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Chris Selley: Why so shy about running for Parliament, Avi Lewis?

For the NDP, there are two theoretically winnable byelections coming up. The party leader should want to run in one

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There has been minor hubbub this week down at the Laurentian Tennis and Raquet Club — not a real place — over a new Abacus Data poll suggesting a generational divide among Canadians when it comes to their most basic views on democracy. Among poll respondents aged 60-plus, 78 per cent felt “democracy is always preferable to any other kind of government.” Among 18-to-29-year-olds, it was just 43 per cent. In that same younger cohort, fully 13 per cent agreed that “for someone like me, it doesn’t matter what kind of government we have.”

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Those certainly aren’t encouraging numbers. But I don’t think they’re necessarily evidence of some failure of civics education, as former cabinet minister Jason Kenney and several commentators suggested. I thought Conservative Senator Leo Housakos hit much closer to the mark, arguing the findings should be “a red flag to all of us who play a role in public institutions that we need to be better.”

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