National Child And Housing Days
Opportunities to remember that we are failing young Canadians
Thanks to those of you who took the time to join our inaugural Community Call last week. We had a great time, and hope you also found value in it. It was exciting to meet so many people passionate about generational fairness – we’re more motivated than ever knowing that we have your support! For anyone who couldn’t make it, you can find the recording here, and the calls to action that we discussed here.
As we mentioned on the call, Paul was coming to us from Ottawa, where he was invited to speak about the need for a Generational Fairness Task Force with the Office of the Prime Minister, as well as leaders from the offices of other Ministers. We believe that a Task Force can help tackle the root cause of our affordability, housing, medical care, and climate crises: public policies that put the well-being of older generations above that of younger ones. The idea of integrating generational fairness into government operations seems to be gaining some traction with the Liberals.
Here are the topics we will cover in today’s newsletter:
National Housing Day
National Observer’s Max Fawcett: Young People Are Still Getting Screwed
New Policy Solutions For Families
Let’s get into it.
For National Housing Day, Our Federal Government Gave Us A Reminder That Housing Affordability Is Not A Top Priority
November 22 is Canada’s National Housing Day. The idea of marking the importance of homes might ring a little hollow for many Canadians, given how bad our housing situation has become. Recent polling confirms that sky-high prices continue to make housing a source of despair, anger, and worry. New Statistics Canada data suggests our housing system is becoming dynastic, with the children of homeowners or ‘mom & pop’ real estate investors more likely to own homes than children of non-owners. For many younger people, the housing crisis is impacting “nearly every facet” of their lives – from physical and mental health, to financial wellbeing, to overall quality of life.
In the face of housing despair, what can we do on National Housing Day but reiterate the need for accelerated and comprehensive action to fix our broken housing system? It’s clear what needs to be done – check out our housing policy solutions framework which describes all of the steps along the way to restoring affordability.
National Housing Day fell right after this year’s Fall Economic Statement (FES), but the federal mini-budget didn’t match the urgency of the moment on housing. Despite the PM’s earlier brave statement that housing prices can’t keep rising, our Federal government continues to treat supply as a silver bullet, making it less likely that the stalling prices the PM has set out as a goal are achieved. While our leaders claim to understand that “no single measure will solve Canada's housing challenge”, the FES primarily focuses on “building more homes, faster”, ignoring investor demand, which the PM recently correctly identified as a factor that led to elevated prices.
If you’re looking for more on the FES, check out Paul’s recent appearance on BNN, where he details how the FES includes $115 billion in new spending for Old Age Security compared to just $16 billion for housing - no wonder young people are feeling the squeeze. We’re currently taking a deeper dive into the FES and will have some more analysis available in the coming days.
Young People Are Still Getting Screwed
The above is the title of an article that Max Fawcett, lead columnist at Canada’s National Observer, and a friend of Gen Squeeze, published last week on the first-ever Intergenerational Fairness Day. In the article, Max explains how “Canadians under 45 consistently get the shortest end of the political stick”, on climate action, public finances, and of course, housing.
“Housing policy and local planning decisions in Canada have long been biased towards protecting the equity of existing homeowners, much of which was accumulated through no work or wisdom of their own, rather than affordability issues faced by younger people.”
We recently outlined some of the policies that are contributing to our issues. It’s exciting that a prominent writer like Max not only agrees with our diagnosis of the problem but is also calling for the same solutions:
“A good place to start would be forming the Task Force on Generational Fairness that Generation Squeeze has called for, one that would shed more light on the challenges younger people are facing.”
Thanks, Max, for bringing attention to Intergenerational Fairness Day, and how a Task Force on Generational Fairness would help create the change we need.
For more great insights from Max, check out his recent podcast with us. The episode features a discussion on housing, where we learn that Max agrees with our idea that restoring affordability means breaking our addiction to rising home prices:
“The beating heart of any successful housing strategy in this country involves going after the biggest enemy in all of this, our own behavior”.
(Are you listening, writers of the FES?)
New Policy Solutions For Families
Monday, November 20th was National Child Day, a day to celebrate child rights like access to rest, play, education, health care, safe water, and nutritious food, among many others. As the cost of living in Canada continues to rise, many young families are having trouble providing these necessities for their children. The aim of our updated family policy solutions framework is to deliver the changes needed to support families with young children.
Parents are struggling to balance time to care for their kids, with time at work to earn the wages needed to support their families. Our plan aims to make this balance easier by improving parental leave, ensuring key supports like child care are affordable, accessible, and high quality, while also exploring ways to change workplace norms to support greater flexibility. Interested in learning more? Check out a summary here, or do a deep dive into the detailed framework here.
That’s all for this time, thanks for reading!
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As a new parent, I appreciated reading the "new policy solutions for families." I've been personally very grateful to Gen Squeeze and other organisations who in the past successfully advocated for making EI (and parental leave) accessible to self-employed individuals. This was an excellent step in the right direction to making parental leave available to all parents. There's more to be done when it comes to promoting shared leave and increasing benefit amounts, as you've noted.
I love that Gen Squeeze considers flexible work arrangements as part of the solution for families. I think that flexible and remote work are often missing from the conversation about parenting. In my own experience, having flexibility with my hours has tremendously improved my ability to balance parenting and working.
You touched on this in the article, but I think it's worth reiterating the gap in our system for children before they go to school. After parental leave ends and before publicly-funded school begins, there is huge uncertainty for parents. Will they be able to afford childcare? And if they can, will they even get a space? There must be data on the impacts to our economy when parents are forced into taking additional time off work to care for children because of lack of affordable, accessible childcare. Would love to see you write more about this!
It's hard not to feel as a young-ish person like recent (and belated!) spending commitments on housing have sort of been the bare minimum to try to get ahead of shifting sentiment on immigration targets rather than to actually prioritize the housing problem for its own sake, especially because targets for population growth have a lot to do with supporting an aging population. Certainly supply is not the whole story, but I don't think there's any question about the fact that fast population growth creates strain. (This is especially true when that growth is disproportionately adults who would mostly ideally be independent households, which makes it different than previous periods of fast growth.) It even shows up a little bit in the rhetoric about needing to plan for a growing Canada.
Might not be a problem if governments had treated population growth as a thing that requires real investment, both for immigrants themselves and to make sure the benefits of immigration are shared broadly, rather than a cheap way to rebalance demographics and grow the tax base, but I think there's a real dynamic where it's been assumed until recently most of the investment needed to support a growing population can be private even as many of the investments needed to support an aging population are public. Of course, part of the reason growth as a solution to that might feel attractive to governments in the first place is exactly because of the age-imbalance in spending and lack of investment in families GenSqueeze points out, but it can also exacerbate disparities.