Live by the youth vote, die by the youth vote. That’s been the story of Justin Trudeau’s nine years in power, which began with his party catapulting from third place into a majority government largely on the strength of their support among young voters. As that support started to erode, so too did the Liberal Party’s grasp on power, first in 2019 and then again in 2021. Now, with a federal election that could theoretically happen any day, it’s young voters who seem most enthusiastic about sending Trudeau packing.
It’s worth unpacking just how far his party has fallen in the eyes of young voters. Back in 2015, nearly half (46 per cent) of Canadians aged 18 to 34 supported the Trudeau Liberals. By 2021, only 46 per cent of Canadians in that age group were even willing to consider voting for his party. And now, according to a September survey from Abacus Data, only 24 per cent of 18 to 29 year olds intend to support the Trudeau Liberals, which puts them 15 points behind Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives. Among 30 to 44 year olds — essentially, the 18 to 29 year olds of 2015 — Poilievre’s lead stretches to 25 points.
This is an obvious problem for Trudeau and his party, not least because there’s no path to a Liberal victory — or even a more modest Liberal defeat — that doesn’t require a reversal of this trend. They don’t need to win with 2015 margins among young people, and I don’t think there’s anything they could do short of giving them all free houses to make that happen, but they can’t lose millennials and Gen Z by anything close to double digits if they want to avoid catastrophe. Poilievre’s team clearly knows this, which is why they just announced a waiver on the GST on new home purchases that clearly targets that crucial under-45 demographic.
After abandoning electoral reform and letting the housing crisis get completely out of control, younger voters are understandably fatigued and frustrated with the Trudeau government. But there’s one last hail-mary that it could try — one that, ironically, he can thank both the Bloc Quebecois and Canadian Association of Retired Persons for. It was the Bloc that demanded an increase in Old Age Security payments to those under 75, an idea that would cost taxpayers an additional $16 billion a year. But it was CARP president Rudy Buttingnol, in an interview with the CBC’s Matt Galloway, who suggested that the real conversation should be around where the income thresholds are for seniors benefits. “I think that’s where the debate should be on,” he said. “You know, when is a senior’s income considered sufficient?”
Buttignol tried to walk that back almost immediately in a subsequent blog post, but the cat was well out of the bag by then. As Generation Squeeze founder Paul Kershaw noted in a column of his own, the clawback on OAS starts at $90,000, and only gets fully stripped away at $140,000 of income. Worse, the clawback isn’t applied at the household level. As Kershaw noted, “This means some retired couples are receiving OAS when their combined incomes surpass a quarter-million dollars.”
The Canada Child Benefit, by way of comparison, starts getting clawed back when family incomes get to around $79,000. If that standard was applied to OAS and payments were clawed back when combined household incomes reached $90,000, that could free up as much as $48 billion over the next five years.
University of Calgary professor Trevor Tombe has also run the numbers here, and they look awfully similar to Kershaw’s. As he noted in a piece for The Hub, there are already approximately $6 billion in annual Old Age Security and Guaranteed Income Supplement payments going to households with combined incomes above $150,000 — and that doesn’t even account for the equity in their homes. By 2028, he estimates that figure could be as high as $13 billion annually once you account for the 10 per cent boost in payments to seniors over 75 already announced by the Trudeau government. This figure would be higher still if that 10 per cent bump were extended to all seniors, as the Bloc Quebecois has proposed (and Conservatives have voted in favour of).
What else could we do with that money? For starters, we could use it to actually eliminate poverty among seniors. Rather than giving $870 per year to all seniors between 65 and 74 years old, including those who absolutely don’t need it, we could give $5,000 per year to the seniors who still live below the poverty line.
Better yet, we’d still have some $32 billion left over to help address the growing imbalance in support between younger and older people. The federal government could, for example, create a means-tested housing subsidy for Canadians under 40. It could give Canadians under 40 a larger basic personal amount on their income taxes. It could do all sorts of things to put more money in their pockets and address, once and for all, the problem of generational inequality.
Generation Squeeze’s polling suggests this would be an easy — and big — winner for the Liberal government. When asked if retirees in households with incomes of $100,000 or higher should “accept smaller OAS payments that reduce their after-tax income by ~$3,200”, 72 per cent of Conservatives, 78 per cent of Liberals, and 81 per cent of NDP supporters back the idea. And when asked if the clawback threshold for OAS should be similar to the Canada Child Benefit, 64 per cent of Canadians — and seniors! — thought it should be the same or lower.
