Why We Follow The Money

Budget season is a key moment to advance generational fairness

A lot of people in Toronto (Kareem included) complain that spring no longer exists. It feels like we jump from wearing winter jackets to shorts within a week. Setting aside the alarm this might raise about our changing climate, the team at Gen Squeeze is once again ready for our spring tradition – a deep dive into government budgets. 

Over the next couple of months, provincial and federal governments will release their 2024 spending plans. We’ll be there in BC, Alberta, Ontario, and on Parliament Hill in Ottawa with our unique blend of number-crunching and truth-telling. Our goal is to bring you the untold stories about how governments are spending your tax dollars, and whether these investments are generationally fair.

“Don’t tell me what you value.
Show me your budget—and I’ll tell you what you value.”
- Joe Biden

We realize that government budgets might not seem terribly interesting, especially when too many Canadians are worrying about their own finances. But budgets are key moments to promote generational fairness, because they chart the course for everything governments do. 

Join the conversation about where your tax dollars are going 

BC’s budget is first up this year, on February 22. Paul will be behind the scenes in Victoria to break down spending by age group – something governments in Canada (sadly) still don’t account for, as the Bad Budget Bunny reminds us.

On February 28, we’re hosting our next Community Call to talk about what it means to budget fairly for all generations. We’ll feature hot-off-the-press commentary on the BC budget, and our forecast on what to expect in budgets to come.  

Our Community Calls are a place to connect with other like-minded advocates and share questions and ideas, so don’t forget to bring your thoughts about budget winners and losers.  

You can register for free here. And stay tuned to our budget season 2024 page for new commentary and information about future events.

If you want to let the federal government know what you think about where to invest, check out Let’s Talk Budget 2024. Sharing our budget recommendations is a quick way to tell federal leaders how best to promote generational fairness. Jump in the conversation until February 9.

“Gen Squeeze is my go-to source for provincial and federal budget analyses. Their team has a knack for translating huge amounts of data and research into crisp takeaways and helpful infographics. For folks who lack the time (or patience!) to sift through extensive budget documents on their own, Gen Squeeze can be trusted to do the heavy lifting and weigh in on how well we are — or aren’t — tackling some of the most pressing issues facing our country.”

— Ian Klesmer, Gen Squeeze supporter

Budgets: How we pay for the Canada we want

The way we spend our money says a lot about what we value. Government spending plans are no different. We've repeatedly found that governments haven’t budgeted well for the large number of retiring baby boomers – and that they’ve been compensating by squeezing investments in younger generations.

So what are we hoping to see in the 2024 budgets?  Here’s a snapshot. You can find detailed recommendations for each jurisdiction here.

• Put generational fairness at the center of policy and budget decisions by creating Generational Fairness Task Forces.

• Ground housing policy in the principle that restoring housing affordability for all requires home prices to stall so that earnings can catch up.

• Strengthen accountability by filling in and fixing current data gaps — including what we spend by age, what we spend on treating illness versus creating health, how housing price inflation is measured, and whether we're meeting our climate goals.

• Invest adequately in $10 a day child care to make $10 the maximum fee (with no fee for low-income families), while securing fair professional wages for early childhood educators to attract and retain these critical workers.

• Protect pollution pricing, because we can't solve our wallet problems by neglecting our climate problem.Please help us share this newsletter far and wide. The more awareness there is about Canada’s broken generational system, the more quickly it will be fixed.

Budgets make clear whether politicians are putting money where their mouths are

Paul had the opportunity to brief the entire Liberal cabinet at the Federal retreat last summer. It was super encouraging to hear Prime Minister Trudeau come out of those meetings promising to do better for younger Canadians.

"We owe it to you to take action, so you can fully benefit from the promise of Canada. So you can succeed and access all the opportunities the generations before you had.”
- Prime Minister Justin Trudeau

But just a few weeks later in the Fall Economic Statement, little new spending was announced to help younger people – even though the government found the funds to boost spending on Old Age Security and medical care for Canadians age 65+ by $150 billion over five years. This massive investment in older demographics accounts for the majority of the $186 billion projected to be added to our national debt over the same period.

In the 2024 budget, we’re hopeful Trudeau’s Liberals will live up to the promise he made last summer, and find a generationally fair balance between supporting healthy retirements and reversing the deteriorating well-being of younger Canadians.

While influencing government budgets might seem like a daunting task, our past successes show that it is possible. See this story in the Vancouver Foundation magazine describing how Gen Squeeze helped turn a $90,000 grant into a $30-billion government investment by successfully branding the $10aDay Child Care campaign.

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That’s all for this time, thanks for reading!