Like counterparts around the world, Canada’s youth are struggling, victims of a weak economy and a rising cost of living crisis. Whereas boomers rode an unprecedented wave of prosperity and higher living standards, younger Canadians, particularly those under 30 , are now more pessimistic about the future than older generations. These realities suggest severe consequences for the rest of us, and for our future.
Younger voters were once seen as the driver of a progressive takeover of all institutions. But today younger voters are, if anything, headed in different directions, with some, notably single women, headed to the left while men, in almost all countries, moving decisively to the right. In Canada, for example, the youth vote is trending towards the Conservatives.
Twice as many voters under 35 think Trudeau has hurt their generation more than helped them; the younger the voter the more negative they tend to be. Two in five, notes a Fraser Institute study , feel pessimistic about the federal government compared to less than eight per cent who have confidence in the current national regime. In the U.
S. as well the percentage of young voters identifying as Republicans has been on the upswing since 2016. This year Donald Trump has gained ground over his weak 2020 showing.
It is too early to tell how much the substitution of Kamala Harris for the doddering Joe Biden could weaken this trend. In Europe as much as one-third to two-fifths of young people support parties — and views of immigration climate polices — often characterized as far right. Even in the recent British elections, Labour lost ground among younger voters, barely breaking two fifths while Reform quadrupled its share.
Although much is made of young people’s embrace of Hamas and the terrorist-friendly progressives, U.S. poll data shows that economic factors and alienation from current institutions are likely to be far bigger factors in how they vote.
In particular, the rightward shift comes from people without college degrees who make up roughly two thirds of young people across OECD countries. What the ideologically and gender divided youth widely share is a deep-seated pessimism. In the United States less than half of millennials say they are doing better than their parents.
Pew has found that the vast majority of parents — 80 per cent in Japan and over 70 per cent in the U.S. — are pessimistic about the financial future of their offspring, Canada ranked fourth among leading nations in pessimism, with three quarters expecting the young to do worse.
One key factor is that compared with their parents, young people today are more likely to have a future with no substantial assets or property, notes a Deloitte study. In contrast, the boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, have widely benefited from the economic progress of the past 50 years. All too often this success inadvertently appears to have been achieved at the expense of the young.
Those who bought homes early in places like Vancouver — ranked along with Toronto as among the most expensive markets in the English-speaking world, according to the Demographia housing affordability study — are worth considerable fortune with household wealth averaging more than a million dollars for boomers. No surprise, then, that in the U.S.
, less than 10 per cent of Americans under 30 think the country is headed in a good direction. Indeed recent surveys suggest that generation Z, those now in their teens and twenties, constitute the most disillusioned generation , seeing less opportunity for themselves while coping with escalating food prices, high rents and car insurance costs . And then there’s a deteriorating job market, with opportunities for the very skilled and low skilled, but not much in middle-class employment.
Tech jobs , for example, are stagnating and even dropping, even as salaries for the most skilled AI programmer’s soar. Many other white collar jobs, from accountants to lawyers, are threatened. Eighty-two per cent of millennials fear AI will reduce their compensation while this year’s Forbes billionaire study shows only one per cent are under 40, the lowest level in over twenty years.
Given these conditions and attitudes, it’s not inconceivable the younger generation could embrace radical change , even a break with democracy. With marriage, family, and home ownership, people tend to adjust towards the political centre. Today, young people are increasingly isolated, a society made up of largely disconnected individuals who suffer what the U.
S. Surgeon General has described as an epidemic of loneliness . Similar trends can be seen even in once family centred Japan , Taiwan , South Korea , Singapore and Hong Kong .
Even now in China , nearly 70 per cent of adults ages 18–36 are on their own. Young people are further disheartened by the often-hysterical predictions of climate disaster. The majority of young people in forty countries, according to a Lancet study , see the planet as doomed by climate change.
A recent study of Canadian college students found 80 per cent claiming it effects their mental health, and half say they feel this every day. Rather than seek to address and adapt to whatever changes are coming — warmer winters in Canada could have some positive impacts as well — young people confront a green ideology that embraces “degrowth,” that is smaller economies that would make upward mobility all but impossible. Not surprisingly those under 30 constitute the most “disengaged” workforces in the high income world, with many delaying their transition to adulthood.
In the U.S. some 40 per cent of recent graduates are underemployed , in jobs where their college credentials are essentially worthless.
Across Europe , and the U.K., large proportions of young workers are neither in work nor school.
Even East Asia, once the heartland of workaholics, Japanese “shinjinrui,” or the “new breed,” have rejected steady work. Many are living with their parents and spending their time traveling, playing video games, and pursuing hobbies. Even in China, where many educated millennials , faced with diminishing prospects for the country’s increasingly beleaguered middle class, have abandoned striving in favour of “lying flat.
” Can this process be reversed? Ultimately, boomers need to revise their longstanding self-absorption. Instead, the older generations need to step up and support programs that encourage economic mobility, home ownership, marriage and family formation. This means embracing economic growth and social mobility through such steps as more skills-based education, improved basic infrastructure, and especially more housing that can be purchased by ordinary families.
This approach may violate some principles of market fundamentalism but is critical to the preservation of the market system itself. Given their penurious condition and limited opportunities, many younger people are fans of expanded government and greater re-distribution of wealth. Nearly two-thirds (60 per cent) of young adults around the world told Pew Research in 2022 that they don’t view capitalism positively — the highest share of any age group and 33 percentage points higher than those of boomers or generation Xers.
Under one possible scenario, countries like Canada, in part driven by minority populations urged to see themselves as victims, could create an expansive welfare state that would largely replace family and work with payouts which one writer calls “fully automated luxury communism.” Only a growth agenda, that gives the younger generation hope, can help turn this around, particularly in Canada where growth has been minimal for nearly a decade. There’s the old adage that youth is wasted on the young.
Maybe to that we should add that seniority is empty if lacking commitment to the future of those who come next. National Post Joel Kotkin is the RC Hobbs presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University and author, most recently, of “The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Middle Class..
