B.C. students lean to the left. Is that leadership?

If I were a B.C. resident, realizing that my children and their classmates at school were the only ones in the country whose mock election ballots did not match those of their parents, I'm not sure how I'd like it.

Goodness knows (and so does my family) that my lifelong attempts at raising a brood of rampant socialist ideologues hasn't quite worked out. But that's just me. 

Oh well, there's always the grandchildren.

But in British Columbia, politics has always been half-art, half-sport. (Alberta may have had a short spell of Bible Bill Aberhart, but B.C. can boast no less than Amor de Cosmos and Bill Vander Zalm as resident in their Hall of Fame).

As well, you'd kind of expect kids to experiment with rejecting their parents values by rejecting their politics in mock votes, taken while studying their provincial elections at school.

For 10 years now, the Student Vote program has been enhancing provincial social studies curricula, by engaging a parallel provincial election campaign for students from Grade 1 through High School — all across the country.

Students take part in a mock vote, operated much like the adult vote.

Their votes are generally taken just before the real vote, counted and held secret until after the provincial election, for which all their parents line up at the polls in order to do their civic duty.

You wouldn't want the outcome of informed students, who actually watched debates, made signs and campaigned, to influence the choices of adults.

In every region of the country, the student voters have predicted the outcomes of the provincial elections, says Tayler Gunn, who founded the Student Vote program, and who has kept track of more than three million votes in 19 mock elections across Canada.

Except in B.C. In that province, the students tend to select the loser. Or rather, the students in B.C. tend to vote to the left of their parents.

Who do you credit, the parents, or the public education system?

In the B.C. campaign, which ended in Tuesday's vote, there was a lot to interest students. Environmental concerns, and interprovincial pipelines figured large in the debates.

Objectively, it's easier for parties on the left to make promises that students would tend to approve concerning greenhouse gasses, alternative energy sources, recycling and defying the multinational corporations.

Call me idealistic, but I expect younger people to see environmental questions in green and white, where parents, who pay for the link between energy and the economy out of their own pockets tend to see things more in shades of green.

Likewise, the link between taxation and services (like education), which also figured in the provincial campaign.

Viewed in that light, instead of wondering why B.C. kids vote strongly pro-environment and pro-services, like education, I think Gunn should be asking aloud why students in the rest of Canada tend not to vote just a bit left of their parents.

At any rate, Gunn and the Student Vote program are doing our education programs a good service.

Perhaps keeping the data would be difficult, but it would be interesting to discover if following provincial elections during school years translates into increased interest in political events, participation and voting, in adulthood.

Or do we compartmentalize, keeping school separate from non-school? There's no telling how much Shakespeare I've forgotten over the years, and I know my Math 30 is like, gone, forever. I can't even read a high school math text today, much less figure out the questions. (Have you tried recently? It's not even English!)

Either way, if the supper-table conversation sometimes turns to “how was your day at school?” having the kids inject a little political leadership at home might be a good thing.

Especially, it seems, in B.C.