The Missing Middle Podcast
Welcome to the Missing Middle, a podcast about why the middle class in Canada is disappearing. We hope to help you understand why life is becoming unaffordable for so many in this country, and what can be done to reverse course.
The Missing Middle Podcast
Are Young and Old People Voting for Different Futures?
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Are Canada’s politics becoming less about left versus right and more about young versus old?
In this episode of Classonomics, Mike Moffatt and Sabrina Maddeaux explore the growing generational divide in Canadian politics and what it means for the economy, housing, and the future of democracy. They examine why older voters may prioritize inflation, pensions, and asset prices, while younger Canadians increasingly feel shut out of homeownership, economic growth, and traditional institutions.
Topics covered:
- The growing age divide in Canadian politics
- Why seniors and younger voters have different economic priorities
- “Pocketbook” versus “sociotropic” voting
- Economic growth and the distribution of wealth
- Old Age Security and the politics of an aging population
- Housing prices, homeownership, and generational inequality
- Why young Canadians feel increasingly disconnected from the economy
- Populism, political radicalization, and distrust in institutions
- Brexit and the backlash against economic elites
- Why making the economy work for younger Canadians matters for the future
#Canada #CanadianPolitics #HousingCrisis #GenerationalDivide #Economy #Politics #HousingAffordability #Millennials #GenZ #MissingMiddle
Chapters:
00:00 — Is Age Breaking Our Politics?
03:26 — The Generational Divide Is Reshaping Politics
06:22 — Why Voters Are Choosing Their Own Wallets Over Growth
10:14 — Why Older and Younger Voters Want Different Things
13:17 — Why Politicians Want to Keep Home Prices High
16:08 — Why Young People Are Losing Faith in the System
17:26 — How Economic Frustration Fuels Populism
20:33 — Why Young Voters Are Turning to Extremes
21:03 — How to Make the Economy Work for Young People
Research:
Beer question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_question
Vlandas study: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/980470
German research: https://www.kielinstitut.de/publications/kiel-focus/the-economic-consequences-of-populism/
Tobi Lutke’s idea that pensioners be excluded from voting is offensive. The concern behind it isn’t
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/authors/mike-moffatt/
Hosted by Mike Moffatt & Cara Stern & Sabrina Maddeaux
Produced by Meredith Martin
Funded by the Neptis Foundation https://neptis.org/
We see when a country has a large and growing share of the population that is past retirement age, that causes our politics to shift to becoming more zero-sum in nature, and we stop investing in things that grow the economy as a whole.
SPEAKER_00They're rigging the economy against you, time and time and time again in favor of a different demographic. Classonomics, hosted by Sabrina Mado and Mike Moffat. Recently a tweet went viral arguing that voting should be limited to working age people in order to ensure decisions are made by quote unquote people with a stake in the future. Mike, I saw your recent piece in the Globe and Mail on this. You were super clear that you completely disagree with the idea, but you did think it highlights a bigger issue in Canada that we're just not talking about. Can you break that down for us? Because your headline was the idea that pensioners be excluded from voting is offensive. The concern behind it isn't.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. As the title of the article states, you know, the idea that pensioners be excluded to voting is offensive to me, but I get the concern behind it. You know, the first voting right tweet that went viral, and to be clear, there were a few here, was in the context of a public hearing in San Francisco, is on two mid-rise apartments, like a 22-story and 18-story one. And, you know, we know that in San Fran, the middle class has been completely priced out of the city. Even though you've got, you know, high-income, young tech workers, make a lot of money, they still can't afford to live there. And, you know, despite that, you've got a large number of existing local residents who, on average, are substantially older than this gray-haired man, and they're actively trying to stop this development. And to be clear, you know, the folks opposing this development, they have every right to do