By Don Newman

April 18^th, 2024

One day fourteen years ago, after speaking to what was then called Ryerson University in Toronto, I was walking down a hall packed with students going to their next assignment as classes changed. Everyone, it seemed, was twenty years old except me. Suddenly, a middle-aged woman smiled and waved at me from a classroom doorway.

She was a professor, and she had a question for me: What did I think of Justin Trudeau, who was then contemplating a run for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada? I replied rather flippantly that I had trouble taking seriously a major-party leadership candidate whose birth I could remember covering as a news story.

Confirming that she felt the same way, she added a comment that would turn out to be verify predictive of what would soon happen in Canadian politics. The students around us “loved” Trudeau and couldn’t get enough of him. Many of them had not been born in Canada and had no recollection or reference to the time his father, Pierre, had been Prime Minister.

Less than a year later, Justin Trudeau was Liberal leader. Two years after, that he was Prime Minister, as he led the Liberals from just thirty-two seats and third place in the House of Commons to a majority government of over one hundred and eighty seats. And an important part of that victory came from the votes of young Canadians who “loved” Trudeau and expressed that emotion via voting.

Since then, younger voters by and large have stayed loyal in two election while other Canadians began to cast their votes elsewhere, allowing Trudeau and the Liberals to remain in power with two healthy minority governments, in 2019 and 2021.

But that was then and this is now.  In the twelve years since university students were raving about Trudeau and excavating the term “Trudeaumania”, they have grown into thirty-somethings trying to develop careers, start families and buy homes. They are now feeling the practical impact of government beyond politics, feeling the squeeze of inflation and higher interest rates, as well as sky-high rents and home prices. They are being told by the Conservatives and others that they will not be able to aspire to the same kind of life their parents were able to work for and achieve.

Since last summer, the Liberals have been tumbling in the polls and, for the first time, to the party’s shock and horror, younger voters are part of the collapse that now has the governing party an average of 20 points behind in public opinion surveys.

That is what the April 16^th budget was about. Trying to win back the disaffected young voters under 40 years of age who were among the Trudeau Liberals’ most loyal supporters but are now among its most disaffected critics. So slanted were most of the budgets key proposals towards millenials and Gen Z Canadians that the Government had to give the budget a name it hoped would hide its intention; “Fairness for every generation.”

Younger Canadians believe they have been treated unfairly, particularly when they have to face today’s high prices or high rents when they try to buy or rent a home. Two announcements in the budget are designed to address that feeling of unfairness: The Canada Builds program, a $55 billion fund to provide loans for new apartment construction in partnership with the provinces and territories. And a $6 billion Housing Infrastructure Fund to provide the water, wastewater, stormwater and waste infrastructure to support the multitude of homes the government is committing to build by the end of the decade.

How will these expensive housing programs, plus the new spending on defence, a national dental plan and the start of a national pharmaceutical plan be paid for? Well partly through a$39.8 billion deficit in this fiscal year, and partly by increasing the percentage of capital gains eligible for taxation from 50 percent to 65 percent for people with annual capital gains incomes of over $250,000 a year. Since most of the people who will have capital gains of that amount are probably wealthy, older Canadians, the higher tax rate will at least to younger Canadians seem like “fairness” in the tax system.

That is at least one of the hopes of the Trudeau government. Along with the hope that the budget will get the people who “loved” the prime minister a decade ago, to like him enough to vote for him again.

Contributing Writer and columnist Don Newman, an Officer of the Order of Canada and lifetime member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery, is Executive Vice President of Rubicon Strategy, based in Ottawa.