The Liberals can win back young voters with this one simple trick

Live by the youth vote, die by the youth vote. That’s been the story of Justin Trudeau’s nine years in power, which began with his party catapulting from third place into a majority government largely on the strength of their support among young voters. As that support started to erode, so too did the Liberal Party’s grasp on power, first in 2019 and then again in 2021. Now, with a federal election that could theoretically happen any day, it’s young voters who seem most enthusiastic about sending Trudeau packing. 

It’s worth unpacking just how far his party has fallen in the eyes of young voters. Back in 2015, nearly half (46 per cent) of Canadians aged 18 to 34 supported the Trudeau Liberals. By 2021, only 46 per cent of Canadians in that age group were even willing to consider voting for his party. And now, according to a September survey from Abacus Data, only 24 per cent of 18 to 29 year olds intend to support the Trudeau Liberals, which puts them 15 points behind Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives. Among 30 to 44 year olds — essentially, the 18 to 29 year olds of 2015 — Poilievre’s lead stretches to 25 points. 

This is an obvious problem for Trudeau and his party, not least because there’s no path to a Liberal victory — or even a more modest Liberal defeat — that doesn’t require a reversal of this trend. They don’t need to win with 2015 margins among young people, and I don’t think there’s anything they could do short of giving them all free houses to make that happen, but they can’t lose millennials and Gen Z by anything close to double digits if they want to avoid catastrophe. Poilievre’s team clearly knows this, which is why they just announced a waiver on the GST on new home purchases that clearly targets that crucial under-45 demographic. 

After abandoning electoral reform and letting the housing crisis get completely out of control, younger voters are understandably fatigued and frustrated with the Trudeau government. But there’s one last hail-mary that it could try — one that, ironically, he can thank both the Bloc Quebecois and Canadian Association of Retired Persons for. It was the Bloc that demanded an increase in Old Age Security payments to those under 75, an idea that would cost taxpayers an additional $16 billion a year. But it was CARP president Rudy Buttingnol, in an interview with the CBC’s Matt Galloway, who suggested that the real conversation should be around where the income thresholds are for seniors benefits. “I think that’s where the debate should be on,” he said. “You know, when is a senior’s income considered sufficient?”

Buttignol tried to walk that back almost immediately in a subsequent blog post, but the cat was well out of the bag by then. As Generation Squeeze founder Paul Kershaw noted in a column of his own, the clawback on OAS starts at $90,000, and only gets fully stripped away at $140,000 of income. Worse, the clawback isn’t applied at the household level. As Kershaw noted, “This means some retired couples are receiving OAS when their combined incomes surpass a quarter-million dollars.”

The Canada Child Benefit, by way of comparison, starts getting clawed back when family incomes get to around $79,000. If that standard was applied to OAS and payments were clawed back when combined household incomes reached $90,000, that could free up as much as $48 billion over the next five years. 

University of Calgary professor Trevor Tombe has also run the numbers here, and they look awfully similar to Kershaw’s. As he noted in a piece for The Hub, there are already approximately $6 billion in annual Old Age Security and Guaranteed Income Supplement payments going to households with combined incomes above $150,000 — and that doesn’t even account for the equity in their homes. By 2028, he estimates that figure could be as high as $13 billion annually once you account for the 10 per cent boost in payments to seniors over 75 already announced by the Trudeau government. This figure would be higher still if that 10 per cent bump were extended to all seniors, as the Bloc Quebecois has proposed (and Conservatives have voted in favour of). 

What else could we do with that money? For starters, we could use it to actually eliminate poverty among seniors. Rather than giving $870 per year to all seniors between 65 and 74 years old, including those who absolutely don’t need it, we could give $5,000 per year to the seniors who still live below the poverty line. 

Better yet, we’d still have some $32 billion left over to help address the growing imbalance in support between younger and older people. The federal government could, for example, create a means-tested housing subsidy for Canadians under 40. It could give Canadians under 40 a larger basic personal amount on their income taxes. It could do all sorts of things to put more money in their pockets and address, once and for all, the problem of generational inequality. 

Generation Squeeze’s polling suggests this would be an easy — and big — winner for the Liberal government. When asked if retirees in households with incomes of $100,000 or higher should “accept smaller OAS payments that reduce their after-tax income by ~$3,200”, 72 per cent of Conservatives, 78 per cent of Liberals, and 81 per cent of NDP supporters back the idea. And when asked if the clawback threshold for OAS should be similar to the Canada Child Benefit, 64 per cent of Canadians — and seniors! — thought it should be the same or lower. 

Yes, there would be some seniors who would surely carp (sorry, I had to) about this sort of transformative shift in public policy. But they would be drowned out by the millions of young and middle-aged people who would, for the first time in their lives, be seeing a government that treated their interests as though they actually matter. 

It might not be enough to save the Trudeau Liberals, if only because there might not be anything that can do that at this point. But it would save this country’s neediest seniors from having to live in poverty, and give younger Canadians some much-needed hope and economic support. Best of all, it would achieve all of this in a way that doesn’t further amplify the divisions between young and old. It might even bring them together. As far as potential political legacies go, that has to look pretty good to Justin Trudeau right now.