OP-ED: The Ontario Liberals and NDP misunderstood what young people need

"Appealing to young voters is a classic strategy for progressive politicians. In Ontario’s recent election, the Liberals and NDP both bet big on the youth vote — and failed."

Source: Facebook

Author: William Dunstan

Appealing to young voters is a classic strategy for progressive politicians. In Ontario’s recent election, the Liberals and NDP both bet big on the youth vote — and failed. These parties failed because neither provided a credible solution to the issues affecting young Ontarians. Both tried to engage young voters with gimmicky promises of new rent controls and tuition subsidies. The right way to help young people is to offer a better future, not redistribute money today.

Young people know they won’t stay young forever. That’s why they prioritize issues related to long term quality of life. In Ontario and across Canada, there are two big problems creating a bleak future for young people: stagnant economic productivity, and unaffordable housing. Polling shows that young Canadians identify housing and the economy as top issues. Instead of introducing benefits targeted toward young people, politicians should focus on increasing future living standards so that today’s youth are better off for the rest of their lives. In Ontario today, that means boosting productivity and building houses.

Canada’s recent productivity growth trails most OECD countries, and Ontario’s growth has been below the Canadian average since 2000. As a result, Ontario is now poorer than 46 U.S. states. If Ontario’s productivity remains stagnant, today’s young people will earn less in the future.

A party serious about boosting productivity should have adopted an unfulfilled promise that Doug Ford made back in 2018 — cutting Ontario’s uncompetitively high corporate tax rate. A main factor in Ontario’s current productivity challenge is low rates of business investment. Slashing the corporate tax rate can encourage more investment.

Another opportunity to offer a credible plan on productivity would have been to replace vague promises to reduce interprovincial trade barriers with a concrete commitment to fully open Ontario to goods, services, workers and investors from other provinces. The Western provinces have already started doing this, and joining them would increase annual incomes for Ontario families by around $1000.

What won’t help productivity are new tuition subsidies. The NDP pledged to turn student loans into grants, and the Liberal promised to eliminate interest on these loans and raise the income threshold for repayment. Greater financial assistance for students can increase productivity if it leads to more students gaining needed skills. However, the NDP and Liberal plans wouldn't have accomplished this. First, very few Canadians are unable to attend college or university for financial reasons, so additional financial aid isn’t needed to get young Ontarians enrolled in post-secondary. Second, even if we boosted enrollment numbers, that wouldn’t significantly improve our productivity. We currently have a surplus of college and university-educated workers, and half of all working-class Canadians have post-secondary credentials beyond what is needed to do their job. Ontario may have skills shortages in specific fields, but wide-ranging tuition subsidies aren’t the solution there.

Instead of improving productivity, spending on new tuition subsidies will simply increase Ontario’s already substantial public debt — a debt that young Ontarians will have to pay off down the road. This money will benefit some young people today. But in the long-run, most of today’s youth will be worse off from paying for wasteful government spending. They rightfully rejected this idea on Thursday.

Ontario’s other big, long-term challenge is housing. Housing prices have doubled in Ontario over the past 10 years, and average rent has increased by 60%. Price increases are especially painful for new entrants into the housing market, such as most young people. A recent poll found that nearly half of young Ontarians are thinking of leaving the province due to housing costs. Bonnie Crombie and Marit Stiles both regularly spoke about housing affordability issues, but undermined their credibility with promises to bring in new counterproductive rent controls.

Home prices have risen because construction hasn’t kept up with Ontario’s growing population. This largely occurred because Ontario and municipal governments impose restrictions, high taxes, and long approval timelines that make housing more expensive to build. In Alberta, for example, where these burdens are smaller, housing has been built more quickly. The Ford government has made progress on these issues, but not nearly enough to achieve its goal of building 1.5 million new homes by 2031.

To be fair, the Liberals and New Democrats had ideas that would get Ontario closer to this target. Both promised to allow greater densification, with the Liberals also promising to reduce taxes on new builds. Rent control, however, would push these targets further away. Just like taxes and regulations, rent controls reduce the financial return on building new housing, which means fewer units get built. Rent control could briefly benefit young Ontarians who are already renting, but in the long-run, capping prices will make the housing shortage worse.

Young people do need more help to get ahead. But this should be done by growing tomorrow’s proverbial pie, not offering specific young people a few extra morsels today.

William Dunstan is a Young Voices contributor and a Master of Public Policy student at the University of Calgary. He has written for prominent Canadian think tanks on topics including economic growth, rural development, and demographics. Follow him on X @wc_dunstan.