Anthony Koch: Canada works fine — if you're a boomer (2025)

Pierre Poilievre keeps saying it: Canada is broken.

And for millions of younger Canadians, it’s not just a slogan. It’s reality.

But for older voters — especially Boomers and older Gen Xers — that message is like nails on a chalkboard. They hate it. Not because it’s wrong, but because it threatens a version of Canada they still believe in. A Canada that worked. A Canada that rewarded hard work, played fair, and gave them everything they have now.

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And it did work — for them.

If you bought a home in 1996, you paid around $150,000 in most major cities. Today, that same home is worth over $1 million. In that time, you’ve watched interest rates drop, your equity skyrocket, and your retirement fund balloon. Government services worked when you needed them. Your pension is solid. Life in Canada got better, year after year. So when someone says “Canada is broken,” it sounds absurd — because for you, it never broke.

But for those who came after you? It never even started.

Younger Canadians are locked out of the middle class their parents entered with a college degree and a single income. They’ve been told to study hard, work hard, and keep their heads down. And they did — only to graduate into a gig economy, spend half their income on rent, and watch the dream of home ownership float further out of reach every year.

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They’re not looking for handouts. They’re looking for a fair shot. And they’re not getting one.

This is the raw generational fault line running through Canadian politics today. And it’s only getting wider.

That’s why older voters are drifting toward people like Mark Carney — technocratic, stable, a man who promises to “manage” Canada rather than change it. His recent ad isn’t a pitch to young people with no assets — it’s a comfort blanket for those who already have theirs. It speaks to a deep yearning among older voters to go back to a time when Canada felt whole. When the system worked. When they were building their lives, not watching their kids fail to launch.

But you can’t go back to 1996. And young Canadians don’t want to.

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For them, Poilievre’s blunt diagnosis — that the country is broken — is refreshing. It’s finally an admission of what they’ve been living for a decade. That the institutions their parents built no longer serve them. That the rules are rigged. That the future doesn’t look like opportunity, it looks like survival.

The Liberal Party doesn’t want to talk about this. Neither do their allies in media and academia. Because to admit that Canada is broken is to admit that the people who ran it — for decades — broke it. Or at the very least, turned away while it happened.

This isn’t a left-versus-right issue. It’s generational. The system still works if you own a home, have a pension, and aren’t saddled with debt. But for younger Canadians, those things are slipping out of reach — and politics that only speaks to nostalgia is just another reminder of who Canada still belongs to.

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We are becoming a two-tier nation. One Canada owns. The other rents. One Canada votes to protect what it has. The other votes to escape a future it never signed up for.

So, yes — Canada is broken. But if you’re over 55, you might not notice. That’s not an attack. It’s just the truth.

The next election won’t just be about left versus right, Liberal versus Conservative. It’ll be about a political class that’s still campaigning in 1996 — and a generation that can’t afford to live there anymore.

National Post

Anthony Koch is the managing principal at AK Strategies, a bilingual public affairs firm specializing in political communications, public affairs and campaign strategy. He previously served as national campaign spokesperson and director of communications to Pierre Poilievre, as well as director of communications and chief spokesperson for the Conservative Party of British Columbia general election campaign.

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