Youth elect stress

American election stressing out Canadian youth

By CATHERINE MWITTA

Young Canadians feel uncertain about their future in light of the 2020 U.S. elections, says a Vancouver-based counsellor.

Tricia-Kay Williams, a counsellor at Metamorphose Counselling in Vancouver, said that Canadian youth are experiencing global stress.

“It’s definitely circumstantial with COVID-19 and the sort of political climate that we’re experiencing a global stress, a global grieving. So now you’re no longer stressed about your job or activities. Now you’re stressed about things happening across the world,” Williams said.

Many young Canadians like Michaela Peters, a volunteer at the Oct. 24 protests at the Vancouver Art Gallery in support of Mi’kmaq fishers and their rights, said that there has been an increasing “negative change” in the political climate since U.S. President Donald Trump’s election win in 2016.

Antoine St. Marie, a young Canadian who is a member of Fightback, an anti-capitalist organization, said the increasing political anxiety in Canada and the United States have affected youth very hard. “I think that has to do with [the fact] that we live in a society that doesn't offer people a future,” St. Marie said. “It doesn't surprise me that the system in crisis produces this kind of massive polarization.”