The grey vote

The parties are running low on ammunition in the election that never ends, and I can sense, like a tracker laying an ear to the ground, the approach of conversations about demographics and the getting-out of the vote. With this campaign sub-season — suitably located in the autumn — will come talk of “grey power”; dread of the Conservative advantage among bigoted, ornery, vote-crazy oldies; and, above all, the suffocating hatred of the young toward the liver-spotted hands that grip our levers of power and ward off change.

I rarely speak of Baby Boomers without a generous helping of contemptuous spittle. But the great equalizers, pain and death and dementia and distraction, are now starting to take them. The people I call Turnout Nerds obsess over youth voting: it seems unnatural to them, even revolting, that fewer than half of people under 35 bother to struggle to the polls, choosing to deny us their breezy new ideas and their orientation toward the future. (Not that I can see much actual evidence of either quality.)

They do not talk much about what happens to voter turnout once Canadians have passed their peak propensity to vote, which arrives, according to the official estimates for the 2011 election, at the age of 67. The graph, it turns out, looks like a skewed triangle. Voters in the age cohorts from 20-25 had less than 40 per cent turnout in 2011. There is a slow linear climb from there; turnout passes 50 per cent in the mid-30s, 60 per cent in the mid40s, 70 per cent on the cusp of age 60. It rises to above 75 per cent at about the traditional retirement age.

But the dropoff in turnout from there is steeper than the rise — and how else could it be, given arthritis and lumbago and the other cruel facts of late life? And by age 67, according to an insurance man’s icy “life t a bl e s ,” more than one per cent of the population is dying every year. If you adjust for mortality, and imagine a hypothetical pool of Canadian voters starting out at age 18, the estimated age at which the highest number of the original group will be voting isn’t 67; it’s more like a flat peak between the ages of 59 and 64. After that, coronaries start taking away more voters than enthusiasm is adding.

As much as we talk about the Baby Boom, the population of Canada is still ever-growing through immigration and natural increase. The largest single age group of eligible voters in 2011, according to Elections Canada’s figures, was the 523,896 48-year-olds. They were a force to be reckoned with because their turnout was high, but they should not be thought of as some ever-victorious army; no younger cohort of eligible voters was smaller than 400,000. The 73-year-olds, by contrast, numbered fewer than 200,000 tough old birds.

We have a three-way election on our hands, so it seems natural to divide the electorate into thirds by age. The 2011 figures would make the cutoff ages 38 and 55 (with a median of 47). Those cutoffs will have scuttled forward a little bit for 2015, but, remember, it is that top third that has been dying the fastest. You could think of the whole voting public as consisting of a young group from ages 18-37, a middle group aged 38-55 and an old group 56 and up.

Feel free to impress your friends by using the fancy word for thirds: “terciles.” And note that senior citizens proper, people aged 65 and over, are about half a tercile — barely more a sixth of eligible voters, no greater in numbers than the 56-64 wad of late Boomers. For that matter, seniors were, in 2011, actually less numerous than potential voters aged 18-28.

This conception at least offers some relief from the usual picture of prepackaged generations, your Xs and Ys, devised for retail marketing rather than politics. What are the Conservatives, who already enjoy the devotion of the elder tercile, doing when they write benefit cheques for young parents? They’re reaching into the young group, trying to build an electoral future and capture new territory by reinventing the old Family Allowance.

When Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau talks of a multi-billion-dollar injection of cash into home care and medication costs, he’s reaching out past his natural base of youth, serenading the vulnerable old tercile and the middle-tercile children who are afraid of being shackled to declining parents. Twotercile policy is good

policy.

Seniors do not wield as much electoral power in this country as many people think