Yes, there would be some seniors who would surely carp (sorry, I had to) about this sort of transformative shift in public policy. But they would be drowned out by the millions of young and middle-aged people who would, for the first time in their lives, be seeing a government that treated their interests as though they actually matter.
It might not be enough to save the Trudeau Liberals, if only because there might not be anything that can do that at this point. But it would save this country’s neediest seniors from having to live in poverty, and give younger Canadians some much-needed hope and economic support. Best of all, it would achieve all of this in a way that doesn’t further amplify the divisions between young and old. It might even bring them together. As far as potential political legacies go, that has to look pretty good to Justin Trudeau right now.
Comments
Your numbers re making the OAS match the child benefit don’t make sense. It would mean a clawback of $1.72 for each dollar of extra income.
The basic premise is good, and the threshold sounds reasonable, but a clawback percentage over 40% is not. At that rate clawback would be complete at family income of $126,000. To lower that, the only practical option would be to lower the threshold even more.
Please count me among the seniors who would (figuratively) leap for joy if the Liberals would do this. Please!
This is brilliant. If our joint income reached $79,000, we would happily give up our OAS payments. Also, as older people, we need less (not counting medical needs) and consume less than younger people.
Though a bit more in OAS for seniors would be welcome, the burden ends up on the younger generation which isn't really fair. For low income seniors below the poverty line, that could be a better direction, but still someone has to pay for that, and that would be the younger generation. Either way, they get screwed.
What would help far more, is to eliminate the GST for first time home buyers, give back also a tax credit to help. Sure, the younger generation will ultimately pay for this, but at least they are getting something out of it. Helping first time home buyers would be a major win for the Liberals, which is the biggest problem the younger generation has.
Minimum wage really could use a boost, but unfortunately, that is a provincial matter and I doubt any conservative premier would even consider that to not upset their corrupt donors.
Eliminating the GST for first time home buyers is completely useless (and the Conservatives know it--heck, if it wasn't, they wouldn't do it). It just creates room for prices to rise another few percent. Since housing prices these days are driven by speculation, that would happen quickly.
So this is a great Conservative policy--its net effect would be to channel 5% of the price of every house from the government to developers, speculators and to some extent upper middle class people selling secondary homes. Cut government revenue, give it to the rich . . . what's for a Conservative not to like?
In other words, follow the money. ;-)
Speculation, especially the rampant international kind, was dealt a blow by the pandemic and to a limited degree with speculation and vacancy taxes.
Today in Vancouver it's a buyer's market. Land prices are still high, though, and that could be a leftover effect of locking in low density sprawl with decades of exclusionary zoning in a city that ran out of land, therein creating a permanent shortage when demographic growth has consistently been in the double digits. The zoning maps still show a troubling sea of yellow representing tens of square km of open land sprawling over 80% of the city's geography, namely excessively generous open front yards and back yards and large lot sizes with no viable city response to allow subdivisions, resulting in the mass expansion of strata title on every new unit created within a lot.
Youth are starting their careers and cannot afford to buy housing due to past urban trends, or are at odds to accept purchasing a tiny condo in a highrise further out. All this while governments are habitually deflecting away from actually building good quality affordable rental housing with stable rents in human scaled walkable communities that act as a counterweight to the market see saw.
One thing not calculated, at least not officially, especially not by journos like Max, is the billions currently being passed from Boomers to their kids and grandkids. Some call that the Bank of Mom & Dad and it has created a boom in viable downpayments and real estate sales, mainly condos. Some would argue that would be a form of price inflation from the demand side.
The fact remains that housing is a top issue and the urban response would be to build more using less land per unit, and to spread moderate density further out by infilling big lots, all the while with government intervention with new rental supply, much increased transit service and polyzoning.
I'm 62 and retired and my wife who is 56 is still working. We're fortunate that our household retirement income in a few years will be over $100,000. We'd be happy to have OAS revised to support fellow seniors who need the extra income, plus the next generations of Canadians.
Another senior weighing in here. I totally support this idea. I know too many seniors who are just banking their pensions in retirement when we have too many others living in poverty. Now if only there was the political will to make such a bold move!
Thank you for bringing up the fact that seniors are one of the biggest demographics experiencing poverty. About half of all seniors are single and their housing needs are not being met.
Since when was their ever a pension plan for housewives? My mother was kicked out of a private apartment back in the 80s because she couldn't afford the landlord's rent increases. She ended up spending 12 years in a subsidized 300 unit senior's warehouse in a downtrodden neighbourhood virtually abandoned by the city of Calgary. Thankfully she had a son who sent her money when he could.