so. You know, people are allowed to have their opinions, they're allowed to express their opinions. But there's also merit uh to the idea that bad things can happen to the politics of a country or the politics of a community when a critical mass of voters feel either like rightly or wrongly that they have no stake in either economic or infrastructure growth. Now, you know, my politics lean kind of center left. And I see this happening in both, you know, small L and big L liberal politics. So let's take one of our favorite examples, old age security. Because of the aging of the population, you know, OAS is taking up an increasing share of the federal budget each year. It's soon going to reach about $100 billion a year. You would think that like governments would look at that price tag and how high it's going up and going, like, gee, like we've really got to scale this back, or otherwise, this is gonna kind of consume us whole. It's gonna break our finances. And to be fair, the Harper government actually tried to do that about 15 years ago by changing uh the cutoff dates, you know, reducing the size of the program. But instead, the Trudeau government went in the opposite direction. They actually made OAS more generous by giving a top up to those aged 75 and up, added about $3 billion to this already ultra expensive program. And that $3 billion is money that we could be using to invest in, you know, infrastructure, things to grow the economy. But instead, it's being used for consumption simply because it's politically popular. So I worry about these things. Now, your politics are more conservative than mine. You're more in the center right. You know, are you seeing those dynamics play out on your side of the aisle?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, absolutely. I think it's affecting every stripe of political party because demographics don't change across the aisle. And the conservative party is definitely still figuring out its own generational dynamics within the so-called big blue tent. And historically, people think of okay, there's social conservatives, there are fiscal conservatives, there are Alberta conservatives or Saskatchewan conservatives and East Coast or Toronto ones. But the interesting divide that's really emerged over, I'd say, the last five years are older conservatives and younger conservatives, and they have very different views and priorities. And really, that younger cohort, which I'm a part of, is influenced by the fact that they've been let down by institutions in the economy. They can't afford a home, cost of living is soaring, uh, employment is precarious, and they live in a very different reality than conservatives from prior generations, and it's creating a lot of tension, which is leading to a lot of the infighting that we're seeing on social media and us also breaking into the news. And that's something the party's going to have to reconcile if it wants to honestly stay together. And it'll be really interesting if Kerapolev ever does, you know, step down and leave in the next few years before the next election, how that plays out in a potential leadership contest. Because I think there will be a big divide and tension there as well. And it's affected his leadership as well. I think it's made it difficult for him to bring forward any sort of truly big, bold economic policy because there's an inherent tension between yes, catering towards that younger demographic that wants to disrupt and really make massive change to the system, and then older conservatives who, yes, still do turn out to vote more. And in the last election, a lot of them turned out to vote for Mark Kearney because they're more comfortable with either minor change or they're invested in keeping the status quo.
SPEAKER_01I got that sense as well that this, you know, kind of crosses ideological and partisan lines. And, you know, to be clear, like in any kind of political movement, there's there's always been divides. You know, we've seen like urban, rural, you'd mentioned, you know, different provinces and different things like that. But it does really seem to be that we are getting more of an age divide in our politics than we've seen in the past that cross-cuts uh all of the parties.
SPEAKER_00For sure. It's even less about conservative versus liberal versus NDP than are you a millennial or Gen Z or a baby boomer? That's the divide these days.
SPEAKER_01And once again, we're left out, Gen X. And you're left out.
SPEAKER_00Sorry, didn't mention you.
SPEAKER_01We're we're used to it. It's it's okay.
