At University Hospital in London, Ontario, Amanda Vanderley, 25, works grueling 12-hour shifts as an emergency room nurse. Each day includes not just providing critical care and assisting doctors with emergency procedures but also managing patients’ anxieties.
On the drive home after a long shift, her own anxieties rush in. Especially about how she and her husband Mattias, 23, a data analyst, will make ends meet.
Amanda’s $38 an hour, together with Mattias’s income, brings them around $135,000 annually before taxes. But after Canada's high taxes, they are left with $85,000 to $90,000 in Canadian dollars, or the equivalent of $60,000 in U.S. dollars. The financial strain is palpable—they’re barely managing day to day, let alone contemplating buying a home.
“I can anticipate and plan for the emergency room. But the thought of buying a house right now is overwhelming,” she said. “It would wipe us out.”
The couple rents an apartment in the basement of a house. Vanderley worked 70-hour weeks for two months to help pay for their wedding in August.
“If we want to go on a vacation, I have to work extra shifts. If Mattias and I want to start a family, I’ll either need to make more money or pick up more hours,” Vanderley said.
That financial precariousness—widely shared among Canadians in their 20s—is leading to a remarkable change in the country’s politics. Mirroring a similar shift to the right in the U.S., many young voters here are abandoning Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party for the Conservative opposition. The next election must take place by October 2025, and both parties are conscious of young people’s complaints that the Trudeau government has failed to address economic concerns such as high housing costs and inflation.
“I’ll be supporting the Conservative Party in the next election because I’ve seen the damage that big government and reckless spending has done,” Vanderley told me.
Eric Lombardi, 30, a management consultant in Toronto, who volunteered for the Liberal Party in high school and voted for them in the last two elections, is also disenchanted.
“The things that gravitated me toward Trudeau at the time were issues like the legalization of marijuana. I’m a freedom-oriented person. I’m a gay man. The Liberals were always far more supportive of my community vocally,” Lombardi told me.
Today, he’s leaning toward supporting the Conservative Party.
“Trudeau has lost the plot. He and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland have been gaslighting people about the state of Canada’s economy since the pandemic.
“For most people in the real economy, we’ve been in a recession.”
It’s been almost a decade since the last major shift in Canadian politics. In 2015, the economy was struggling, and young people saw Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper, who had been in power for nine years, as out of step on issues such as the environment and immigration. Trudeau and the Liberals ran on the slogan “Real Change Now,” and promised increased infrastructure spending, the legalization of marijuana, and the withdrawal of Canadian fighter jets from the fight against ISIS in Syria.
Turnout among young voters soared that year. And 45 percent of Canadians ages 18 to 29 cast their ballots for the Liberals, up from 15 percent in the previous national election in 2011. Powered by that change, a youthful and charismatic Trudeau, 43 at the time, led his party to a sweeping majority in Parliament.
Now, nearly a decade later, Trudeau’s promises have largely been fulfilled:
In 2017, Canada’s Human Rights Act was expanded to ban discrimination based on gender identity and gender expression.
In 2018, recreational use of cannabis was legalized for adults, with production and distribution regulated by the federal and provincial governments.
The government acted on many of the recommendations from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which investigated the harm by a 160-year-long residential school system for indigenous youth that suppressed their culture and accommodated physical and sexual abuse.
In 2019, a carbon tax on fossil fuels was introduced to combat climate change, with most of the proceeds returned to taxpayers.
But the wheel has turned, and Trudeau now finds himself struggling, just like Harper in 2015, to convince voters to return him to power despite a moldering economy.
The country is mired in a severe housing crisis, with the International Monetary Fund warning in June that housing affordability in Canada was at its “worst levels in a generation.”
The impact falls particularly hard on younger voters, with the percentage of Canadians ages 18 to 34 who live with their parents or family ballooning to 35 percent in the wake of Covid lockdowns.
Compounding this, economic growth has stagnated with GDP per capita (how economists measure the financial well-being of the average person) contracting for eight out of the last nine quarters. Unemployment in October was at 6.5 percent and youth (15 to 24) unemployment at 12.8 percent, after peaking at 14.5 percent in August.
Even those who have a job and a roof over their heads feel their prospects are precarious. In August, nearly half of Canadians, 45 percent, said that rising prices were significantly impacting their ability to cover day-to-day expenses compared to 33 percent in 2022, according to Canada’s official statistical agency.
