“Thanks for voting,” says Cohen Francis, acknowledging a Grade 4 student who successfully folded their ballot as they’d been shown and tipped it into the voting box.
Francis is in Grade 9. On Monday, November 25, his class at the Halifax Independent School led the provincial edition of the Student Vote program for their school.
The program uses elections as teachable moments for students under voting age to learn about the roles and responsibilities of governments and elected officials—and the roles and responsibilities of voters. The results from this program are helpful in knowing what the next generation of voters wants and cares about, and how that might differ from their parents and families.
On Student Vote Day, which varies from school to school but comes before the end of the actual election day—in this case, Tuesday Nov 26—students cast ballots for the candidates of their choosing based on who is running in their school’s electoral district. The results of their votes are then shared publicly after the general election. They’re in-depth. They include the overall seat count and popular vote for each party, as well as results by electoral district and individual school tallies.
For Francis’s school, student vote day was Monday. Three voting stations were set up in a large classroom, and students from Grades 3 through 8 cycled in to cast their ballots for candidates in their district of Halifax-Chebucto.
For Francis, the fun part was “seeing how many kids actually want to vote—we’ve only had one kid not want to so far.” Outside the doors of the voting room, students in Grades 3 and 4 sat on a bench waiting for their turn. One of Francis’s classmates asked the group, “Does everyone remember who the four parties are?”
The team behind Student Vote is the non-partisan Toronto-based charitable organization CIVIX, which runs several programs geared towards building knowledge of elections, government spending, the role of elected officials and digital media literacy.
Ahead of elections, CIVIX sends learning materials to registered schools specific to their ongoing election, and lets each school determine its own lesson and voting day structure.
Dan Allan, chief program officer for CIVIX, tells The Coast that the materials schools receive are digital and bilingual, and modified to match accessibility and accommodation needs. Schools are also sent ballots, ballot boxes and voting screens to set up on the day of the vote.
Allan says Elections Nova Scotia and the province’s Department of Education and Early Childhood Development helped fund the program, which has seen over 200 schools participate across all 55 electoral districts, mostly in Grades 4 to 12.
“There are some schools who do an alternative activity for younger grades where they might vote for animals,” says Allen, “but we try to encourage it to be Grades 4 and up because that way we know that the students are actually going to know what they’re participating in.”
In Nova Scotia, this just happened for the municipal elections, so the provincial Student Vote was able to build on that. It was Nova Scotia’s largest municipal Student Vote to date, with 15,000 students from 124 casting their ballots in 28 races.
Student Vote elected Andy Fillmore as mayor, matching the general election results. The 7,674 students casting ballots from 55 schools in the HRM gave Fillmore 29.1% of the vote—less than the 42.5% he earned in the official election, but still enough to win in the crowded field of 16 candidates. Halifax Independent School also elected Fillmore as mayor, but HIS students differed from the official results for District 8 representative, when they elected Trayvone Clayton as their councillor, who lost in the general election to Virginia Hinch.
In this election, 18,445 student voters from 158 schools have re-elected the PC Party of Nova Scotia with 41.1% of the popular vote, and Houston won his Pictou East seat.
Students chose the Nova Scotia NDP as the official opposition, with 12 seats and 26.2% of the popular vote and Chender won her seat in Dartmouth South. The Liberals won third place, with 26.1% of the vote and five seats, while Churchill lost his Yarmouth seat, and Independent candidate Elizabeth Smith-McCrossin won back her seat in Cumberland North.
In the electoral district of Halifax-Chebucto, the HIS split with their district—who elected PC candidate Tonya Malay—and picked NDP candidate Krista Gallagher with 39.82% of the votes.
For Francis’s class, teaching younger students about the provincial elections started with the basics. “We had a slide show, which had the pictures of all the candidates and the party symbols,” he tells The Coast. “We went over, ‘if you see a blue sign, that means it’s Progressive Conservative, and these are the conservative people you can vote for in our area’—and some of them got that, some didn’t.”
His class summarized the party platforms for the PCs, Liberals, NDP and Green Party based on Student Vote materials and videos from each party leader responding to five student questions on affordability, healthcare, education, safety and priorities.
