For a country that looks so big on the map, it’s awfully hard to get houses built in Canada these days. But this is all by design: in “Canada’s Million-Dollar Housing Crisis, homes are treated as an investment vehicle rather than a place to live. Dealing with one of the worst shortages in the developed world, Canada’s voters in the recent election were not concerned just about Trump but about who could save the middle-class dream.
As Canadians greeted the announcement of Mark Carney’s cabinet, the expectation was that of far-reaching change. But a day after being sworn in, Canada’s new housing minister, Gregor Robertson, put an end to those hopes. Robertson, the ex-mayor of Vancouver — which saw one of the most severe localised housing crises — said home prices should not go down. Has his boss’s campaign pledge already been turned to dust?
This is a terrible start to a supposedly new era. What Canada needs is not just a total rupture with the Trudeau years but a break with decades of virtual NIMBY dictatorship under all parties, at all levels of government. At this rate, the divide between the generally affluent home-owning Boomers and Gen Xers and the downwardly mobile Millennials and Gen Zs is only likely to persist into the Carney era. This generational divide, of course, exists as well in the US, the UK, and elsewhere, but the Canadian context is distinct: owing to the lesser relative salience of culture war and immigration issues compared with other Western nations, it is now the central cleavage of Canada’s politics, in a way that it isn’t elsewhere.
So how great is the gulf between them? Statistics Canada shows a 65-67% gap between average Millennial household wealth ($493,423) and the equivalent figures for Boomers ($1,397,609) and Gen X ($1,485,654). On top of this, there is said to be $1 trillion in Boomer wealth set to be passed down soon, but even this is in doubt given longer lifespans and this cohort’s tenacity in holding on to what they have.
The reason for this disparity is real estate, which props up the economy. Young Canadians have either been excluded from homeownership by high prices and interest rates, with big cities like Robertson’s Vancouver and Toronto among the two most unaffordable cities in North America; or they are new homeowners who managed to buy properties but are now squeezed by rising mortgage payments. Older Canadians meanwhile have seen the value of their properties soar over a much longer period.
But this snapshot is part of a 60-year-old pattern whereby Boomers exert their influence as the largest generation. Because “Canada’s was the loudest boom in the industrialized world”, as the demographer David K. Foot has recounted, “Canadian boomers are a… more important factor in Canadian life than American boomers are in American life”. The subsequent history of Canada has been one of governments responding with reflexive deference to their demands. The growth of the public sector in the Sixties catered to their educational needs, while the Nineties-era turn towards fiscal austerity (and federal disengagement from housing) coupled with the rise of prohibitive zoning at local levels reflected this now middle-aged cohort’s intention to keep and grow their personal net worths.
They have maintained this goal — through ceaseless real estate appreciation — with fanatical discipline ever since. As Foot wrote, “It was just as inevitable that once the boomers were housed, the [housing] boom would end.”
But it’s not just their numbers that let the Boomers get away with so much: it’s also their enormous capacity for political cohesion. People who voted for the first time in 1965 kept voting at high rates — around 60-70% — throughout their whole adult lives. In contrast, later generations, especially Millennials and Gen Zs, mostly voted at the lower rates of 30-40% range, with few exceptions.
In fact, Foot failed to foresee how the Boomers would prolong their stranglehold well past their working-age primes. He predicted they would relinquish their urban properties and cash in early, mass migrate to smaller retirement towns, and gracefully free up space in the cities for younger cohorts, believing that not long after 2000, “houses will be what they were before the boomers entered the housing market, places to live rather than investments… the days of rapid and huge increases in house prices are gone.” Of course, this never happened — quite the opposite.
Gen X is in a special position; though they were not able to benefit as quickly from the system set up by the Boomers, enough of them were nonetheless able to break into the housing market and build up household wealth as the price upswing was in its initial stages in the mid-Nineties and 2000s, an entry point that was closed off to many Millennials who came after. As a result, they even have a marginally higher average net worth than Boomers and are not in a position to break ranks politically with the status quo.
Naturally, the flip side of Boomer hyper-engagement is consistent Millennial and Gen Z non-engagement: countless youths who have abdicated their civic rights altogether, citing apathy or ignorance.
What we are dealing with here are gross sociological distinctions, which cannot be put down to partisan differences. Canadian and global outlets who covered the race put special emphasis on a supposed bond between the disenfranchised youth and the populist Conservative Party under Pierre Poilievre, just as the over 55s flocked to Carney: in this telling, the former voted on cost of living while the latter voted on anti-Trump nationalism, depicted with scorn in Right-wing media as a luxury issue for Boomers intent on drowning out the affordability debate with nostalgic invocations of their own postwar golden age.
Yet the polling data does not confirm this: yes, the Boomers have gone majorly for the Liberals, but surveys carried out in the lead-up to the election and in its immediate aftermath indicate a very close, competitive race for the youth vote, with apparent Liberal leads for the 18-35 cohorts. It was actually middle-aged Gen X males (along with the oldest Millennials) who went overwhelmingly for the Tories.
But it is enormously comforting for the Right to say that they have a strong lock on the youth vote, and they will continue to do so. To hear Poilievre speak, it is as if the housing crisis sprung up overnight in 2015 right as Trudeau was elected — instead of being the result of decades of joint Liberal and Conservative misrule, including the last Tory government of which he was a part. Other than deregulation, which really needs to happen at the municipal rather than the federal level, it is also hard to see Poilievre’s neo-Thatcherite agenda as anything other than a return to vintage Nineties Boomer conservatism; or as JD Vance said of him, “Mitt Romney with a French accent” (Poilievre doesn’t have an accent, but point taken).
“It is hard to see Poilievre’s neo-Thatcherite agenda as anything other than a return to vintage Nineties Boomer conservatism.”
In any event, Canada’s youth is still up for grabs, even as young and old jostle for the favour of the governing Liberals who have historically been the big-tent brokerage party par excellence. In the 20th century, Liberal leaders brokered ingenious compromises to reconcile the divergent interests of competing groups in Canadian society: English and French, East and West, capital and labour. Today, they must do the same with the Boomers and their children; they must first admit, however, that a zero-sum standoff currently exists between them, instead of ignoring the problem in the first place as Robertson did as mayor in Vancouver, and as Trudeau did as prime minister.
Enough first-time voters responded to Carney’s pledge of a Second World War-style, nationally directed industrial policy to get “government… back in the business of building affordable homes”, that is, to mass manufacture homes at scale: the very idea that his housing minister can’t seem to contemplate. But what will it take for such an ambitious plan to actually succeed?
Carney will need to compensate the Boomers and Gen Xers whose home values will start tumbling once new units enter the market en masse. A creative way to do it would be to find ways to deploy the older cohorts’ own wealth toward funding the construction boom, perhaps through the issuance of special Canada Construction Bonds that pension funds and retirees can purchase, the returns on which would be drawn from the profits to be generated by the resulting newly manufactured affordable unit sales. This is exactly the kind of financial alchemy that Carney should be able to perform. The “counteroffer” to the Boomers could then be supplemented by seniors’ discounts, subsidised nursing care, and the construction of retirement villages as part of the new industrial policy.
Whatever the case, young Canadians must realise (as well as young Americans, Britons and anyone else with this challenge) that the conflict will be settled not on the terrain of patriotism or political ideologies but of raw self-interest. Beating the Boomers at their own game will be the only way to humble them.
