Arts community more than James North

A group of prominent arts community organizers, entertainers and academics say young people must become more engaged in civic matters as Hamilton grows as an arts and entertainment hub.

"Young people are open to a lot of ideas of change, but in some ways they are also living in an eternal present and don't know the things that might be different in the future," said McMaster University political science associate professor Peter Graefe.

"If you take people from my generation or younger than me, they vote at about 20 percentage points lower than people who were born before the Second World War."

It's not that young people are apathetic or unengaged in the world, but that they have little understanding of how politics work, he said.

Graefe was one of eight panellists on a roundtable on the arts organized by the Hamilton Civic League, whose mission is to get Hamiltonians more engaged in the municipal election this fall.

"Young people don't have a sense of shame about not voting in the way that older cohorts might have had," Graefe said.

The panel delved into two key arts community issues -- whether city hall should get do more to support the arts and whether downtown should be the focus of creative enterprise development.

"There are some things they do well, and some things they do horribly," Jeremy Freiburger, executive director of the non-profit Imperial Cotton Centre For the Arts, said of the city.

He said that having worked on arts reports for the city, it has been "jawdropping" how little city hall knew about the true scope and impact of the city's cultural industries.