We were promised jet packs
Instead, we got price-to-income ratios exceeding 10 to 1, post-national humiliation rituals, and attempts at reform repeatedly struck down at the ballot box. Can our young and old find common ground?
Can we fix this great divide? Can we find common ground? Can a nation’s beleaguered, its working-aged and young, downstream from ten years of bad decisions on purpose, can they turn the other cheek as they’re tone-policed and told to sit back and take it, lest they be branded as all but traitors for speaking of the conditions of their captivity?
It’s the challenge right now, but we have to try.
“Talk to your parents,” the host of an event for Pierre Poilievre joked on Saturday in Vancouver — an event I happened to attend. “But be patient. Be kind.” And he’s right.
The cross-talk, the rock’em sock’em robots, the continued slap-fight between warring consultant tribes, it isn’t getting us anywhere, clearly. When the present iteration of the party of the status quo wedges a nation against itself, and denies a reform election after a decade of haphazard redistribution, non-growth, and abject decline, you get a traditional voter-demographic breakdown flipped entirely on its head.
The party of seemingly endless opposition dominated with youth, held strong with the 35-54s, but found itself walloped 52% to 34% among those aged 55+. Since then, those 55+ numbers have only widened, as the ‘safe’ choice, that more stately actor (when he’s not radicalizing those who don’t know any better with claims of false invasion) can do little wrong, even coming out of “middling” budget heading to a vote Monday, and with a nation remaining pessimistic about its future prospects.
If the Liberals are voted down Monday, they would likely relish that opportunity to seize on a majority. The spin is already built in.
The Conservatives don’t want to stand up against Trump!
At a time like this, when we should be coming together, it’s un-Canadian…
We’re supposed to be one Team Canada right now (offer void in British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec), we can’t afford Pierre Poilievre’s divisive Trumpiness.
On and on. Yada and yada.
Nowhere in that comms exercise, drummed up by those who spend more time in America or the Arab Emirates, or meeting with Chinese proxies than they’d publicly care to admit, would there be a defence of younger Canadians, of those still on the launch pad, worried about, say, supposed ‘fixes’ to immigration riddled with creative accounting and more of the same.
Watch myself and Michelle Rempel Garner on the real numbers behind the fake numbers.
Nowhere would they address housing, set to get much, much worse, under both the federal Liberals and targets they’re admitting they won’t come close to hitting, and Ontario’s ‘Conservative’ premier who leads the galaxy in not getting off his ass to get out of the way on starts and lowering punitive development costs.
Nowhere would one find a stout defence against “deconstruction,” or the daily humiliation ritual of flags flying that aren’t our own, or imagined and inflated woke excess meant to sully the memory of our war dead and marginalize normal people.
Following recent debates sparked by Without Diminishment, where we’ve argued a version of “it’s not just the economy, stupid,” when it comes to what’s animating young people and young conservatives — actually talk to them, and half of them are trending towards fascism with how alienated they feel by a lack of upward social mobility, or a society without rules or those willing to enforce them — it’s been easier for some serving in established camps to mischaracterize these conversations as focusing too much on culture, or, ridiculously, “blood and soil nationalism.” But we’re not. If one is dealing in good faith, it’s plain to see we’re trying to talk about both.
That mythical “fiscal conservative but socially liberal” doesn’t actually exist anymore. There’s a whopping 6% of them. So when younger conservatives, moderates, libertarians, classical liberals, when they want to talk the free speech chill they feel on campus, or their problems with a TFW wage suppression and replacement model that’s hit them like trucker from the ‘Fraser wave,’ we should be listening, but particularly so should our baby boomers and aging Gen X’ers.
-70 percent of Canadians—including 75 percent of adults under thirty-five—believe the next generation will experience a lower standard of living compared to today.
-In 1976, the average price of a home in Canada was about $57,000, roughly three and a half times the median household income. Today, the benchmark home price has soared past $750,000, more than eight times the median income. In cities like Toronto and Vancouver, the gap is even more extreme, with price-to-income ratios exceeding 10 to one.
-Young Canadians have responded by giving up on homeownership. According to a June 2024 Ipsos poll, three-quarters of Canadian adults under 35 believe that owning a home is now a privilege reserved for the rich. The home-buying numbers bear this out. According to the Bank of Canada, in 1981, 55 percent of Canadians aged 25 to 34 owned a home. By 2024, that figure had plummeted to just 36 percent, a stark reflection of how affordability has collapsed for many younger Canadians.
Select quotes from John Ibbitson and Darrell Bricker in The Hub.
Adolescence extends, purchasing power erodes further, our birth rate collapses because how could it not, we band-aid over it with replacement labour and ‘GDP go up,’ but productivity goes down — and that vicious cycle continues.
Where that policy-driven ostracization gets us — where that misbegotten and sudden shift from the old sacrificing for the young, to the young continuously having to sacrifice for the old — is nowhere good.
And yet, and this is a frustrating reality that conservative campaigners and leaders’ offices and communicators must adjust for, to get too angry, to be too blunt and combative, it’s not helping. Our non-self-aware, our former Covid crazies, the present all-in on Trump crowd and “f*ck them kids,” they cannot be helped, but there are those who can be, and those who are undeserving of feeling like they’re being painted with a broad brush.
No one should be asking for Pierre Poilievre to follow a Doug Ford playbook that has more lined pockets than principles, and more conflicts than a North Korean newscaster, but they need to take what they’re good at, keep doing that, and then take what they’re not so good at, which is striking the right tone with some of our militantly stubborn, who occasionally vote on spite, and adjust.
It’s a rigged game, but no fool’s errand, to try and pivot where one can. If the Conservatives don’t, that’s how you end up with more threats of different ways to lose from those who lost second and third last, or who win in Ontario by becoming their opponents, and currently find themselves being investigated by the OPP’s Anti-Rackets branch.
I’m as tired of witnessing bad political advice and attempts at low-cunning sabotage as any, but what isn’t working is the exact same. We had a fake war-time election that set our younger generations back years — in a kind of peace-time, adjustments can be made that don’t throw a young voter coalition out of the tent to appease the conservative movement’s Jean Charests. (*Shudder*)
And it should be the movement that moves the Conservative Party, not the other way around. On this, there’s an opportunity for the opposition to hone its skills, and to stop the slide in suburbs for seniors.
So talk to your parents, but with grace. And if you’re a reader who is a parent who’s tired of feeling like you’re responsible — I understand, and you’re not.
There’s no perfect way to go about this bridging this deliberate generational divide, but leaning into the grace and understanding we’re not seeing entirely modelled by our politicians and their camps would be a start.
Allow me to try: If I were a Carney, Trudeau, Ford, or Eby voter, who got into the housing market before the cut off, with assets that have jumped by 30% per year, no recent medical emergencies or delayed diagnoses for my loved ones, I don’t have to commute into a suddenly lawless and dystopian central business district, and I either don’t have kids or that ain’t my problem anymore, I might not want to give it up that easy, either.
Ok, maybe that needed a little work. But hey, it can’t hurt to try. What’s the worst that can happen, more of the same?
Alexander Brown is Director of the National Citizens Coalition, a host on Juno News, the proprietor of Acceptable Views, a co-founder and managing editor of Without Diminishment, and a contributor to Project Ontario.
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