Canadians go to the polls to elect a new prime minister next week. The center-right Conservative Party's Pierre Poilievre is facing off against the Liberal incumbent, Mark Carney. For those who haven’t been following the situation in Canada, Carney is the Kamala Harris of the Great White North; he’s only in office because former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau resigned.
Polling shows Carney’s Liberal Party in the lead, partially because Canadians are lashing out in defiance against President Donald Trump’s tariffs and tongue-in-cheek rhetoric about making Canada the 51st U.S. state. But the numbers are fascinatingly close, with 43% supporting Carney’s party and 37% supporting the Conservatives.
There’s a fascinating generation gap among Canadian voters, as Stephen Daisley points out at The Spectator. It happens to be an upside-down generation gap, compared to what you might expect.
“If the franchise was limited to 18-to-34-year-olds, the Conservatives would narrowly win the contest; if only over-65s could vote, the Liberals’ victory would be even mightier,” Daisley writes.
Side note: Nothing in Daisley’s article mentions GenX voters, so I looked at the crosstabs, and the polling among my generation falls closely in line with the general vote, with 42% supporting the Liberals and 39% supporting the Conservatives. Man, we GenXers get the shaft all the time.
Daisley notes that it’s the Boomers who are giving Carney and his Liberals the biggest edge:
What’s that all about, then? In a word: boomers. The boomer, born roughly between 1946 and 1964, is the bête noire of Canadian right-wingery. He is a retired government employee on a generous public pension who came of age in times of plenty, bought his spacious house on the cheap, then pulled the ladder up behind him. He imagines himself to be an ageing hippie but grew up in North York in the Sixties where the closest he got to the counterculture was buying the White Album from Sam the Record Man.
He watches, listens, streams and surfs the CBC. The progressive-minded public broadcaster is the source of all his independent thinking and Facebook the soapbox from which he regurgitates chapter and verse of last night’s edition of The National. If the CBC were a church, he would be a lay preacher. The Carney boomer reckons the young are lazy and entitled, Tory voters racist and stupid, and Americans crazy and tacky. He believes above all in the three most important Canadian values: peace, order and asset-hoarding.
Daisley points out the contrast by writing that “a significant segment of young’uns trend rightwards in Canada while the olds are the backbone of the centre-left vote.”
Related: Is History Rhyming in Canada?
Here's an example of how strongly the Boomers are all-in for Carney. Over the weekend, an independent Canadian journalist captured this image of a Carney-supporting older man as his fellow Liberals look on with laughs of approval:
Elbows and/or fingers up. #cdnpoli #Brantford #Elxn45 #ProtestMania pic.twitter.com/jTKswfmgVp
— Caryma Sa'd - Lawyer + Political Satirist (@CarymaRules) April 19, 2025
You stay classy, gramps.
“The two-finger salute has already become a meme,” Daisley notes. “Legal scholar Yuan Yi Zhu tweeted the image with the caption: ‘The last thing you see before you are priced out of a house, forever.’ The YouTuber JJ McCullough combined it with a graph ranking real GDP-per-capita growth in OECD countries since 2015 — when the Liberals came to power — with Canada second from bottom.”
Canadian Boomers see a vote for Carney as another way of sticking it to “the man” — only this time, “the man” is the Boomers’ kids and grandkids. It’s an odd phenomenon when the transgressive act is voting for the status quo. Maybe younger generations will wise up before next week’s election and vote for change.
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