In some ways, today’s political dynamics are a mirror image of 2015. Only this time it’s the Conservative Party, led by Pierre Poilievre, 45, that has harnessed a wave of youth enthusiasm. A clutch of recent polls paint a stark picture for Trudeau, now 52. Just 20 percent of Canadians aged 18 to 29 say they plan to vote for his party. Meanwhile, support for the Conservative Party in this age group has surged to 43 percent.
Poilievre’s appeal to young Canadians is driven by a sharp critique of Trudeau’s handling of economic issues that directly affect them. He’s particularly fond of the word “wacko” to describe the prime minister.
Trudeau acknowledged the shift in an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in the spring: “I think about the people who voted for me for the very first time they ever voted in 2015, and who are now in their mid to late twenties and struggling.”
Last month, Trudeau announced the government would suspend the federal sales tax on many items for two months and send one-time checks for $250 Canadian dollars to millions of people.
It may not be enough to save him.
“Young people feel that the deck is stacked against them. They feel betrayed when they look at their job and housing prospects,” said Philip Cross, a former chief economic analyst at Statistics Canada, now with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, a conservative think tank in Ottawa.
“The idea that Trudeau legalizing marijuana was going to be enough for these kids, it clearly wasn’t,” Cross told me.
Productivity growth in Canada has been so low, compared to the U.S., that Carolyn Rogers, deputy governor of the Bank of Canada, said the country is in an emergency, and “It’s time to break the glass.” She points to two main causes: protectionist policy that limits competition and a lack of investment, especially in intellectual property patents.
Another issue has been a surge in legal immigration, which has intensified urban congestion, exacerbated the housing crisis, and strained infrastructure and healthcare. For the first time in 25 years, a majority of Canadians say that immigration levels are too high.
Just as in the recent U.S. election, the impact of immigration has become a major issue. Tim Lang, the president and CEO of YES, Canada’s leading youth employment agency, is used to seeing how the economic cycles of recession and growth affect youth employment. But the influx of new immigrants is creating a “new phenomenon,” he said.
Thousands of young Canadians have come to YES in “complete desperation” after spending six to eight months looking for work, Lang told me.
“The 1.1 million new immigrants who came to the country in 2022 alone drove unprecedented competition for jobs. We are seeing some of the highest youth unemployment since 2012 in a matter of a year and a half.”
Trudeau appears to have gotten the message. Last month, his government announced it would slash immigration targets. It has also sharply cut the number of international students and temporary foreign workers allowed into the country.
Andrew Perez, 38, is a public affairs strategist who supports the Liberal Party, but is also critical of Trudeau. In 2015, he voted for the Liberal Party because he was “yearning for a progressive alternative.”
“The campaign promise of the legalization of marijuana was huge in my social network,” Perez told me.
Although he intends to vote for the Liberals again, he acknowledges that “The Trudeau government is hemorrhaging right now. I think it is actually quite stunning how much he’s lost among the younger Canadian population.”
Marc Kealey, a lifelong Liberal and former aide to the late John Turner, who was briefly prime minister in 1984, has known Trudeau since the future prime minister was 12 years old. Kealey describes him as a “good man with a great heart” but adds that “Politically, he’s created a culture whose time has passed.”
“Young people who were 18 and able to vote in 2015 are now almost 30 years old and find that they can’t afford to buy a house or eat well due to the high cost of food. They’re going to park their vote with a guy like Pierre Poilievre, who’s got a real simple message,” Kealey told me. That message focuses on the cost of living, including housing and the carbon tax.
Perez, the Liberal strategist, notes that, to today’s young people, the gains made in the progressive agenda are regarded as a done deal, not something they have to fight for.
“People feel a sense of decline, and they wonder if Canada will ever be as great and prosperous as it once was,” Lombardi said.
“That sense that I can’t live my potential here is very real for young people,” he added.
That sentiment came through clearly in my conversation with Amanda and Mattias Vanderley, too.
As a teen, like many young people, Mattias was bullied and in search of an identity. He found a sense of belonging in Trudeau and his progressive agenda.
“I remember, when I was 14, seeing Trudeau on the news and being endeared. He seemed to care about everyone,” he said.
“We saw Trudeau as a beacon of hope,” Mattias told me, his voice tinged with disappointment. “And then that hope turned out to be just completely false.”
When I asked Amanda Vanderley how they would get through their current difficulties, she talked about faith, not politics.
“We know that God’s going to take care of us, so that part gives me peace. And how that all works out is very much beyond me.”
Rupa Subramanya is a reporter for The Free Press. Follow her on X @RupaSubramanya and read her piece, “The Canadian Truckers’ Day in Court.”
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