SPEAKER_00Now, people vote for a particular candidate or party for any number of reasons, but one of the most reliable indicators of who will win a US presidential election is the polling question: which candidate would you like to have a beer with? When it comes to voters who vote on the issues, those issues are usually divided into economic issues and social issues. Now, your Globe piece makes the case that there are two kinds of economic issues actually, and the distinction between those two does matter. Why is that?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and there's a fair bit of research to back this up. So this isn't just kind of uh me musing, but you know, the piece argues that this distinction between economic issues matter because it's different types of voting behavior. So the first type of economic issues we can think of are personal finance issues or what the media calls pocketbook issues, even though, you know, I haven't heard anybody refer to a small wall or small purse as a pocketbook since like the 1980s. But, you know, we still call them that. So that's kind of the first type of economic issues. And these pocketbook issues can be thought of as things that directly put more money in your pocket. So that could be things like support checks for the government or things that keep consumer prices as low as possible. You know, we remember that the Trudeau government, uh, you know, in the kind of closing day of the Trudeau era, you know, put the uh GST off of uh pop and wine and things like that. You know, that's kind of a pocketbook type issue. It could also be things that protect someone's net worth, like existing home prices. We can think of those as a pocketbook issue as well. The other class of issues, which unfortunately has a complex name, it's called sociotropic, uh, because social scientists cannot make things easy for people. They're more society-wide and they they affect the economy, but it's less of a direct linkage to, you know, any individual family's bottom line. So it's things like GDP, it's the employment rate, it's how much business investment's going on. It's all those things that affect the economy as a whole, but on kind of a nationwide level, not at the individual family level.
SPEAKER_00So the distinction then is between economic issues that grow the size of the pie versus those which are about how the slices are distributed?
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. So that is a kind of key distinction here. And to be clear, you know, economic issues that any one voter cares about, like they're not binary. It's not like, okay, I, you know, I vote like 100% on sociotropic or 100% on pocketbook issues, but rather that we all kind of exist on a spectrum, or at least those of us who vote on economic issues. Uh, but what happens over time is that people can kind of shift from one category and the other. And what seems to happen, and the research backs this up, is that you can get a growing cohort of the population who believes rightly or wrongly that economic growth doesn't benefit them. And when that happens, they shift from voting on more sociotropic issues to voting on more kind of pocketbook issues. So, to use your analogy, they're voting to more go, okay, I want a bigger piece of the pie for myself rather than voting on issues to make the pie larger for everyone. And my piece in the globe argued that this cohort of folks who vote on more pocketbook issues does include pensioners. They are more likely than the general population to be pocketbook voters. And we see when a country has a large and growing share of the population that is past retirement age, who kind of recognize they're not going to live long enough to experience the benefit of economic growth, to experience the benefit of these infrastructure investments, that causes our politics to shift to becoming more zero sum in nature, and we stop investing in things that grow the economy as a whole.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And we're definitely seeing that trend in Canada. And I think not only a growing share of the population that are pensioners, but especially when you combine that with high asset prices and so much wealth built in home equity, there's a mentality that, oh, we don't have to worry about economic growth or creating jobs or income because there's a huge amount of voters that don't depend on income at all more than ever in the past. And they feel very comforted by their asset prices and they um don't have the same stake in growing the economy, like you said, whereas younger people are pro-disruption, pro-bigger change because they don't have the comfort of those asset prices or those old school pensions that don't exist anymore. And we've seen that also impact views on US-Canada relations and negotiations. If you look at the polling, older voters are much more in favor of really sticking it to the US, elbows up, that movement. Whereas younger Canadians just want jobs and economic growth. So the priorities there are different as well. And that played out in the last election.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I really I really think it it does. You know, it is kind of easier to say, well, you know, let's just close the border, really stick it to the Americans. And, you know, if there's some job loss, so what? And, you know, if the unemployment rate goes to 15%, so what? It's a lot easier to say if you're not a working age person.