There is also a deep, tragic void in advanced care for seniors, and a huge variation in care between provinces. COVID put that issue right in our faces. The original deal was that the feds would act to balance healthcare variations across the nation. Today it's obvious the feds gave the provinces most of the power by slowly clawing back funding over many decades. And in turn half the provinces did their own underfunding.
When Max Fawcett starts harping on the poor youth who cannot afford a home and starts harping on how "wealthy" and "entitled" seniors are, I immediately think of my mother, thousands of her fellow seniors who were in her hopelessly inadequate pension situation, the terrible inadequacies of senior's care and the fact it's not youth who hit the hardest by our unprepardness for pand
...pandemics but seniors, I get very angry with his lazy journalism that utterly fails to look at the context and bigger pictur
...picture.
The seniors with big pensions are usually two income couples. The other half are singles, the majority women, whose "career" was raising kids, anf THEY are the youth who put in untold unpaid hundreds of hours caring for their parent.
Max, you put in a quarter century seeing a parent live in poverty, pitching in with everyday care, supporting a par
...a parent in your own time and draining your own resources doing so, then you'll chang
...change your tune about transferring pension money from seniors to youth. Transfer the excess to the millions of seniors in inadequte car
...care facilities, to homecare services and to decent senior's housing.
Thanks so much Alex
How soon they forget who kept them going.
So many women held up the illusion for decades of self sacrifice and now apparently need to vanish to keep it going.
Fawcett: "What else could we do with that money? For starters, we could use it to actually eliminate poverty among seniors. Rather than giving $870 per year to all seniors between 65 and 74 years old, including those who absolutely don’t need it, we could give $5,000 per year to the seniors who still live below the poverty line. Better yet, we’d still have some $32 billion left over to help address the growing imbalance in support between younger and older people."
Likewise, Trudeau could do something to restore his climate change bona fides.
Younger and older people not only need housing, but they also require efficient transportation.
Rather than shelling out billions of dollars in O&G subsidies for climate boondoggles such as carbon capture and storage (CCS), SMRs in the oilsands, and blue hydrogen -- not to mention "climate" pipelines (TMX) -- we could invest that money in desperately needed operating funds for public transit, free bus passes to modest-income households, and intercity transit.
Handing out subsidies for überwealthy O&G companies reporting record profits while public needs go unmet is obscene.
YES!!
Right on!
Redirecting fossil fuel subsidies into housing would find huge support with many voters, mainly youth.
Unfortunately, youth do not donate to political parties much or hire lobbyists to pester MPs and MLAs. Private corporations do, and in too many cases have purchased politicians and therein have a direct influence on policy.
This has always been the trouble with this country and it's wonderful social services -- there are too many people who absolutely DO NOT NEED these benefits, but get them regardless of their income levels! I know we live in a democracy, but we need to be more equitable in how we deliver our social services, ensuring that the people who actually need them are the ones that benefit. And yes, I am retired.
Ditto, ditto, ditto. Now, just make sure that making these changes won't mean that elderly parents have to move in with their kids and sleep on their couches! ;-)
My wife and I live quite comfortably on combined income of $50,000. It is ridiculous that a couple with combined income of $180,000 doesn't get a claw back in spite of likely owning their home and having a private pension.
The other obvious to me is the free market neoliberal governments the world has been burdened with, in Canada all parties abandoned non market housing for 45 years now, 20% in 1980, 4% in 2023.
Free-market is only in profit, not housing needed and it shows. The Conservatives under Mulroney started it, Harper intensified it and Trudeau did nothing to correct housing issues or our OAS. Perhaps a decade of radical neoliberalism under Poilievre will wake us up? I doubt it but we are going to find out the true meaning of neoliberal Conservatives . Privatization of everything, u r responsible for yourself and we the government think this is best for u.
have you figured nursing homes and or home care for both of you into that?
Wouldn't it be great if we could have a conversation about how much income is too much in Canada and then start to do something about income inequality?
