Grits' `generational fairness' pitch falls flat
The Liberal's budget aimed at young voters didn't move the political needle
You couldn't blame Prime Minister Justin Trudeau if he's been feeling as downcast and rejected as a hapless magician hired for the children's party. I mean, what hasn't he done for the young folk? In a series of spending and program announcements this month all aimed at Millennials and Gen Z adults, he's performed the political equivalent of pulling rabbits out of his top hat, making animal balloons, doing the never-ending handkerchief trick with his sleeve, with the grand finale of releasing doves. And what's the audience reaction? They're on their phones, watching YouTube videos of Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre.
It is almost pitiable, how badly the Liberals' great reset is going in its admittedly early days. All that effort around a carefully curated budget aimed at, as the Liberals dubbed it, “generational fairness” has not moved the political needle even a millimetre. Correction: it has moved the needle a millimetre, just in the wrong direction.
In polling we released at the Angus Reid Institute post-budget, the Opposition Conservatives are up a couple points to 43 per cent in vote intention, while the Liberals are down a point, to 23 per cent. Pollsters like me will say this is statistically insignificant movement. But given the pull-out-all-stops effort at a “generational fairness” budget, party strategists and spin doctors must be reaching for the liquid anti-acid, if not something stronger.
“Give it time,” they'll tell you publicly. “People don't know what's in the budget yet.” But even when you tell them, the Liberals remain thwarted, unrewarded. The aforementioned poll showed half of respondents the budget highlights up front in the questionnaire, before asking about vote intention. The other half got the budget details toward the end. In turn, vast majorities of Canadians professed to like individual aspects of the budget measures, such as increased defence spending, more housing infrastructure, pharmacare, dental care and even the new disability benefit (that many advocates in the disability community have themselves panned). Even then, more than half (56 per cent) told us the budget makes them more pessimistic about the future. Worse than that: the younger people aren't just unimpressed, they're checking out altogether. Among voting age Gen Z's and Millennials — those aged between 18 and 44 — fully 70 per cent do not believe the Trudeau government is working in their generations' best interests. This has to be a hurtful repudiation, especially as concern at every generational level about inflation and the cost of living is falling.
Where are younger voters going? 18- to 24-year-olds skew slightly toward the NDP, while 25- to 34-year-olds are split between the NDP and the Conservatives. Older millennials are all in on the CPC. At the moment, the governing party is nowhere in this fight, running a distant third among all those voters they're trying so hard to turn. The Liberals eat the NDP's lunch among the over-45 crowd, but still run second to Poilievre's party at margins of nearly two-to-one.
The prime minister has clearly failed to make headway with the voters he needs. All he may have left now is to scare them; into believing Conservatives will hack away at and roll back all the nice things he says he'll deliver; into believing that they'll be even worse off under CPC government than they are under his own. It will be a difficult case to make, given Poilievre has maintained a message discipline of saying almost nothing about the spending programs he would cut as he rails about the Liberals' long history of deficit spending. As is always the case in politics, there is no upside for the opposition to tip their hand with specifics too soon. That said, it's about time the Conservative leader was pressed harder on what, if anything at all, is in his bag of tricks.