SPEAKER_00For sure. And the idea that when adults get older and past that age of retirement and shift into becoming pocketbook voters makes intuitive sense. And we can come up with all kinds of anecdotes that support that theory. But is there any evidence that it's true?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it turns out that there is. So one study in particular I like is uh from this guy, Tim Vlandis, at Oxford University. And we'll link to the study in the show notes. And he looks at voting behavior in 21 different countries since the 1960s, you know, how the demographics of those countries change over time. And he finds basically this conjecture to be true. And he finds it true for a couple of different reasons. That first, pensioners obviously care more about the size of programs like public pensions, like OAS than non-pensioners. So that naturally causes governments with older populations to make those programs more generous, just like we saw in Canada and just with the with the Trudeau government. And it's also the reason why the Harper government had so much problems scaling back OAS. The second reason that matters is that older voters are less likely to penalize incumbent governments for slow GDP growth or high unemployment, but more likely to punish them for high inflation. So they'd be more likely to support what you suggested of the kind of elbows-up approach, sticking it to the Americans, even if that causes higher unemployment. So, because of that trade-off, governments are more likely to prioritize keeping inflation low when populations are older rather than investing in in the future. And Vlandis finds that not only does the age of the population change voting behavior and policy priorities, but those policy changes actually cause economic growth to slow. So that it has economic consequences.
SPEAKER_00For sure. And we see that even in tax policy where older generations have much more favorable tax policy, even as they get much larger handouts. We see it on the focus of governments to keep home prices high. We've seen the liberal housing ministers say that home prices can or shouldn't come down, even though obviously they need to come down in order to be affordable. So it plays out all the time.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it really does. And, you know, we might not have had a housing minister who would make a comment like that if our population skewed younger. And Vlandis himself makes that connection to home prices. Like his piece, I'm gonna directly quote it here. You know, as the share of the elderly voters increases, parties focus more on keeping inflation down and house prices up, since this tends to matter more to the elderly. So again, there's peer-reviewed science on this to suggest this isn't just, you know, uh younger people's conjectures. This is an actual phenomenon that happens.
SPEAKER_00You take it a step further, though, and argue that it's not just seniors feeling disconnected from economic growth. It's also working age folks who feel like they've been left behind. So they'd rather see the pie redistributed than worry about growing it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. So this phenomenon isn't isolated to seniors. And we see times where a growing part of the actual working-age population can become disconnected from economic growth. I saw this kind of viscerally, this like I had a kind of a light bulb moment uh about a decade ago during during Brexit. So, you know, I did not think the Brits would vote for Brexit. I knew it would be close, but I didn't think they'd go that far. And, you know, I kind of spent the next 24 hours like binge watching uh BBC. And, you know, they had the the this one reporter, I think it was the the next morning, out at some northern town. And she interviewed these two guys who's probably, I don't know, like late 50s or so. So still working age, but but older, and they were clearly Brexit voters. And she asked them outright, she's like, Well, you know, aren't you worried about the sort of economic consequences of this? You know, we saw, you know, markets go down this morning, and you know, there's talk of companies not doing well or whatever. And these guys just laughed and they said, Oh, you're like, oh no, a bunch of rich people lost money, you know, oh I'm I'm gonna lose so much sleep over that. That, you know, they they actually treated this uh issue of you know the economic economy going into decline as actually a positive thing rather than a negative thing, because they believe that economic growth all flows to the 1%. So they're like, okay, well, if we want to stick it to the 1%, the way we do that is slow the economy. So, you know, that's obviously just an anecdote, you know, something I saw on the BBC, you know, a decade ago. But you know, the science kind of bears that out that as you have this population that uh feels disconnected from economic growth, they tend to become more pocketbook voter issues and tend to focus more on, you know, uh how the uh how the pie is sliced rather than trying to grow the economy.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and that trend's only grown since then and it is concerning on some levels. It starts with a lack of faith in institutions because the institutions aren't only failing you, but they're rigging the economy against you time and time and time again in favor of a different demographic. So why would you support them? Then that extends to larger institutions and a country in general, and even capitalism. If you look at polling both in Canada and the US, the uh percentage of young people who even support capitalism is shockingly low. And then democracy, right? And you see it playing out as well in the uh democratic primaries in the US. There's this huge rise of socialism and socialists, and that's in part because young people don't believe in capitalism or even democracy in some cases, because they think everything is again not only failing them, but actively rigged against them. So why not completely get rid of every system we have or assert your own type of authoritarian control over the system so that maybe you can own a home and have a family because you see it as other people rigging it against you, anyways, and doing the same thing. So it's a worrying trend and it leads to radicalization, anger, disillusionment, and potentially even, you know, things like violence and terrorism. So it's a massive, massive problem that politicians should be more wary of.
