New Majority is healing Canada’s democracy one young person at a time

December 2025

How do we help young Canadians dealing with an affordability crisis, a mental health crisis and the existential dread of a climate crisis to participate in democracy? That’s the question New Majority seeks to solve each day.

New Majority is a national nonpartisan, non-profit organization that focuses on helping unengaged young voters get their democratic wings. Much of their work is around voting, but it also means connecting young people with their community or elected officials at the municipal, provincial and federal levels through innovative campaigns and programming.

“At the systemic level, we’ve seen increasing distrust in political systems and elections,” says Amanda Munday, Executive Director at New Majority. “We can’t fix trust in institutions overnight, but we can bring more people into participating, so they have some lived experience and personal connection to democracy. Our focus is on the growing group of people who say [democracy and elections are] overwhelming.”

In 2024-2025, across one federal, seven provincial and two municipal elections, the New Majority team had conversations with more than 200,000 young Canadians and encouraged nearly 100,000 of those people to commit to voting.

New Majority’s polling data, from publications like their Youth Perspectives Survey, tell us that only 4% of youth are unwilling to vote. “We hear in the media or through different channels that young people don’t see the value in voting. That’s not what our data shows,” says Munday. “When we go onto the ground in an unbiased way and talk to young people, it’s more that they don’t know an election is happening or they don’t know how to vote.”

New Majority’s specialty is drawing interested youth in and directing that enthusiasm and energy into purposeful action. Community Connectors is a program where youth are paid $150 to spend six hours having conversations with their own friends to make vote plans and boost voter turnout.

On average, those Connectors make vote plans with 30 of their personal contacts. The program has reached 10,000 people overall. New Majority then uses many of those Connectors to work on other campaigns. “Once they come in and experience the magic of convincing a non-voter to get to the polls, there’s a lot of people who come back to be canvassers or [work on] phone banks,” says Munday. And all our work is paid, which is critically important when youth unemployment was at 17.9% this past summer.”

Here’s what it looks like in action. In 2023 and 2024 New Majority ran a campaign in Mississauga, ON that began with an existing contact list gathered through voting pledges. They assembled a group of 50 volunteers to lobby constituents to ask Mississauga City Council to approve green development standards and on April 8, 2024 – the day of the total solar eclipse – Council unanimously passed the [resolution] and cited youth engagement as a key to council voting unanimously in favor.

New Majority then immediately recruited those volunteers as canvassers for the municipal by-election that was happening the following month. “We went from one campaign right into electoral mobilization and … into issues that young people care about. All to build trust that the systems do work,” adds Munday.

With funding from the Catherine Donnelly Foundation, New Majority is also exploring a broader non-partisan role for the organization to address the democracy sector’s biggest gaps and move forward in collaboration with other key players. “New Majority started to connect with other national democracy and civil society organizations to look at the ways in which democracy in Canada has failed certain groups and to ask what potential collaboration looks like,” says Munday.

They are conducting in-depth interviews with sector leaders to Identify common barriers, areas of overlap, and opportunities for collaboration. They will synthesize findings from the interviews and produce a report that proposes ways to work together.

Organizations are already finding common ground. “Everyone is saying the same thing,” says Munday. “We need to be working together more collaboratively. We need to understand who isn’t here … and who needs to be in the room, and we need to figure out what our sector strategy will look like.”

And when contemplating Canada’s struggle to save democracy, Munday is convinced that New Majority’s approach to in-person engagement and providing opportunities for further civic action is an essential approach that’s transferable to other groups, especially those who have too often been excluded.

“I really believe that for young people who feel so hopeless … we have an answer to provide them some sense of control. And it’s voting,” says Munday. “Sure, politicians don’t listen to young people, but the way to change that is for them to show up. I believe we’ll continue to see a rise in turnout by going with what we’ve been successful at. It works, so we’re going to keep doing it.”