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TOP STORY
In one of the more surreal twists of sky-high Canadian public dissatisfaction, the country now ranks as one of the world’s only places in which young people are supporting conservative parties at rates well beyond those of their parents.
A Leger poll from last month found that Conservative support was stronger among voters aged 18-34 than any other age cohort. The under-34s backed the Tories by 47 per cent, as compared to 45 per cent for those aged 35-54, and 41 per cent for voters over 55.
The phenomenon has also started to show up at the provincial level. With about two weeks to go until the B.C. election, the B.C. Conservatives have been put in sight of a majority government due largely to an unexpected wave of youth support.
According to a Sept. 30 Leger poll, voters under 34 were backing the B.C. Conservatives by 47 per cent as compared to the 39 per cent who intended to vote NDP. Among voters over 55, the allegiances were reversed: 48 per cent supported the NDP against 43 per cent for the Conservatives.
Nothing like this has really happened before — at least as long as Canada has had age-stratified opinion polling.
It’s not the first time that a majority of young voters have flocked to a conservative option. The Progressive Conservative landslides of 1958 and 1984 were both secured in part by winning over voters under 30.
But what’s happening now appears to be the first time that the average Canadian 21-year-old is more conservative than the average Canadian 65-year-old.
For now, at least, the phenomenon is somewhat unique to Canada. In the rest of the Anglosphere, political sentiments are still hewing to their traditional pattern of young people leaning progressive, with old people leaning conservative.
The current U.S. presidential election has Democratic candidate Kamala Harris commanding up to 60 per cent of the under-30 vote, as compared to roughly one third of young voters who said they would vote for Republican nominee Donald Trump.
In the U.K., the July general election found that support for right-wing options was directly proportional to the age of the voter. A mere 17 per cent of British voters under 24 voted either for the Conservatives or the populist Reform UK. Among Brits over 70, those same parties commanded a smashing 61 per cent.
In Australia, a recent YouGov poll asking voters if they wanted “more socialism” found that 53 per cent of Australians under 24 did.
As to why Canada is different, one easy explanation is that the country is being hammered particularly hard by a suite of bad economic and social indicators that are disproportionately impacting the young.
This is most obviously true of housing unaffordability. According to the most recent OECD data, homes are more detached from incomes in Canada than in any other country except Portugal. This means that Canada has one of the world’s highest proportions of young people who — under current conditions — have no realistic chance of ever being able to afford a home.
This fact has even started to factor into Canada’s internal security planning. Last year, an RCMP report distributed among federal policymakers warned “many Canadians under 35 are unlikely ever to be able to buy a place to live.”
All the while, rent has skyrocketed. In just the last year, Canada’s average listed rents have spiked by more than 20 per cent.
Young Canadians ended up paying the steepest economic price as a result of the months of lockdowns mandated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the disease mainly threatened the elderly, it was Canadians under 25 who had to endure unemployment spikes above 25 per cent — in addition to whole semesters of remote schooling.
As early as 2022, the C.D. Howe Institute was warning of “scarring”; cohorts of workers whose career paths never fully recover from the lengthy unemployment they experienced under COVID.
Canadians under 34 have been disproportionately impacted by Canada’s increasingly acute shortage of primary care physicians. With an estimated four million Canadians lacking a family doctor, a recent survey by the Commonwealth Fund found that the problem is worst among Canadians aged 18 to 34.
In recent months, scores of young workers have also been shut out of the entry-level job market due to unprecedented waves of temporary immigrants. In just two years, the jobless rate among 15 to 24-year-olds has risen from under nine per cent to 14.2 per cent — a phenomenon that can be largely attributed to millions of foreign students and temporary foreign workers entering the Canadian labour market.
There’s also the simple fact that Canadian living standards remain in steady decline as compared to the rest of the developed world. This isn’t good for any generation, but it’s particularly noticeable for younger generations without homes or indexed pensions.
There’s no inherent reason that all these economic issues would have driven young Canadians into the arms of a conservative party. But everything has gotten measurably worse under a government that — since 2019 — has represented a de facto coalition of Canada’s two main centre-left parties; the NDP and the Liberals.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was first elected in 2015 thanks in part to an unprecedented wave of youth turnout. It’s these same young people who, nine years later, are now backing the Conservatives at rates twice those of the Liberals.
A September Abacus Data poll found 43 per cent of under-30 voters intending to vote Conservative, against just 20 per cent who supported the Liberals. And as far back as April, Global News noticed that the rate of grey hair at Conservative rallies seemed to be lower than at any point since the party’s 2003 founding.
But if Canada is at the forefront of a new era of young people turning to the political right, there are recent hints of a similar phenomenon occurring in continental Europe.
Recent elections in both France and Germany saw outsized youth support for parties often described as being on the “far right.” In France, the June elections for the European Union saw a plurality of under-34 voters (32 per cent) support the protectionist, anti-immigration National Rally.
In Germany, those same elections saw Alternative for Germany (AfD) — a similarly anti-immigration, Euroskeptic populist movement — attract an unprecedented 17 per cent of under-30 voters. This was the exact same total that under-30 voters gave to the much more mainstream Christian Democratic Union.
The usually cited reasons for this trend are an echo of what’s happening in Canada: Rising shelter costs, COVID lockdowns that disproportionately harmed the young, and a sense that mismanaged immigration has led to rising crime and diminished social cohesion.
IN OTHER NEWS
Speaking of young voters skewing conservative, the federal Conservative Party just provided the deciding votes for a Bloc Québécois proposal that will mostly have the effect of benefiting seniors at the expense of younger cohorts. That would be a proposal to raise Old Age Security payouts by 10 per cent for Canadians aged 64-74. That happens to be one of the wealthiest cohorts in the history of Canada. And the pension hike will cost about $16 billion, which works out to roughly $500 per year for a family of four.
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