SPEAKER_01And again, this isn't just in your head. Like there's some really interesting research about this. Uh, there's one piece I like out of Germany. We'll link to that in the show notes. And it looks at 60 different countries over the last hundred plus years, and it finds that when a critical mass of voters start to believe that they can't personally benefit from economic growth, they understandably start to turn on the political and economic elites. They elect a populist. Uh, they elect, you know, somebody who's going, okay, you know, we could let's let's break the system. And that populist can be on the left or the right, or sometimes not even particularly ideological at all. But they position themselves as someone who could fight for the little guy against the elites, you know, they can uh, you know, change the rules, that the rules are not working for the general public. So, you know, let's just kind of break the system, put in something better. And what that research finds is that when those populist governments get elected or go into power, they start to scale back on policies that grow the economy. They focus more on redistribution. Now, that redistribution isn't always to the people. Sometimes it's to themselves and a small cadre of uh uh of their fellow travelers, but they focus more on redistribution. And that has an impact that you see talent start to leave the country, you see institutions weaken, you see the economy slows. The German research finds that after 15 years, the economy is like 10% smaller than it would have been, or 10% smaller than kind of a comparable country that didn't go down that route, that didn't experience that political shock. So when people feel that they no longer have a stake in economic growth, even when they're 100% correct and justified to feel that way, it breaks the politics of a country and it sets off a series of political and policy changes that make a bad situation worse.
SPEAKER_00And I think that's key. You said it's not left or right. Um, it's young people who want corruption and they just want massive change or to tear things down. And that's a mistake, actually, I think conservatives made in the last election and continue to make, is young voters massively shifted at one point in polling to supporting conservatives. But it wasn't that young people en masse became more conservative. They just wanted big change and there was that populist undercurrent. But that doesn't mean that they're now conservatives for life if that party doesn't serve them and their goals. In fact, they're very likely to switch over to, let's say, the NDP now that there's a new leader, if they're more radical. And that's going to be a problem for the party going forward. So they can't just assume, oh, young people are now conservatives for life. Uh voting patterns are different than in prior generations. And that's why it's so important that younger voters have a stake in the economy, in capitalism, in democracy, that they can buy a home, they can start a business, and they can have a family, or else there are going to be big ripple effects and consequences in terms of not just how they vote, but for everyone, right? Because the millennial Gen Zs are large populations and they will start to vote more as they age. And it'll be really interesting to see how they vote and what that leads to.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, they really will. And, you know, there is kind of this kind of horseshoe theory thing happening that, you know, you get people who uh get attracted to being on the extreme more than you know being on the left or on the right. You I mentioned Germany earlier, you know, we saw this in the last German election that young people tended to vote either for the far left or the far right, because again, they believe, and I think there's a lot of justification to it, that the system isn't working for them. So if we want to avoid these outcomes where you've got politicians who who are elected who are about breaking the system, we have to actually start to make the system work for younger people. Like we can't ignore these issues. It never, you know, history shows that this does not end well. So we've got to, you know, for self-preservation, if nothing else, you know, older people like me have to create a system that works for younger people, or just, you know, the country will not, we may survive it, but we're not going to be as good a place as we otherwise could be because we're going to cause all of these negative uh political consequences when we have a system that's broken for young middle class people.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. Thank you everyone for watching and listening, and to our producer, Meredith Martin, and our editor, Sean Foreman.
SPEAKER_01If you have any thoughts or questions about how Gen X is always left out, and you probably don't because Gen X is always left out, please send us an email to missingmiddle podcast at gmail.com.
SPEAKER_00And we'll see you next time.
