Why people who need help most lose out on election handout promises: Don Pittis

There is lots of research that shows the best thing you could do for the Canadian economy in the long run is to wipe out poverty and help young people.

While parties of the left and rightmay identify differing strategies to do it, most politicians know poverty and youth-gone-wrongare bad for the country as a whole. Theycontribute to crime and poor healthoutcomes andcreate a lingering burden on the better off parts of the economy.

But experts who have studied the phenomenonsay something strange happens to those good intentions during elections. They say the calculus of winning forces political parties that want to win into narrowing their focus to the richer and the older.

"In our system, once the election thinking takes over, the professionals take over in a sense and their basic goal is to maximize returns, in other words, 'How do we maximize the number of seats we can win?'" says Henry Milner, a scholar who has written extensively on Canadian and Quebec democracy.

The essential goal of those professional campaign organizers, the shadowypeople behind the politicianscharged with getting their candidates elected, is toidentify undecided voters and appeal to the majority ofthem.

"Very seldom are those young people or poor people," says Milner, author of The Internet Generation:Engaged Citizens or Political Dropouts, who has a research chair in electoral studies at the University of Montreal.

Voting at 16?

Repeated studies in Canada and elsewhere have shown that younger and poorer people don't exercise their right to vote at the same rate as those who are older and wealthier.

While most Canadian electoral research doesn't focusdirectlyon incomeincluding the2016 Statistics Canada report on the risein voting turnouts between the 2011 and the most recent 2015 federal electionproxies for incomesuch as education levels and home ownership show it happens here as well.

According to Milner, it may be that young and poorer people are focused on factors other than electoral politics. Poorer people may be in ethnic subgroups, busy withlives in turmoil orwithout a tradition of political participation.

Similarly when young people hit voting age at 18 they are often at an unstable point. Having just finished high school, they are struggling to find work or housing or finding their way in relationships andpost-secondary eduction.

That's why one of Milner's proposals is to experiment with a voting age of 16 toinculcate the tradition of voting while young peopleare stillembedded in a relatively stable life of home and school.

Milner says not being exposed to traditional sources of Canadiannews such as radio, TV or newspapers may also makea difference.

"The internet yes, if you are interested in [politics] you can find it easily, but if you're not interested particularly, it is just so easy to avoid it entirely," saysMilner.

However there are signs political leaders should be wary of assuming young voters are ill-informed when issues arise that strike a chord. The CBC site for Snapchat, the source used by some of the youngest media viewers, got hundreds of thousands of hits within a few hours following the Justin Trudeau brownfacestory.

Youth issues

"You could have a special case where an issue comes up that really affects young people," says Milner. "One might argue that climate change may be emerging as such."

Milner is convinced Trudeau's image as a youthful outsider who young voters could identify with was partly responsible for a recovery from the lowest levels. Election experts will be waiting anxiously to see whether, once drawn into the election process, they will vote again this time.

The other reason that long-term economic proposals are not directed atthe young is that there's evidenceyounger people don't pay attention, tending to live in the moment. However, economic issues that affect young people directly, such as sharp rises in tuition in Quebec, attracted the attention ofyoung voters.

Another long-time scholar of the electoral process, Keith Banting, currently at the School of Policy Studies at Ontario's Queen's University, says a new feeling of anxietyamong the Canadian middle class has made politicians wary of explicitly targetingeconomic policy toward the poor.

"It's not a surprise to me that we have over the last 20 years shifted our priorities from helping the poor to helping people who are under pressure in the broad middle class," saysBanting.

Redistribution by stealth

In Canada too, says Banting, anti-poverty policies, while good for the economy over the long term, are simply not politically sustainable. Instead, Canada's parties, which all cling to the political centreand realize the benefits of bringing the poorest into the more active part of the Canadian economy, indulge in something Bantingcalls "redistribution by stealth."

As an example, Bantingrecalls an eight-page Liberal Party document on child benefit payments which would clearly helppoor people the most but was also clearly addressed to the better off people whose political support the partyneeded.

"The word poverty did not appear in the document but it was sold as helping the middle class and, quote, those struggling hard to join us."

Follow Don on Twitter @don_pittis