For some parties, Francis said it was easier to summarize what they stood for “because they provided detail.” For others, “they were very quick, and they weren’t really that in-depth of what they were actually trying to do. I think I could say the Liberal and NDP, most of the time, provided good information, so it was easy to say, ‘this is what they stand for.’”
Francis said he voted for the party he wanted to elect based on their leaders’ responses and party platform, then traced that back to decide which candidate to vote for in his district.
Before the Student Vote program, Francis said, “I would just vote for whoever names look the best. If there’s a funny name, I’ll vote for them.”
Now, he’s encouraging his classmates and younger students to get excited about voting. “I know a lot more now about how voting works, how you have to win a district and then that’s a seat, and just how that whole system works.”
He says it was exciting to see the younger students getting into it, as he had. “If you really have no idea who you want to vote for, and you feel like you don’t want to vote, that’s your choice,” he says. “But I really feel like you should vote.”
Another Grade 9 student, Scarlett Stevenson, presented the Student Vote lessons to the Grade 7 and 8 classes.
“We told them about the parties and the party platforms, and then we highlighted who’s representing the parties in the district,” she says. Students asked Stevenson questions like, what are MLAs, and what is their role? She says she’s influenced about who to vote for by talking with her parents, and by what she’s learned researching each party candidate.
She agreed with Francis that some leaders “put a lot more thought and effort” into answering students’ questions in the videos they got from them.
When it came to leaders talking about education, Stevenson says, “I think a lot of them were a little optimistic.” Although her school is small and private, and doesn’t necessarily experience the same things as public schools, she’s heard from friends at these schools, especially in high schools, that issues surrounding student support and school violence are real things she’d like the provincial leaders to consider.
She’ll graduate and head to Citadel High School next year, so she was especially interested in hearing how all four leaders discussed this: “I feel a little selfish for it, but it’s just human nature.”
As for her vote, Stevenson says, “personally, I don’t align with [Progressive Conservative leader] Tim Houston’s party’s values, and, normally, I’m somewhere between Liberal and NDP, but Claudia Chandler and the whole NDP party seem like stronger leaders, and they seemed like they were more thought-out in their video replies.
“They were a lot more in-depth, and I found the Green Party and the Liberals—they were kind of brief.”
Sabine Morris is another Grade 9 student at HIS. She said the school’s vote, though not official, does count for something and that parties should pay attention to it.
“We’re the future voters.”
After participating in and leading two nearly back-to-back Student Vote programs at her school, Morris says she’s now comfortable having her view on who to vote for and involving herself in election conversations.
“I really think it’s important for students to be educated about this and what’s happening around them—and what might happen—and use this to make an opinion of what they might do in the future.”
While the voting age in Canada is 18, people can register to work for a political party at age 14. Morris says participating in this program has excited her for the next time she can vote.
“Before, if I wasn’t educated, I was just like, ‘oh, I don’t really know anything about it, so why would I vote?’ But I think it’s definitely good to know, now, that I can be a part of this and I can have my say in what’s going to happen.”
Thus, the snap election has been fortuitous for student voters, both under and over the voting age. Post-secondary students have also been able to participate in the provincial election, and this would have been much harder if Progressive Conservative leader Tim Houston had kept his 2021 promise of a July 15 fixed election date.
In October 2021, when Houston introduced the July fixed election date amendment to the Elections Act, then New Democrat leader Gary Burill and Halifax NDP members of the legislature Lisa Lachance and current party leader Claudia Chender raised concerns about how this would affect student voters. Burrill, the current MLA for Halifax-Chebucto, read letters from then-Grade 9 students at Halifax Independent School in the Law Amendments Committee about how a provincial election happening during the summer break from school meant they would miss out on participating in the vote.
Those students are now in Grade 12. Happily for the current Grade 9 students at the HIS, the snap election and broken promise on the summer fixed election date meant they had a chance—albeit not much time—to gather Student Vote materials on provincial elections, parties, roles and responsibilities and teach those to their younger schoolmates. Their school is a non-profit private school, so students have an additional task of understanding how public education funding and programs apply to them.
Meghan Nixon teaches the Grade 9 students who run the vote. She organized the letter-writing campaign back in 2021 and says this year, on Friday, November 29, her class will write letters to their current and incoming members of the legislature asking for the free student bus pass program to be extended to them, as well. Right now, it only covers students in public schools
This article appears in Nov 7-30, 2024.