Related references:
-How rich is too rich? Chancel L, Nature 629, 282-283, 2024-05-06: doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-01276-1
-CCPA Insights 2024-05-10: https://mailchi.mp/policyalternatives.ca/canadas-top-100-ceos-make-191-… Inequality soars
-CCPA Insights 2024-06-05: https://mailchi.mp/policyalternatives.ca/canadas-top-100-ceos-make-191-… -The case for taxing the wealthy
-Universal Basic Income Could Double Global GDP While Cutting Carbon Emissions, Puiu T, ZME Sci 2024-06-11: https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/universal-basic-income-…
-Inside the Campaign to Kill a Step Toward Tax Fairness, Willcocks P, The Tyee.ca 2024-06-07: https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2024/06/07/Inside-Campaign-Kill-Step-Toward-…
Thank you for these links. I was wondering why Max seems to pick on seniors with nearly ageist zeal. An unnecessary public pension level does not address why he still hammers the older generation on housing so much, or resorts to simplistic mass upzoning narratives that supposedly will bring down housing prices. They don't, and the reasons are complex.
UBI could be one of his topics to address the imbalance without resorting to a singular pinpoint focus of blaming and shaming one generation for merely existing under outdated pension policy while subsidies to undeserving, profitable sunset industries doesn't get nearly as much digital ink.
Exactly. He a a brilliant writer and original thinker I admire and mostly agree with but blaming the end of lifers, no more earning boomers( and there are others either end of 46-66) who might be facing disastrous expenses in nursing homes or wherever in a failing health care system is terrifying.
It was a universal when we worked, paying for our grandparents and parents health care from scratch, as well as theirs; now it s limited and means tested and he want s to take away more from borderliners because times are hard right now?
I remember how very hard it was as a young woman born in a 1940s mans world. Getting an education on borrowed money while the guys I went to school with got high end jobs in the north; bringing them coffee and staying quiet in meetings and competing hard for few promotions for women; refused mortgages because female, and having to do everything on my own without the skills any highschool boy had?
It still is and I have no one to take care when I get too frail. I have to pay for some guy to do things I cannot. They make far more than I did and do.
Leave me what I worked extremely hard for and was promised. What s left is going to charity anyway.
Sure I m as anti rich as the next one, but where that line is drawn and why young people who grew up with everything I couldnt even imagine and refuse to work anywhere half as hard just because is a mystery to me.
And why I have to support folk who are determined to live and buy in Vancouver while I took harsh jobs noone else would in the boonies and live modestly today as always is also bewildering. Do they even vote?
Arent there more worthy foes to pick, Max? Ill be dead soon. Who s up next?
And PS it fell to me to care for my aged parents through their long and terminal illnesses. Just on top of everything else. Certainly not tax breaks or recognition. No Menopause centres ( See Tim Huston s platform). Certainly not much inheritance left either. When I finally paid off that mortgage started in 1982 for a dump, I got to think about retiring. You might have been raised and still live in well off circles but it s not the truth for quite a number of us.
Go pick on some more corporations and rich kids.
Great commentary! Being a septugenarian, I am at a loss to explain Max's generation's bloated sense of entitlement and his ignorance of the reality of older generation's experiences with poverty and sacrice. His knock on us Boomers makes no sense. We are facing terrible circumstances in public underfunding of elder healthcare, and somehow we are supposed to believe there is a surplus of pension funds for senior's? There is no surplus, folks, but there is a funding crisis evolving in senior's care. The problem is a misdistribution of funding for SOME unneeded pensions, but that certainly won't make up for the impending shortage in eldercare.
And we're supposed to believe pension "overpayments" should be transferred to Gen X, Y and Z for downpayments on a condo? Gimme a break.
Amen.
The recent story on price fixing happening among corporate landlords using AI in the way that they have to make it even more convenient to manipulate people is probably already pervasive in the corporate world, so I wonder how this was discovered?
Not in the story, the one thing you were genuinely curious about, which happens often I find, but Americans have jumped on investigating this. So it was brought up in Question Period by the NDP and next day we heard that Canada is also looking into it with the Competition Bureau.
My point is how the corporate world moves apart from the government, ever more deviously and deeply with technology for that express purpose, so why can't the government get the word out that they are one stream and the corporate world in our capitalist system is another, and they are not all-powerful or the perpetrators of every single thing! If Poilievre has been successful at one thing, it's embedding the opposite idea, and then in trademark a**hole fashion, falsifying it even further by blaming it all on ONE PERSON.
The Reform conservatives have never focused on young people before, but the latter's cavalier disinterest in context and preference for memes certainly skews them toward the cons.
Such dyed-in-the-wool deviousness is actually what separates the Liberals from the current Conservatives (hence "cons") despite the NDP nonsense that they're interchangeable.
