Sam Dagres: Canada’s youth need to find a voice
From market sentiment to government policies, Canada's young are increasingly treated as disposable—and they must insist that their interests be prioritised.
Youth is being wasted on the old.
I was 21 when province-wide lockdowns were first announced in March 2020, and my little brother was two days from celebrating his 17th birthday. During supper that evening, we discussed the horrific prospect of being cooped up in our house for two weeks. We scoffed at my dad, who argued this would go on for at least a month. No one had a clue it would be more than two years before our lives would return to normal.
Illegal and life-threatening activities in Quebec included gathering at a park with more than five people, cycling outside alone after 8pm and being homeless. We were prohibited from celebrating birthdays, attending graduation ceremonies, proms, births and funerals. Kids were taken out of school and plugged into an iPad—screen time was now mandatory. Literacy and attention spans have not yet recovered.
While our young minds were desperate to continue developing, widespread atrophy set in, as it was virtually impossible to forge new friendships or develop meaningful skills without staring at that screen. Many, including my father, lost their livelihoods. The riskiest behaviour you could engage in was tweeting something edgy or eating a Tide Pod.
Life remained frozen despite health experts knowing those aged 65 and over were most vulnerable, as evidenced by the COVID-19 vaccine rollout. Canada’s first shipment of vaccines arrived in December 2020, more than a year before all restrictions were lifted. Nevertheless, my grandmother and I remained subject to the same restrictions until the bitter end.
During the twentieth century, many of the West’s young were called upon to make sacrifices far greater than those made by those of us locked in our homes, but both are examples of the young bearing the burden for generational crises. We remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice; we cherish their memory. This is because sacrifice is an integral part of civic life, but so is gratitude.
At the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, older Canadians seemed to have forgotten what the young had given up to ‘stop the spread’, and they went on with business as usual: steamrolling us in other ways.
This lack of recognition is in keeping with what has become the cornerstone of modern Western political life: mortgaging the future for present gratification. At the governmental level, debt-fuelled spending largely goes towards protecting the elderly, including, but not limited to, the COVID-19 response. Federal COVID-19 spending reached $360 billion, helping us reach the trillion-dollar threshold for our national debt.
Of the $400 billion spent annually on health care in Canada, half goes towards treating the elderly. As the elderly population grows, resources will continue to be allocated accordingly.
The largest federal programme, Old Age Security, costs over $80 billion and is projected to reach $108 billion by 2030–31. Total benefits for the elderly will be $88 billion next year. This represents 17 per cent of all federal spending.
On top of financing a growing debt, younger Canadians have been priced out of many of our cities’ housing markets because of decisions to halt and obstruct new housing construction to ensure property values keep rising. All the while, we face unprecedented labour competition and artificial wage suppression following the arrival of over 2 million international students and 1.6 million new temporary foreign workers between 2021-2025. The already-established want their property values high and their labour cheap, and the rest of us be damned.
And now, we are on the brink of the holy grail of child sacrifice.
The wild overvaluation of AI companies hinges on the promise of replacing human labour, specifically the labour of the young. As a result, entry-level and graduate jobs are in free fall. The double-digit annual market returns we’ve seen over the past few years reflect shareholders’ excitement over culling the least experienced workers.
Youth unemployment in Canada is approximately 14 per cent. Is the market champing at the bit to turn that 14 per cent into 50 per cent, so that the asset-rich class can enjoy higher returns in their stock portfolios while their children oscillate between OnlyFans and welfare?
From market sentiment to government policies, the young are treated as disposable.
Policies that would serve our interests include radical proposals such as means-testing all benefits for the elderly, removing the principal residence exemption, meaningful income tax relief for young families and, best of all, raising the retirement age. We should not accept any pearl-clutching from those who happily imprisoned and masked literal children.
I know it goes against our sensibilities, as we are a generation raised to be empathetic and collectivist, but if we do not insist that our interests be prioritised—something older generations have no qualms about doing—then we will continue to be collateral damage.
A new frontier of Canadian political life must emerge, beginning by distinguishing between what is good for them and what is good for us. A world dominated by the old is anxiety-prone and risk-averse. We should not underestimate how the attainment of comfort has come to be treated as an ultimate good across generations. While an understandable goal for the elderly, it is a puzzling one for the young.
We have found ourselves poorer, neutered and cultureless, while the elderly are cashing out, with their elbows up, enjoying what remains of our ‘universal’ health-care system. If older generations refuse to leave the world better off for their children, then we will have to demand that they do.
Sam Dagres is a writer based in London, U.K. She was formerly the Manager of Communications at the Montreal Economic Institute. Her writing has appeared in the Financial Post, the Globe and Mail, Le Journal de Montréal, and the Toronto Sun.
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For whatever it’s worth, I am one of the ‘older generation’ that the writers have referred to in this article. Rather than quietly clutching my riches and voting for the party that would help me to do that, I voted Conservative in the last elections and support all that you say. I would be ready to accept giving up my OAS and live on savings accumulated carefully over the decades. So, not all of us over-65’s in Canada fall into the category of self-serving you describe. Above all and foremost, we need a change of federal government here in Canada in order to bring in some needed relief to our younger generations.
This is very hard to read. I guess this is an opportunity for all the boomers like me to claim we weren't part of the problem. But it is quite clear to me that ours is the first generation that put self actualization in front of our young. We may not have actively participated in this tragedy, but we watched it happen without going to the barricades. I am probably more at fault because I knew it was happening. I did use to make speeches at City Council saying that we were destroying the future of our young people every time we turned down another opportunity for housing. And mostly they just laughed at me and called me a developers' shill. Several times I said that one day the young people are going to arrive and they are going to be angry. And here you are. Did the boomers who claim innocence protest housing in their neighbourhood? It used to be religion that was optimized for family formation that maintained the balance. But that was too inconvenient. But the same sanctimonious entitlement of us boomers and the dumb ideas about economics and society are still popping up in the young. I SO hope there are enough younger people that can be committed enough and strong enough to get us out of this horrible situation we are handing to the next generation. You should never have to ask that your interests be prioritized. That should be a given. Thank you for your courage to call this out. Thank you Without Diminishment.