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What we've lost (10): A normal life

Ben Woodfinden: Canada has failed its younger generations, which no longer have the opportunity to live the life that their parents did

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The past 10 or 15 years have not been kind to Canada. Along with a decline in prosperity has come an erosion of the things that made our society great, a decline of what held us together and made us the envy of the world: things like resilience, friendship and service. In this series, National Post writers consider What We’ve Lost.

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In the 2024 World Happiness Report, Canadians over 60 ranked eighth in the world. Canadians under 30 ranked 58th. Happiness is, of course, subjective and hard to measure, but the gap between a country that still works for one generation and has completely failed another points to a broken social contract.

What we've lost (10): A normal life Back to video

The idea of a “social contract” is, of course, largely a fiction. Nobody actually signs up for the terms of their society, and political theorists have pointed this out. But the idea endures because it captures something real.

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People accept the rules not because they signed a contract but because the system broadly delivers for them. The deal holds because the deal works. You go to school, you work hard, you get a job, and in return you get access to a middle-class life. No politician ever had to spell it out.

For boomers, it more than held. For gen X, with some strain, it held. But for millennials and gen Z, it has collapsed, and the data on this point is not ambiguous.

In Canada, winners and losers are increasingly divided along generational lines. Boomers control roughly half of all wealth in this country. Millennials, despite making up the largest share of the labour force, hold about 10 per cent.

Boomers bought homes when prices were low and wages were growing, and then watched those assets skyrocket over the following decades, turbocharged by restrictive zoning and loose monetary policy. Average boomer household wealth now sits at $1.4 million.

Millennials carry debt-to-disposable-income ratios of 265 per cent. If you bought a house before 2008 and you’re 60, you’re probably doing fine. But if you’re 30 and trying to buy, Canada is a place where the system is stacked against you.

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The average home in Canada surpassed $700,000 in 2024 (it has since eased somewhat, but not nearly enough to matter). In the 1980s, a young adult working full time could save for a down payment in roughly five to seven years; today, it takes 17 years nationally, and close to 30 in Toronto or Vancouver. Most young Canadians now think they will never be able to afford their own home. That is not pessimism, it’s arithmetic.

For the first time in Canadian history, men over 64 are out-earning those aged 25 to 34. Since 1976, inflation-adjusted median incomes for younger men have declined by $14,300, while the oldest cohort saw theirs rise by $23,100. Government transfers to men over 65 years of age rose by $7,000 over that period. For men aged 25 to 34, they rose by $6.

And the policy response, from municipal councils blocking new supply to a federal government that ran historically loose immigration without building the housing to match, has only reinforced the dynamic. The sclerotic system that locks the next generation out is the same system that inflates the assets of those already in it.

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Your best ticket out of this is if you have access to the “Bank of Mom and Dad.” Thirty-one per cent of first-time buyers received a financial gift from their parents in 2024, up from 20 per cent in 2015, with the average gift now topping $115,000.

A society in which home ownership increasingly depends on the wealth and status of one’s family is not one with a thriving middle class, it’s one that’s splitting into an inherited set of haves and have-nots.

When the social contract is broken, the consequences are not abstract. The first thing to go is the future. People stop forming families. Canada’s fertility rate has dropped to 1.25 children per woman, a record low and one of the lowest rates in the world. Half of Canadians under 50 who want children say they’ve delayed longer than they wanted to (rising to three-quarters among those 35 to 44).

Declining fertility rates are not just a Canadian story, they are a global one, and it’s not simply due to material conditions. But the material conditions that make family formation possible (a stable job, a place to live, some measure of financial security) have been stripped away for many of the people who today want to, or are trying to, start families.

Historian Christopher Lasch saw this coming decades ago: the family besieged from both directions at once, capitalism dissolving its economic foundations while the “therapeutic state” eroded its authority. What you end up with is a world in which starting a family feels less like a natural stage of life and more like a lifestyle choice that requires extraordinary resources. Canada has arrived at exactly that place, and then made it worse by pricing out the people who want to try.

And then there is the most damning verdict of all: people leave. Emigration from Canada hit 120,000 over the 12 months ending in the third quarter of 2025, the largest such outflow in Canadian history. And it’s not just those who have already left: an Angus Reid survey found that 42 percent of Canadians aged 18 to 24 are seriously thinking about leaving their province because of how expensive housing has become.

This is not an issue of talent being poached by higher American salaries. It’s about what a career in Canada actually buys you and concluding that the implicit promise of the country — come here, work hard, build a life — no longer holds. When a country starts losing the people who grew up believing in it, something has gone badly wrong.

Conservatives, especially, should understand what is at stake here. Every serious conservative thinker, from Edmund Burke to Roger Scruton, understood that people do not commit to abstract propositions about freedom and markets. They commit to particular places, particular communities and particular ways of life.

The “little platoons,” the intermediate institutions, the local bonds of loyalty and obligation that hold a society together all flourish in a world where material conditions allow people to build homes, establish roots and give them “skin in the game” and a commitment to the society they live in.

Take those conditions away and you are left with a population that has no reason to defend institutions it was never allowed to join. That is not a left-wing observation. It is the oldest conservative insight there is.

A country in which young people feel that no matter what they do, the living standards of their parents are not available to them, is a country that will lose them. Canada’s political class needs to stop treating this as something to be managed with housing announcements and affordability task forces, and start treating it as what it is: the most consequential domestic policy failure of the last quarter-century.

The basic deal is broken, and if we don’t do the big things needed to fix it, the country that boomers got to live in will have been a one-generation experiment.

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