Know your nation: Why political literacy is for everyone and how to get there
By Anya Bredenkamp, January 21 2026—
As you can probably guess, I have a lot of opinions. And my opinion about opinions is that they are absolutely necessary in a civilized and intelligent society. So when I spoke to my mom in early 2025 about the upcoming federal election, and she replied “I’ll vote for whoever your dad tells me to vote for,” I was confused, to say the least.
Let me break down why this is a bigger issue than it appears.
It unfortunately may not seem like something significant, but her response has stuck with me ever since, because that kind of broader political dissociation is problematic. She went on to tell me that she just didn’t care about that kind of stuff, and I fear she isn’t the only one.
This opinion-less population is dangerous, because it creates a population unaware of how the nation is running and their role within it. And the only logical thing that happens next is a complacent population. As students at a school as prominent as the University of Calgary, and therefore representing the future of Canada, it is imperative that political literacy is not placed on the backburner.
Your vote directly impacts things like where your tax dollars go. Take a look at Budget 2025. Personally, my favourite proposals are things like the $925.6M over 5 years for public AI infrastructure, for example, or $20.4B for military recruiting and “generational pay raises,” or a revised immigration plan of $168.2M (due to lost fee revenue). All of these actions have been proposed by our Liberal government, if you didn’t know, alongside various others. And all of these actions appeal to growth I want to see as a citizen in Canada.
People online have been giving the new budget a lot of attention because the Carney government is shaking up an already teetering system. It’s easy to get rage-baited and fear-mongered online when people are talking about things as serious as this, and especially so if you have no context or background in the subject. But take heart: politics really isn’t all that mysterious and intimidating, and is actually quite accessible.
The government is operated somewhat like a mega-business. They have revenue streams, budgets, lawyers, quotas and people relying on their services. Which makes us Canadians the stakeholders.
As an example of fear-mongering content, during recent LinkedIn scrolls, I’ve noticed people crashing out over the gloomy deficit. When the audience is the average voter, a deficit is simple: the amount of money the government spends, but does not have. According to the 2025 budget, that number is set to start at $78.3 billion and decrease to $56.6 billion by the 2029-2030 period.
These are hard facts, but there are many ways to interpret this. Think what you want about those deficit projections, but personally I see a nearly $21 million decrease as optimistic, considering that these numbers rely on everything in the budget running according to plan. As we know, that is rare for economies at our scale. But who am I.
If I were you, I would consider things like the consequences of a deficit, whether this is an increase or not from recent years and why that might be, what similar international economies look like and if the planned spending is on something I agree to be sustainable and profitable.
Now as an IR major, I won’t pretend to know anything substantial about this, so the next best thing is to listen to the professionals. One professional, the interim Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) who is an appointed and independent reporting body, is my first stop. During a Government Operations and Estimates hearing (minute 25:50), the PBO described the projected spending as “stupifying, shocking…not a funny fiscal outlook.” This, accompanied by some of his other statements on the matter, are continually informing my opinion.
A debt-to-GDP ratio, or similarly a deficit, is only one number, but you can consider it a snapshot of an entire budget, and understanding what makes the multi-billion-dollar difference is essential.
I’m not here to tell you to love or hate the budget, but that you should try and make your own opinion on it. If I’m being honest, it isn’t the most thrilling way to pass the time, but the government is telling us exactly what they want to do, and it is essentially meant to inform your votes. If you decide that this budget makes no sense for what you would like to see in Canada, then you take that to the polls. Maybe sign a petition.
As we saw in Budget 2025, our government spends an incredible sum of money, and although the student population may not be contributing very many dollars to these initiatives, these policies lay the foundation for what we can expect down the road. Taxes are not optional, and your vote shouldn’t be either.
The best way to stay informed is to do the research yourself. I hate to break it to you, but TikTok should not be your primary source of information. If it is, I’m afraid that you’re likely missing out on a lot of information that a 10 second clip won’t give you. I encourage you to go to the Government of Canada website and read about policies and initiatives with your own eyes, and then form your own positions on them. This allows you to do things like reading the actual, hard-copy of Budget 2025, rather than hoping you get the full picture from an article or clip about it. Another great source is CPAC, which posts the streamed sessions of parliamentary debates, question periods, hearings, and committee meetings. A useful tool I regularly utilize is ChatGPT to make sense of concepts that I am unfamiliar with. It takes time, but my understanding grows.
At the end of the day, these are just my opinions as your fellow undergraduate student, but I encourage every Canadian, especially the youth, to look into policies that determine the future of Canada. Taking a few of my suggestions above will be a good place to start on the path to becoming an informed voter. It doesn’t matter what your political leaning is, but not having an opinion is a silent killer. The more people that have no opinion means less people holding the government accountable. And if we don’t have that, if we deny our duty as citizens, we are powerless.
This article is a part of our Opinions section and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Gauntlet editorial board.