The Canadian province of Alberta is basically the only place in all of North America that gets it right across the board. Legal age limits there are as follows:
- Alcohol: 18
- Tobacco and Vaping: 18
- Cannabis: 18
- Gambling: 18
- Guns: 18
- Voting: 18
- Run for office: 18
- General age of majority: 18
- School leaving age: 16
- Driving: 14 for learner permit, 16 for GDL, and 18 for full unrestricted license
- All other age limits: similar to the rest of Canada and the USA overall (at or below 18)
- Curfew: None at provincial level, only locally in a few towns here and there (usually 15)
In other words, 18 is the age of majority, and once you are an adult, you are an adult. Period, full stop. Some age limits can be lower than that, of course, as there is much room for nuance, but no age limit can ever be higher than that, at least not without extraordinary levels of justification. And guess what? The sky didn't fall in Alberta. No seriously, it really didn't. Alberta still has yet to get the memo about the supposedly catastrophic effects of full adult rights combined with "underdeveloped" 18-24 year old brains.
In fact, the Alberta Human Rights Act explicitly prohibits age discrimination for anyone over 18, except for senior citizen privileges for people over 55. Anything else requires truly extraordinary justification, which in practice is about as rare as a unicorn.
That is really how it should be everywhere, regardless of what exact age limit is chosen for age of majority (which is 18 in most of the world and most of the USA). It's really not a difficult concept to grasp, as a child can easily understand it, but too many chronological "adults" seem to be unable to do so. Anything else is a slippery slope, and such slopes are much, much slipperier than they appear.
And for alcohol, tobacco, and cannabis, while underage possession and consumption is illegal, for all three it is basically a mere ticket-level offense with no criminal record. Unlike many US states have. And parents are allowed to give their own underage children (but no one else) alcohol at home (within reason), as many but not all states currently do.
The driving thing is of course probably the most jarring one of all to the rest of the world, so allow us to explain. The global outlier young age limit of 14, rivaled only by South Dakota and a few other rural states, applies ONLY to the learner permit, which is similar to an American style learner permit, with only supervised driving allowed among other restrictions. To get a GDL (probationary) license, i.e. what Americans often call a "junior" license, you need to be at least 16 and also have had a permit for one year or more, and pass the basic road test which is harder than an American road test. There are some restrictions to the GDL, such as no more passengers than there are seat belts, and a zero tolerance limit for both alcohol and cannabis, but no night restrictions. And to graduate to the next level, the full unrestricted license, one must have had the GDL for at least two years regardless of age, be suspension-free for the final year of two years, and pass an advanced road test, the latter of which has since been phased out in 2023 in favor of simply making the basic road test more difficult and more like the advanced road test. Honestly, making the American road test more difficult would probably be far more effective than any age-based restrictions ever could be.
Alberta in recent years has had one of the lowest overall traffic death rates per vehicle kilometers traveled in Canada, and lower than the USA, so they must be doing something right!
And DUI laws are quite strict there regardless of age as well. There are swift and certain penalties of immediate but temporary administrative license suspension and vehicle impoundment for BAC as low as 0.05% (or 0.00% if GDL), in addition to any criminal penalties if above 0.08% and/or obviously impaired. Note that the zero tolerance for GDL is regardless of age. For DUI cannabis they are also quite strict as well, and we at Twenty-One Debunked think TOO strict since hard per se limits (let alone zero tolerance) don't really make sense for a substance with such complex pharmacokinetics and long detection times, and generally less impairing than alcohol. At the very least, in the interest of simple justice, they really need to set the testing cutoff for positivity high enough to prevent false positives or innocent positives.
Thus overall, Alberta is a good model for America to follow. So what are we waiting for?
Oh, and they also have the best and largest shopping mall in the entire western hemisphere, the West Edmonton Mall. It makes the even the vaunted Mall of America look a bit "meh" by comparison.
