR goggles and content in kits to classrooms across the country at no cost to teachers with teacher guides and all of the tools that you need as a teacher to bring your students through Parliament, Centre Block, the Senate and the House of Commons. It teaches about democracy and parliamentary work in a really innovative way that we know engages kids.
And we recently launched Parliament: The Immersive Experience here in Ottawa where students can go into a 360° multimedia experience of Parliament. But it’s not just for students. It’s for all ages. It’s for Canadians, international visitors, everybody. Again, it was a very conscious decision not to charge an entry fee because we don’t want cost to be a barrier for anybody.
Dimitri Pavlounis: I cosign the importance of experiential, authentic learning, and empowering teachers to do that. Letting them do that by prioritizing it in the classroom. We hear from a lot of teachers that say, “Yeah, our curriculum front matter says that citizenship is central to education, but in reality, we’re told we need to prioritize literacy and numeracy.” I don’t know where the idea came from that literacy and numeracy are not related to civic education, but this is just not true. You can absolutely teach literacy and numeracy through a civic orientation.
The fundamental civic question is: how do we live together as a public? That is a cross-curricular question. Ideally, you would be asked to think about all of your subjects through a citizenship lens. If you’re in a science classroom, why are you not thinking about how what you’re learning in science might contribute to broader questions of citizenship? If you’re in a STEM or a tech classroom, why are you not also thinking about AI regulation? You can have these conversations easily, but it’s just about adjusting the framing to be a little bit more civically- and democratically-minded.
Beatrice Wayne: There have been a lot of innovative experiments with doing this, particularly in the United States. There’s interesting research showing that STEM students vote at a significantly lower rate than other majors because the civic importance of what they’re studying isn’t foregrounded in their studies. Not to reduce everything to voting, but that is one metric that you can use to evaluate someone’s political connections; and when you incorporate that aspect of civic learning into those classrooms, it raises the voting rate among STEM students.
Heather Lank: Another thing worth mentioning is the broader context in which this education is occurring. We’re working in a world where students are exposed to heavily politicized social media, among other things. They’ve got algorithms in the background. We’ve got unreliable sources of information. Perhaps we need to encourage and look at the whole issue of media literacy and being able to do critical thinking and look at sources. Because if our citizens are acting based on misinformation, then civic engagement becomes highly problematic.
Dimitri Pavlounis: The bucket of what constitutes civic education is expanding. It has expanded beyond just learning the nuts and bolts of how democracy and government works, and this is a good thing in theory. But while the expectations of what teachers are supposed to do is expanding, the time they’re given to do it is contracting. In some provinces they have to teach financial literacy under the umbrella of citizenship. In Quebec, sex-ed is taught as part of the new ‘Culture and Citizenship’ course. There is a tension between objectives, time, and resources.
The other thing, too, that I think is important in terms of citizenship education is that we dispel the myth that civic engagement is primarily a knowledge issue: “If only people understood how the government worked, they would be more engaged.” That’s just not true. There are so many historical, social, and cultural reasons why a young person might feel disengaged from politics, and merely teaching them ‘about’ politics will not change anything. I think this goes back to something that’s been mentioned already: how can we introduce students to political knowledge through the context that matters to them? How can we encourage them to reflect on how knowledge helps them navigate their society?
Beatrice Wayne: I think that’s why some researchers and practitioners are moving to say civic intentionality rather than civic education, because it captures that larger framework – it goes beyond simply providing information about the different levels of government.
CPR: What are the roles that legislatures and civic-focused non-profits play in terms of engaging youth and fostering civic engagement more broadly within society? What are some of the challenges that come with that?
Greg Essensa: I think there’s a real opportunity to get youth engaged in the process, understanding the issues, understanding what each of the candidates and political parties offer as far as a perspective on how they wish to govern our great province here in Ontario. But, as others have said, having a voice and being able to participate in the democratic process is not accomplished just through voting.
When I’m at various speaking engagements, I’ll say to students that there are a whole manner of different ways to get involved in our democratic process. They can come and work for us. We hire 55,000 people for each general election. We’re always looking for people to work for us. Political parties are always looking for people to support them, so if there’s a particular party or candidate who you believe in their cause and you feel very strongly about, they’re always looking for people to come and get involved in the campaign and help candidates door knock. There’s lots of NGO programs and programs like Student Vote that students can get involved in and help organize in their school and run mock elections.
Engaging youth is a longer-term investment. We need to ensure by the time they’re ready and eligible to vote, they’re feeling like they are a contributing citizen by engaging in the democratic process.
Diane Vautour: I have a lot of experience with that, working with various organizations. I’ve worked with Samara Centre, CIVIX, Elections Ontario, Elections Canada, and the Ministry. I think it would benefit everybody to sit down and come together and make a common definition of what they mean by civic engagement. What would be some goals we have for students in Grade 10 civics or coming out of high school? My understanding of civic engagement can be very different from the understanding of a third party.
And, there is also a sense of competition between these organization to get the market share, if you will. I understand that to a certain degree. Whenever there’s a vacuum at the central level in the Ministry, it’s being filled by many different organizations who are all trying to do very good things. But, if I’m a teacher and if I don’t have much background in civics or time, I do need central direction provided to me so that I’m not doing things that are over the kids heads or never intended to be taught in civics.
