Boomers get retirement. Millennials get their debt

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Statistics Canada says the inevitable has finally happened: Baby Boomers no longer rule the landscape like some ravenous but well-meaning tyrannosaur. Sometime before last July 1, the agency says, the number of millennials in Canada passed the number of leftovers from the postwar generation.

For the first time since 1958, when my generation became the country’s largest, Canada’s average age has declined. We’re getting older, the country is getting younger. Boomers out, millennials, gen Z, gen X, gen etc. in.

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All I can say is, given the legacy they’re getting, I hope they’re not the vindictive sort. There’s not much they can do about it, anyway. We’ve done a pretty good job of feathering our nests, while leaving behind the bills. We’ve got the houses, which keep going up in value, they’ve got the national debt, which pretty much does the same. We’ve got investments, benefits, Old Age Security. They’ve got inflation, high interest rates, a health-care system in crisis thanks, to considerable extent, to the cost of keeping us upright.

We could afford big families. In 1958 Canada’s birth rate was 27.2 per 1,000 people. Last year it was 10.1, and even at that low rate, try to find affordable daycare. For us, a first-timer’s home had three bedrooms and a back yard. For younger generations, how’s 600 square feet on the sixth floor sound? And you have to work there, too.

Honestly, it wasn’t supposed to be this way. You’ll probably never meet a more idealistic generation. Maybe we didn’t invent the social welfare system, but we grabbed it and ran. Universal health care. A national pension plan. Generous unemployment cheques. Student loans, childcare payments. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it all cost money, but why should we care? We were young, we were optimistic, there’d be lots of money, from somewhere.

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There was a war on, and even though it wasn’t ours, we were against it. We were for civil rights. We liked to protest, to show how progressive we were. (Actually, we said “liberal,” not “progressive,” but somehow “liberal” got to be a bad term, so now we’re not that.) We demonstrated, we waved signs. Give peace a chance. Make love, not war. Sit-ins. Bed-ins. The Beatles, hippies, Woodstock, feminism, bralessness. How liberated could you get?

Somewhere along the line things seem to have gone astray. How? Don’t ask. Maybe idealism on its own just isn’t enough. People have to go to work, costs have to be covered, and why should we pay it all ourselves when we can demand the government do it? Annual deficits, and Canada’s federal debt, started taking off in the early 1960s, as boomers were entering their prime spending years.

When Lester Pearson left office in 1968, the deficit was $1 billion, or 1.5 per cent of GDP. When his successor, Pierre Trudeau, departed in 1984 it was $32 billion, almost eight per cent of GDP. The debt pile kept ballooning until the mid-1990s, when all the borrowing resulted in a crisis that temporarily put a halt to the spending spree. But not for long. A decade later it was back to big spending, big deficits and a ballooning debt. I guess we didn’t learn.

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So now, StatsCan says, Ottawa has to devote 10 cents on every dollar to paying interest charges. The spree has really taken off since 2015, when Stephen Harper left office. In the past eight years Ottawa has added almost $1 trillion to the debt. Thanks to rising interest rates — needed to temper the rise in inflation — interest charges have nearly doubled to $46.5 billion a year.

You can’t blame boomers entirely for this mess. Neither the prime minister nor the finance minister meet the formal definition of a boomer — she was born in 1968, missing the cutoff by three years, he was born in 1971 — but they certainly have the instincts. On Friday the finance department revealed that, despite repeated pledges to exercise caution, the deficit for the first nine months of the 23/24 fiscal year is four times higher than a year ago, most of the increase going to higher interest payments.

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Look, let’s be fair. Canada has a lot of generous programs. We do our best to make life easier from birth to death. We subsidize pretty much anything, from energy costs (why should people have to pay the full price for the power they use?) to battery plants (why should giant international automotive corporations have to pay to build their own plants?) When COVID hit, we sent money to 15-year-olds robbed of hope of burger joint jobs.

Boomers started all this. We wanted to make things easier, not rougher. All those decisions that have made it almost impossible to afford a house —— zoning restrictions, development charges, rent controls, government downloading — were well-intentioned. And the huge increase in immigration … well, Canadians support immigration, right? It makes up a big part of our national pride. Were we supposed to know they’d all want a place to sleep?

It’s just that, like a lot of people, we weren’t overly fixated on where it was heading, cost-wise.  Look at health care. For decades we’ve enjoyed boasting about how Canada’s universal access was the envy of the world (even if lots of other countries thought the same of their systems.) “Don’t touch health care!” might as well have been our national motto. As a percentage of gross domestic product we spend more than 36 of the 37 other countries in the OECD (only the U.S. spends more), yet all we hear about are wait lists, doctor shortages, overwhelmed hospitals. Turns out throwing money at things doesn’t necessarily make them work well. Now they tell us.

It’s almost poetic that we’re finally handing over the title of largest generation after 65 years, the same as the age of retirement. Or is it a cruel irony? Whatever the case, Easy Street here we come, keep those CPP cheques coming! Maybe we’re old and spent all the money, but we still expect to be taken care of.

National Post

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