Are Canadian students apolitical?
Avoiding politics until the consequences catch up.
On February 14, more than 350,000 Iranian-Canadians and allies flooded the streets of Toronto, marching for a country most of them no longer live in—or have never stepped foot into. Toronto police called it one of the largest demonstrations in the city’s history. That alone should have forced a reckoning on Canadian campuses.
But, it didn’t. The problem is not that Canadian students are apolitical. It’s that they are comfortable enough to pretend they are.
The protest for Iran was not symbolic. Demonstrators spoke openly about friends imprisoned, families targeted, and people killed for dissent. That is what politics looks like when it is not optional. And yet, on Canadian campuses, politics still feels like a choice. Why?
Why is it that hundreds of thousands can mobilize for a crisis thousands of kilometres away, while Canadian students struggle to organize around issues shaping their own futures? Why does urgency never exist with us, and for us?
The answer is not ignorance, but insulation.
Canadian students are not disengaged because they do not understand politics. They are disengaged because they have not been forced to experience its consequences in ways that demand action. In Canada’s 2021 federal election, voter turnout among those aged 18 to 24 was just 46.7 percent, significantly lower than any other age groups. For the youth, politics still exists at a distance, contained within lectures, headlines, and occasional moments of outrage.
That distance creates the illusion of neutrality. But still, neutrality is not what is happening here. What is happening is avoidance. Because the moment politics becomes unavoidable, when it determines whether you can speak freely, whether your family is safe, whether your future is possible, you do not debate it. You respond, whether you want to or not.
That is why 350,000 people showed up for Iran. Not because they are “more” political. Because they have less of a choice for silence and distance. This is what Canadian students refuse to confront. We do not lack awareness, we lack urgency.
We critique systems in classrooms, circulate arguments online, and reduce politics to discussion rather than action. We treat engagement as something expressive rather than necessary, something to perform, not something to commit to.
And then we wonder why nothing changes!
The protests we see in the streets exposed a reality that many Canadian students are still trying to avoid: politics has always shaped people’s lives.
However, that distance is shrinking. Protests are no longer rare. Toronto police report that demonstrations now occur weekly, sometimes daily, driven by an increasingly polarized global environment. Global conflict no longer stays contained. It moves through migration, through communities, through cities like Toronto. And as it does, the line between what is “political” and what is “personal” begins to collapse.
Housing costs, tuition increases, and labour instability are not abstract trends. They are political decisions with material consequences. They are already reshaping what students can afford, where they can live, and what futures feel possible. The only difference is that, for many Canadian students, the impact is still gradual enough to ignore. For now.
But when politics are no longer gradual—when their consequences become immediate, visible, and unavoidable—the illusion of detachment disappears quickly. When that happens, the question will not be: why is everything suddenly political? The question will be: why have we waited so long to take it seriously?
The truth is simple, Canadian students are not less political than the people in the streets. They simply think that they are less affected by politics, but this won’t last as a reality.
