Liberals beware of unhappy youth
Averages can be terribly misleading. If you’ve got your feet in the freezer and your head in the oven, it’s been noted, your average temperature may be just fine. But are you comfortable? Hardly.
A new global survey suggests Canada is a bit like that. The latest edition of the grandly named World Happiness Report, run out of the University of Oxford, ranks Canada a respectable 15th out of 143 nations when it comes to happiness — on average, that is.
But a closer look reveals some troubling disparities that deserve close attention and have major implications for our politics. Specifically, they’re a clanging alarm bell for Justin Trudeau’s Liberals as they get closer to facing the voters.
It turns out that when it comes to happiness, we’re not one country but two. Older Canadians are toasty warm (again, on average). The report ranks this country a very comfortable eighth in the world for happiness among those aged 60 and up.
But younger Canadians are stuck in the freezer. For people under 30, Canada ranks way down at 58th in the world, on a par with the likes of Ecuador and Honduras. The same trend is apparent in the United States and much of western Europe. McGill University scholar Chris Barrington-Leigh summed it up like this to Global News: “We have a very, very unhappy youth.”
The happiness index has been published for the past dozen years and it has shown a slow but steady decline overall for Canada (we were fifth in the first report, in 2012). The latest edition, covering 2023, finds Finland is the happiest country in the world overall. Though someone’s going to have to explain to me how Finland can be both the happiest country in the world while also having high rates of depression and, until recently, suicide.
Another puzzler is that Israel, of all places, ranks fifth overall in happiness despite …. everything. The reason seems to be a strong sense of social solidarity and “meaningfulness,” which are strengthened by external threats.
But back to Canada. The happiness researchers don’t try to explain why younger people in Canada and the United States are so gloomy, but it’s not hard to guess.
For the youngest cohort, the Gen Zers in their late teens and 20s, the culprits surely include the toxic impact of social media, fallout from the pandemic, and the general collapse of trust in almost everything over the past decade.
For those a bit older, the millennials struggling to establish careers and families, you can add the feeling that it’s become increasingly difficult to get ahead — and especially to reach that traditional milestone of adulthood, buying your first home. Young people in many countries — including eastern Europe and even parts of the Middle East — are more optimistic than they used to be. But ours are getting gloomier by the year.
That has all sorts of implications and some of the most obvious have to do with politics. Back in 2015, Justin Trudeau was propelled to victory by a wave of young voters inspired by his “sunny ways” optimism and youth-friendly policies like legalizing cannabis. Younger people largely stuck with the Liberals even in 2021.
But now those same voters are discouraged and have turned decisively to the right — those aged 30 to 44 favour Conservatives over the Liberals by a 20point margin, according to an Abacus poll in late February. Even those under 30 are firmly in the Conservative camp at this point.
That’s a big shift and it seems obvious younger people are responding to Pierre Poilievre’s message about affordability and the need to make home ownership achievable once again. If the Liberals can’t win those unhappy young voters back, they can kiss the next election goodbye.