Big picture, liberal means open, or generous, including the mind while conservative means closed or "traditional" and overall--CHEAP, which, as we all know, runs deep. They're yesterday's men in every sense; think of "old boys' clubs," especially Catholicism's priests, the original iteration of that, and present that to younger people how about? The same could be done with Trump who fills the bill in real time.
"It might not be enough to save the Trudeau Liberals, if only because there might not be anything that can do that at this point. But it would save this country’s neediest seniors from having to live in poverty, and give younger Canadians some much-needed hope and economic support".
If you think Poilievre would do any of this you're mistaken.
Whether additional funds should be used to increase Old Age Pensions, or satisfy the military-industrial complex by purchasing more fighter jets, or rather to help younger people manage spiraling living costs is indeed a legitimate debate. I would vote for money going to all those most socio-economically challenged.
The real problem, however, is that business elites and conservative ideologues (see note 1 below) do not want the federal government to spend any extra money at all. The Liberals have kowtowed to this pressure by pledging to cap their deficits and by working towards lower debt-to-GDP ratios.
The supposed rationale is that gov't spending leads to inflation and that deficit spending places a burden on future generations.
As for the first, while inflation is always possible and steps should be taken if an outbreak occurs, Canada currently has well over a million Canadians actively seeking work. Targeted spending is unlikely to result in inflation in economies that have this much unemployment and unused resources. In economies with trade deficits, and where private sector investment decisions are not leading to full production, the government must run deficits high enough to ensure sufficient job opportunities for all those willing and able to work. As John Maynard Keynes advised, "Look after the unemployment, and the budget will look after itself."
As for the second argument, there is no burden "on a generation" because any payments made on the debt do not travel backwards in time, but are paid to the same generation. Receipts and payments net out. There may be income inequalities among those making the payments (i.e. taxes) and those receiving the bond interest, but that is a different issue and we could start towards remedying that problem today through many policies including making sure the higher taxes are levied on the most affluent.
The danger of an austerity, anti-spending ideology is that it prevents the robust federal investment in housing, health and combating climate change which are the very things that millennials and Gen Z need starting today. Running the economy at less than its potential also results in a smaller pie and consequently greater divisiveness among the generations who will share the lesser output.
Footnotes:
1. Unfortunately I have to include Generation Squeeze proponents in the category of those who have sadly bought into conservative economic ideology. In his May 10, 2024 G&M opinion piece "Poilievre’s promise to end deficits sets collision course with boomers", Paul Kershaw states, "Government deficits leave unpaid bills for younger generations..", "Boomers’ retirement income and medical benefits must be at the centre of deficit-reduction plans", and "That’s why I like Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s promise to end deficit spending if elected..". Imagine wanting to curtail medical benefits for seniors as a proposed solution to helping the next generation! This is certainly a compassionless recipe for intergenerational strife as part of policies which also set the stage for an under-performing economy that hurts the very people Generation Squeeze wishes to help.
2. What matters about the Paradise Papers
William Mitchell is Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=37357
"If there are child-care staff available for hire in Canadian dollars, then the Canadian government can always afford to hire them.
Similarly the rest of the wish list – better housing (presumably there are available carpenters and materials) and the rest of it.
The same logic applies to all currency-issuing governments, which have the capacity to purchase anything that is for sale in the currency they issue – at any time.
The choice is political not financial."
3. How the Bank of Canada Creates Money for the Federal Government: Operational and Legal Aspects
Library of Parliament
https://lop.parl.ca/sites/PublicWebsite/default/en_CA/ResearchPublicati…
"..the Bank of Canada ..wholly owned by the federal government..records new and equal amounts on the asset and liability sides of its balance sheet, creating money through digital accounting entries. The federal government can then spend that newly created money in the Canadian economy..
***
..there is no external limit to the total amount of money the Bank of Canada may create through its asset purchases..
***
..money creation by the Bank of Canada through purchases of Government of Canada securities is essentially an internal government process; this means that external factors, such as financial market dysfunction, cannot cause the federal government to run out of money."
If you consider the OAS as a reverse income tax (which it kind of is because the primary source of funding is income tax) a senior couple resident in BC could make up to $120,000 per year before OAS without a paying a penny in income tax. When you consider the extra medical care costs and other benefits available to seniors, it places a real burden on younger Canadians. It is time for a change.
If you consider the OAS as a reverse income tax (which it kind of is because the primary source of funding is income tax) a senior couple resident in BC could make up to $120,000 per year before OAS without a paying a penny in income tax. When you consider the extra medical care costs and other benefits available to seniors, it places a real burden on younger Canadians. It is time for a change.