{"id":78746,"date":"2025-08-18T13:09:07","date_gmt":"2025-08-18T13:09:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/78746\/"},"modified":"2025-08-18T13:09:07","modified_gmt":"2025-08-18T13:09:07","slug":"how-mark-carney-and-the-baby-boomers-can-save-canada","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/78746\/","title":{"rendered":"How Mark Carney and the baby boomers can save Canada"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mark Carney owes his unlikely election victory in April to a variety of factors, from Donald Trump\u2019s repeated threats against Canada\u2019s sovereignty to Pierre Poilievre\u2019s repeated failure to take them seriously. But more than anything, perhaps, he owes it to the baby boomers, who\u00a0voted for his Liberals in such overwhelming numbers<\/a> that it prevented what many \u2014 myself included \u2014 felt was an inevitable victory for the Conservatives.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Carney might be tempted to reward them a new tax credit, more generation-specific spending or some other predictable political bauble. But if he wants to be a genuinely transformational leader, one who fundamentally alters the economic and political trajectory of Canada rather than merely maintaining it, he has to do more than just cater to their needs. Instead, he ought to challenge the most self-interested generation in history to step up for their country \u2014 elbows and all \u2014 and make a sacrifice.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As Gen Squeeze has noted, rising Old Age Security costs are roughly equivalent to the entire federal deficit \u2014 and many of those recipients\u00a0live in households with more than $100,000 in annual income<\/a>. By reducing payments to those affluent retirees and\u00a0closing a couple of tax loopholes<\/a> that disproportionately benefit wealthy seniors, the federal government could\u00a0free up $14 billion every year<\/a>. That\u2019s enough to lift every senior in Canada out of poverty, shrink the federal deficit, and create a new funding stream for young people that supports childcare, lowers their income taxes, or brings down tuition fees,\u00a0among other ideas<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Yes, this is politically treacherous terrain. Just look at the vitriol and venom in the\u00a0comments on a recent\u00a0Global story<\/a> on the Gen Squeeze proposal, accusing the group of everything from waging intergenerational warfare to inviting outright communism. But if only Richard Nixon could go to China, maybe only Mark Carney can risk offending the boomers and still survive the fallout. In the last federal election they gave him an enormous deposit of political capital. Now it\u2019s time to spend it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

After all, as bad as Canada\u2019s finances might be right now, they\u2019re only going to get worse as the boomers keep aging. According to the Office of the Chief Actuary, Old Age Security payments are\u00a0going to rise from an estimated $77.8 billion in 2023 to $136.6 billion in 2035<\/a>. And as Canada\u2019s population continues to skew older, with smaller families and fewer children being born, the ratio of workers to retirees will only continue to grow. That means an ever-growing proportion of the average citizen\u2019s taxes will go towards Old Age Security, healthcare, and other senior-oriented programs.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Maybe AI can bail us out here, although the odds of large technology companies paying significantly higher taxes on anything seem about as good as you or I winning the lottery. And in the absence of that sort of shared windfall, the demographic math we\u2019re staring at here has a lot of the characteristics of a ponzi scheme \u2014 one where existing participants are paid out with funds collected from newer ones.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That\u2019s how Don Wright, who served as BC\u2019s deputy minister to the Premier, cabinet secretary and head of the public service under John Horgan from 2017 through late 2020,\u00a0described the situation in a recent Substack piece<\/a>. \u201cThe senior promise was established in the 1960s and 1970s, when the younger generations were significantly larger than the retired population. That proportion no longer exists. Furthermore, in the 1960s a person reaching the age of 65 could expect to live another 15 years; by 2023 that had been extended to 21 years.\u201d<\/p>\n

The growing bill on Canada’s so-called “senior promise” \u2014 the combination of Old Age Security, healthcare spending, and other senior-oriented benefits \u2014 threatens to bankrupt the country. Why Mark Carney can, and should, do something about it. <\/p>\n

That \u201csenior promise\u201d was underwritten by math that should, in hindsight, have been almost immediately suspect. \u201cIt would not be sufficient for the baby boom numbers to be reproduced over time,\u201d Wright writes, \u201cbut rather that each succeeding generation would need to be as much larger relative to the preceding generation as the baby boom generation was to the generation that preceded it.\u201d That didn\u2019t happen. In retrospect, it couldn\u2019t possibly have happened. And now, we\u2019re left to clean up the mess \u2014 one that grows with each passing year.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Mark Carney, more than any politician I can remember, has both the political capital and personal courage needed to do that. By forging an intergenerational compromise that sees older Canadians make certain sacrifices in order to help younger people, he could help Canada avert the sort of rightward shift among younger voters that\u2019s happening in almost every other Western democracy. In democracies around the world, from the United States and France to Poland, Portugal and Germany, voters under 40 have shifted noticeably to the right, driven by deteriorating material circumstances, a growing sense that they won\u2019t have the same opportunities as previous generations and politicians who are more than willing to echo \u2014 and amplify \u2014 those fears. As American pollster and political strategist\u00a0Tom Rodriguez wrote for\u00a0The Hill<\/a>, \u201cif this unprecedented rightward trend continues, the identity of the West will be transformed for decades.\u201d<\/p>\n

Averting this sort of rightward lurch among young voters isn\u2019t just about protecting the incumbent Liberal government. If anything, the safer political path for Carney would be to double down on his support among seniors, given their higher propensity for actually casting a ballot. But by deliberately and conspicuously fighting for the material interests of younger Canadians, and asking older ones to help pay the bill, Carney could help inoculate Canada against the toxic right-wing populism that\u2019s infecting much of the western world right now.\u00a0<\/p>\n

If Carney needs help selling it to the Baby boomers, he might want to call on the words of John F. Kennedy. As Kennedy said in a famous 1962 speech delivered at Rice University, \u201cWe choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard\u2026.because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win.\u201d In other words, it\u2019s time for baby boomers in Canada to think less about what their country can do for them and more about what they can do for it.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mark Carney owes his unlikely election victory in April to a variety of factors, from Donald Trump\u2019s repeated…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":78747,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[45,49,48,133,131,132],"class_list":["post-78746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-personal-finance","tag-business","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-finance","tag-personal-finance","tag-personalfinance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78746"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78746\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/78747"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}