The British government's proposal to lower the voting age from 18 to 16 before its next general election has reignited debate over the issue in Canada.Arlyn McAdorey/Reuters

Is it time to raise the voting age?

The question may seem impertinent: Lately the discussion has tended more in the opposite direction. The recent proposal by Britain’s Labour government to lower the voting age from 18 to 16 has set off another flurry of debate over whether Canada and other countries should follow suit.

Advocates tend to talk about it as if it were inevitable, the logical next step after lowering the voting age from 21 to 18, as many countries did in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

And yet in all that time almost no one has taken that step. Should Labour’s proposal pass into law, Britain would become just the second OECD country to give children the unrestricted right to vote in national elections. (Austria is the other. Greece allows 17-year-olds to vote in certain circumstances. Scotland, Wales, Estonia, Israel and Germany allow it in subnational elections.)

So it is, at the least, an objectively radical step. It is one, moreover, that is at odds with other legal and social trends. The age at which a person is deemed able to consent to sex, in law, has been rising, not falling, in recent decades, in Canada (where it was raised to 16 from 14 in 2006) and elsewhere.

So, too, has the age at which someone can be held fully responsible for their crimes. Indeed, the push is on to treat accused persons as old as 24 as “emerging adults,” eligible to be tried as juveniles, as they are in many European countries. (It would be amusing to discover how many of those who insist, correctly, that a child lacks the reasoning capacity to be tried in adult court also think they should be given the vote.)

No one is proposing to lower the age at which it is legal to consume alcohol: Again, the trend has been, if anything, to raise it, reversing the trend of earlier decades. The federal government recommended, as part of its legalization package, a minimum age of 18 for consumption of cannabis. Most provinces set it at 19; Quebec, at 21.

Likewise for military service: the........

© The Globe and Mail