You Can Put An Under-age Voter In the Voters Booth But You Cannot Employ Him

Don't empower him but DO empower yourself:

Over the weekend, the Ontario Liberal Party held a nomination race to select their candidate for the upcoming provincial byelection in Scarborough Southwest. Ahsanul Hafiz took 718 votes on the third ballot to defeat current Liberal MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, who received 699 votes.

This outcome shouldn’t shock anyone who was paying attention.

Erskine-Smith was perceived as the front-runner because he has a big profile, gets lots of media attention, and was endorsed last minute by Prime Minister Mark Carney. Why Carney would endorse Erskine-Smith and get involved in a messy nomination race is beyond me — he now wears part of this defeat.

Despite all of this, Erskine-Smith evokes a strong reaction among many Liberals who don’t like him and want to stop him from being leader of the Ontario Liberals.

On the flip side. Hafiz, the guy who actually won, has served as vice-president of the federal Liberal Party, has been involved in organizing local politics, and is a successful businessman. Folks call Hafiz “the pizza guy” for good reason — he owns about 30 Domino’s Pizza locations across Ontario, that’s a track record of delivering.

Ahead of the vote on Saturday, it was reported that Hafiz and fellow contender Qadira Jackson had come to an agreement that they would encourage each other’s supporters to rank the other as second choice. On Saturday afternoon, images were circulating on social media showing a slip of paper — a sample ballot in English and Bengali — showing people how to rank the candidates with Hafiz first and Jackson second, with no vote for the other two candidates.

This has led to a lot of discussion about ethnic voting blocs, and there is a lot to discuss there, but the crazy part no one is discussing is the part that the Ontario Liberals — and pretty much every other party — needs to address.

The Ontario Liberal Party lets non-citizens — even those who are underage — vote in their nomination and leadership races.

Before you get too upset about this being a Liberal issue, the Ontario PC Party, the Ontario New Democrats and the Green Party of Ontario all allow the same thing. To varying degrees, the same can be said for every major federal party in the House of Commons.

According to Elections Ontario, you must be 18 years of age, a Canadian citizen, and a resident of Ontario to be able to vote in a provincial election.

To vote in any nomination race, for any of the major provincial parties, there is no requirement to be a citizen or even a permanent resident. The Liberals, PCs and Greens require anyone voting to be at least 14, while the NDP will allow 13-year-olds to vote.

Shouldn’t it all be simple: To vote in a nomination race or a leadership race for a party, you should have to be able to vote in the provincial election.

None of the parties — provincial or federal — have learned anything from the Hogue Commission into foreign interference. During that public inquiry, the commission heard evidence about Chinese students being bussed into the riding of Don Valley North in 2019 with instructions from the Chinese consulate to vote for Han Dong.

Dong has always denied knowing anything about this, but the evidence is clear that it did happen whether he knew or not.

“This incident makes clear the extent to which nomination contests can be gateways for foreign states who wish to interfere in our democratic process,” Commissioner Marie-Josee Hogue wrote.

I’m not alleging foreign interference in the Scarborough Southwest nomination race, but we shouldn’t need to wait for this to happen again to change the rules. Parties always want the rules on voting as loose as possible, if it suits them, and they all play into ethnic vote banking to try to win in certain ridings. Even if all the parties changed the rules to the same ones we use in a general election, that would still be happening.

What we can and should stop, though, is even the possibility that people who aren’t eligible to vote in general elections are choosing our next candidates or leader. If you want to vote, become a Canadian citizen, and wait until you turn 18.

 

Ignoring or changing the rules, or simply not having them, has allowed political corruption to fester.

And here we are.

But these youthful ballot-stuffers cannot work in Canada, though:

The Canadian economy has lost 112,000 jobs just since January. That’s the weakest four-month stretch since the pandemic. The unemployment rate has climbed to 6.9 per cent.

But a closer look at the numbers released Friday by Statistics Canada reveals two even more disturbing trends.

The job losses in the first four months of 2026 were “almost entirely concentrated in full-time work.” And young workers were harder hit by layoffs than any other age group.

Our economy has lost 111,000 full-time jobs just since January. This is concerning because full-time employees are often the top providers for their families. Having them out of work is a particular strain on families and communities.

Equally concerning, though, is the spike in youth unemployment. Young workers (those under 24) saw their unemployment rate jump to 14.3 per cent from 13.8 per cent. In 2020, before the pandemic, that rate hovered around 10 per cent.

Among workers 15 to 19, the rate is nearer 20 per cent.

According to the Fraser Institute, workers 15 to 24 have seen their unemployment rate drive up by 57 per cent in just that last three years. Whereas it took these same young workers around 10 weeks to find a job in 2022, it now takes an average 16 weeks.

Canada’s young people are also over 40 per cent less likely to have jobs than their American counterparts. Among G7 countries, only France has slightly higher youth unemployment.

Try finding a first job after high school or college, or finding a summer job to pay for tuition and books in the fall. ...

For instance, since 2020 the number of young, temporary students admitted to Canada has nearly quadrupled. From 2022 to 2024, the number of student visas issued by the Liberal government totalled nearly 900,000. 

But they’re students, you say. Where’s the harm?

Most of them were only technically students. They were registered for classes at career or community colleges. And I’m sure many of them attended. But the Liberals’ rules at the time enabled them to work up to 40 hours a week (now it’s 24 hours) and to stay up to two years after finishing their studies, even if that was only a six-month business diploma.

In reality, these students were another category of temporary foreign worker.

So young workers, who are the last to be hired and the first to be laid off, were quickly squeezed out of the job market. It’s not a coincidence that the spike in youth unemployment in Canada corresponds exactly with the Liberal tsunami of foreign student visas.

The other reason youth unemployment is too high is the Liberals’ record of anemic economic growth.

Through extremist environmental policies, deference to First Nations in the name of reconciliation and a high-tax, high-regulation regime, the Liberals have cost the Canadian economy nearly $1 trillion in lost investment since 2015. That has led to the slowest growth in the OECD, the organization of the world’s 38 most-developed countries.

If young people are the last to get hired and the economy is growing at a snail’s pace, there are simply going to be a lot of unemployed young people.

That can have long-term effects. As the old saying goes, you can’t get a job without experience and you can’t get experience without a job. Workers who don’t find full-time jobs before age 25 may never make up the lost income.

The lack of jobs, the lack of opportunities and other crises (such the crisis in housing affordability), may well create a generation a substantial portion of whom has little hope which has all sorts of implications for politics, voting and public policy.

** 

Canada's unemployment rate rose to a six-month high in April to 6.9% as the economy lost a net 17,700 jobs, Statistics Canada data showed on Friday, indicating continued ‌weakness in a labor market that has struggled in the face of U.S. tariffs and trade uncertainty.

Analysts polled ‌by Reuters had predicted a net gain of 15,000 jobs and an unemployment rate of 6.7%, almost mirroring the data from March, when employment rose by ​14,100 and the jobless rate was unchanged.

The Bank of Canada said in its Monetary Policy Report last month that indicators such as the employment rate, hours worked and job vacancies suggest there is slack, or underutilized capacity, in the labor market, although layoffs remain modest.

 

 But not a foreign workforce.

Right ...