I think there’s a missed opportunity in connecting with student councils in high schools. From my background with Elections Ontario, Quebec seems to be doing that a lot better. So, shout out to Quebec! They have toolkits that they send to their student councils. They used to have a large conference where all student councils from the province attended, and they shared ideas of how to encourage participation amongst their student bodies and to produce democratic school environments.
It’s a no brainer to me that you would be targeting student council and be holding events for them. I have not seen it happen. Maybe it is happening in smaller communities in the province, but I haven’t ever seen it happen in Toronto. There’s a very fixed mindset on getting the teacher’s attention. We don’t necessarily need to always do that. Yes, you need a teacher to facilitate it, but the students should be empowered. representatives should be engaged.
Part of being engaged means having a connection to a civic action project. If you’re pressed for time and choose a civic project out of a database for your class, it may not mean much for their neighbourhoods. It’s what I call a “Me to We effect” of what civic engagement is. That idea really took hold for many, many years. There was a global emphasis, which is great, but civic engagement should start in your neighbourhood, in your school, in your community, before you can move outside globally or that can happen in tandem. It’s a lost opportunity not to have students identify what are the action projects that exist, that have happened in their own communities. They often feel overwhelmed when you tell them to do a civic action project. Then, they’re like, “Oh, I can’t change the world.”
We need to find examples of things that are small. Somebody here in Toronto made a Citizens Minute for Hot Docs, trying to change the way that our public notices are printed in Toronto. They’re not very accessible. The language is not at a reading level that many people can read. They’re boring. They look boring. They’re big signs to get put up on condo developments. Nobody reads them, and they’re super important to neighbourhoods. This idea was just trying to make them better. And, so that’s something. But if you’re not really engaged yourself as a teacher, you’re not going to be thinking about this kind of stuff. You’re going to be thinking about, how can we build a school in Guatemala? That is fine, but it has to happen with other kinds of local initiatives.
Dimitri Pavlounis: I think the ever-expanding idea of what is ‘partisan’ or what is supposedly too political for the classroom is a burden for the teachers we work with. According to best practices, civic education should be authentic, and research shows that students benefit greatly from actively discussing difficult political issues in the classroom. But we’re at a moment when a lot of the issues young people want to discuss are highly contentious, and people sometimes read partisanship or political bias into the issues themselves. Some teachers have told us that they are actively discouraged from addressing some issues in class even if those issues are top of mind for students. This can prove challenging. We want to support teachers and encourage them to provide students with civic education in line with evidence- based best practices but, ultimately, they’re the ones delivering the programming and having to deal with any backlash from wherever it might come.
Heather Lank: Sometimes the extreme voices tend to be the loudest, right? Dimitri’s point about what could be seen as partisan is something we’ve had to contend with at the Library of Parliament. Our job is only possible if we have the trust of all political parties, without exception. If we lose that trust, essentially, we’re out of business. We need still to be able to say things that people might disagree with; it just can’t be along partisan lines.
Many, many years ago, when I was still working at the Senate, the Library wanted to develop a simulated committee process as a part of the program development for the Teachers Institute. We did it by writing a bill called the vegetable bill. It was about which vegetables should be banned from the dinner table. You could amend it by, for example, adding broccoli and taking off brussels sprouts.
But we were able to explain the process and the kids got super involved in the debate. We had kids represent different groups such as the vegetable growers. We developed a bill that you’d really have to work hard to get offended by. So, all the concepts could be captured without it triggering a complaint by parents or anybody else. We need, in this politically charged environment, to be creative and thoughtful about how we develop content. People being afraid to speak their minds is the exact opposite of what we want to teach about civic engagement.
Beatrice Wayne: Heather, I completely agree that we have to be creative in the way that we approach this material and do it in a way that doesn’t alienate people or make people feel outside of the discussion or the political process. But I’m also concerned about the reaction to try to avoid anything that could potentially be challenging. I do think that we have to be able to identify and try out classroom strategies where we can have productive conversations around challenging issues, and have everybody feel like they are heard in a respectful way. This takes a lot of trial and error and a lot of investment, but I think that should be the goal.
Heather Lank: I completely agree with you on that. You don’t want to remove all meaning to make it completely safe. In the case of vegetables, it was geared towards young kids who probably cared a lot about which vegetables are on their plate at dinner, though. That wasn’t the bill that we would necessarily propose for the 18-year-olds!
CPR: Is there anything that you would like to add?
Diane Vautour: There is a great organization called Youth and Philanthropy Initiative (YPI), goypi.org. I think they get it. They don’t necessarily have the ear of anybody that I can see, but they understand how to get kids learning about what it is relevant to them and how to engage all kinds of different kids, not just the superstars. Every kid can be successful at it and the teacher feels like they can implement the project because it’s so well-supported by the organization. I mean, Samara Centre is doing amazing work too. Different kind of audience, different kind of goal. But they are getting it. I’d just like to give them a shout out. Good work Beatrice!
Greg Essensa: I think it’s highly complementary from my perspective that the Canadian Parliamentary Review is speaking of this today. It is an important element for us. The youth are the future of not only our province but our country. We want to ensure that we are considering how we engage them, how we involve them and that they become truly engaged Canadians and Ontarians exercising that right to vote. So, I do applaud the Canadian Parliamentary Review board for having this type of topic because, quite frankly, I don’t think we do enough discussion where we look at differing perspectives and viewpoints on how we engage youth to become participating citizens.