Can Trudeau's budget restore 'generational fairness'? Economists say don't bet on it

"Everything that is created, built, served and sold in this country is increasingly being created, built, served and sold by Millennials and Gen Z," said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as he announced what he called a budget focused on a quest for "generational fairness."

"Their success is Canada's success in the future, sure, but also right now. But the economy isn't rewarding them the way it used to reward their parents and grandparents.

"That's not right. That's not fair."

The notion has gained a lot of traction in recent years — that an entire generation has behaved like selfish parents who, instead of bequeathing their house to their struggling offspring, trade it for a reverse mortgage and spend the money on cruises and country club memberships.

"If you look at [younger Canadians'] life prospects, I think it's fair to say that they have had and will have a more difficult time of it than, say, my generation, who were quite lucky in the post-war period," said economist Robin Boadway of Queens University.

That certainly seems to be the view of many who reached adulthood in an era when home ownership for those just starting out can seem like an unattainable dream. But the economic trends that skewed the balance of power between generations were decades in the making — and economists say one budget won't be enough to restore that balance.

"I'm kind of a boomer hater," said a participant in a focus group organized by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute in September. "They're the people telling us to just walk in and hand in a resume… but they're the people that could just walk into a business and they'd have a career for the rest of their life."

"The boomers had the easiest life in human history," said another participant, who cited pandemic restrictions as another example of governments prioritizing the needs of older generations over those of everyone else.

"Some people gave up half their high school experience so the older generation could live a few more years in their fully funded retirement. In school, tuition wasn't lowered, but seniors got an Old Age Security bump."

Survey after survey has found that younger Canadians are more negative about the present and more pessimistic about the future than older demographics.

The problem for the Trudeau government is that this pessimism also expresses itself in low levels of support for the Liberals. Most polling suggests that the Liberal Party — which came to power in 2015 in part thanks to the support of younger voters — now trails the Conservatives by almost 2-1 among the under-40s. (The combined Liberal-NDP vote in the under-40 demographic remains larger than the Conservative share.)

The relentless focus of both opposition leader Pierre Poilievre and (lately) the Liberals on issues of affordability, especially housing, shows that both parties see them as key to winning over disaffected younger and first-time voters.

"Income matters less than it used to. Access to secure housing matters so much more," said Paul Kershaw, a professor at the UBC School of Population and Public Health and founder of the group Generation Squeeze, which lobbies for what it calls "intergenerational equity."

Kershaw said his own Vancouver home is an example of how real estate consolidates wealth.