I had an epiphany the other day about life in Canada. It came to me, of all places, in a grocery store, holding an $11 carton of milk. The shop in question was Summerhill Market, an upscale store in an upscale part of Toronto, with prices to match: $10.49 for a dozen eggs, $14.36 for a single chicken breast, $20 for a small bag of rice. At 37 years old, I’m doing all right—I no longer worry about paying the rent every month—but I still only go to Summerhill to scan the aisles for clearance stickers. Otherwise, I retreat to the nearby No Frills. I used to marvel at how Summerhill stayed afloat during an affordability crisis—until I started paying attention to the other shoppers. Most are seniors, filling their baskets with $20 bags of potato chips and other little luxuries I could never imagine buying.

After setting down that milk, I walked back to the studio apartment I share with my partner. We pay just over $1,000 a month—a ludicrously low sum in a city where the average one-bedroom rents for well over $2,000. My building is surrounded by detached homes that typically sell for $2 million or more, even during a market downturn. They’re only a few dozen feet from my apartment, but they might as well be on another planet. Many, of course, were purchased years or decades ago by people long since retired. 

The great Canadian wealth divide is not just about real estate and dairy for the one per cent. In virtually every domain, I can feel my prospects, and those of my peers, slipping away. The cost of food, housing, health care, child-rearing, vehicles and practically everything else is going up. Wages are barely keeping pace with inflation, and housing is outpacing it: between 2020 and 2025, average asking rent for a two-bedroom apartment increased 33 per cent nationwide. Millennials and Gen Z have dealt with high unemployment, rising student debt and a cost-of-living crisis that feels less like a rough patch and more like a permanent fixture of Canadian life.

One group, however, has made out like gangbusters: senior citizens. It’s not just that they typically have no dependents, live in paid-off homes and carry little debt, though all of that helps. Their well-being is also untethered from Canada’s anemic wage growth. People 55 and older make up less than one-third of the population but, as of 2023, they owned 49 per cent of the country’s real estate by value, 62 per cent of bank deposits, 72 per cent of mutual funds and other investments and 75 per cent of stocks. The value of all those assets has soared.

The benchmark price of a single-family house, the preferred boomer abode, has increased more than 30 per cent nationwide since 2020 and in some cities has more than doubled. The value of the TSX Composite Index, Canada’s benchmark stock-market index, grew 45 per cent from 2020 to the beginning of 2025. As of this writing, it’s risen another 47 per cent since then. A disproportionate share of that newly minted wealth has accrued to Canada’s oldest generation, whose assets provide security and create passive income—investment returns, stock dividends, rent on investment properties—that their millennial and Gen Z counterparts can scarcely dream of. And then, of course, there are the benefits and entitlements boomers have come to expect: Old Age Security and CPP, as well as pension income splitting, age-based tax credits and an endless list of consumer discounts. 

So of course the seniors next door are able to fork out $11 for luxury dairy. We now live in a gerontocracy: a society in which a fraction of the population hold the lion’s share of wealth, control most wealth creation and wield the political influence that comes with it. In Canada today, a person’s ability to build a good future depends less on effort or talent than on the year they were born. 

Neither older generations nor our own government seem to understand how dramatically conditions have changed since the boomers’ heyday in the 1980s and ’90s. Nearly 20 per cent of government spending on programs and services now goes toward elder benefits—a total of $83 billion in 2026 alone—for a group that is already the wealthiest in the country. Meanwhile, Canadians under 30, or 40, or even 50, are struggling to afford housing, raise families or simply stay in the cities where they were born. They are stuck at the bottom of the ladder of life, while those at the top extend the upper rungs into the stratosphere.

The only way to fix the problem is to attack it head-on: by redirecting some of seniors’ considerable benefits to younger people in far greater need. We can no longer treat staggeringly expensive programs like OAS, along with the broader network of senior-focused supports, as untouchable. If these programs were recalibrated, lower-income seniors could remain protected while affluent ones received less. Those reductions would add billions that could help younger Canadians make ends meet, reduce public debt, and fund transit, clean energy, education and health care. As Canada ages, these funds would also help ensure the state remains solvent enough to care for its seniors, including the next generation of them. 

Older Canadians often get defensive in these conversations, as if they’re being asked to surrender something earned over a lifetime. Many do not feel rich. They consider themselves middle class, because they own the things middle-class Canadians once took for granted: a home, a car, perhaps a cottage or a boat. But those once-ordinary markers of stability are now available only to a privileged minority. 

By the 2040s, more than a quarter of Canadians will be older than 65. A society that keeps transferring wealth upward by age will not only grow economically unsustainable but socially fractured. When people feel shut out of opportunity and powerless to fix it, they become despairing and desperate, more susceptible to radical answers and extreme solutions. Fixing these problems now is not just about generational fairness, and it’s certainly not to punish seniors. It’s to overhaul a system that’s reached a breaking point. 

Canada wasn’t always a gerontocracy. In fact, the generous system of financial support provided to today’s seniors was conceived when elder poverty was a national crisis. In the middle of the last century, wealth peaked in mid-life; once people stopped earning wages, many fell into poverty. Younger Canadians were comparatively better off simply because they were still working. The world wars and the Great Depression destroyed much of Canada’s generational wealth, leaving many older people without savings or family support.

The government introduced the first old-age pension in 1927 as an anti-poverty measure, providing up to $20 a month to people 70 and older (that’s $373 in today’s money). In 1951, the Old Age Security Act raised that to $40 a month ($488 in 2026), funded by taxes—a manageable expense, since Canadians over 70 made up just 2.2 per cent of the population. Further reforms followed in the 1960s, including the Canada Pension Plan and the Guaranteed Income Supplement, a tax-free benefit for low-income seniors. Still, seniors struggled: in the mid-’70s, more than 30 per cent were considered low-income. It was around this time that the idea of seniors’ discounts gained momentum, and why not? Who could begrudge such a beleaguered group a discount on bus passes? This was also, however, when poverty rates for seniors finally started to improve, due to government assistance and, in time, their growing portfolios of savings and assets. Today the poverty rate for people 65-plus is 5.4 per cent, compared to 12.6 per cent for Canadians 18 to 64.

As seniors were lifted out of poverty, a sweeping transformation took place in the Canadian economy: wealth accumulation began to depend more on assets than on wages. Housing in particular became an engine of wealth creation, as a growing population put upward pressure on prices.

The primary beneficiaries were the boomers who entered the housing market during that era, when they were about the age that millennials and older Gen Zers are now. In 1976, the average Canadian home cost $57,000—approximately three times the median household income—putting ownership within reach of most families. Over the following decades, property values rose many times over, drastically increasing those homeowners’ net worth.

While not always explicitly designed to do so, government policies have boosted the wealth of asset holders. One seemingly innocuous example was the dividend tax credit. Because stock dividends paid to investors are drawn from a company’s after-tax profits, the credit ensures payouts are not taxed again when distributed to shareholders. In effect, this means that shareholders who draw income from dividend-heavy portfolios pay less tax than a person earning the same amount from wages. And when the government introduced a capital gains tax in 1972, it set the inclusion rate at 50 per cent—meaning that for every dollar of growth in the value of an investment, only 50 cents were subject to tax when profits are realized. In other words, those wealthy enough to profit from soaring stock-market values or property sales pay far less tax on them than workers do on their wages. Capital gains on primary residences are completely tax-exempt.

Given decades to grow richer through real estate appreciation and the miracle of compound interest, older Canadians have reaped an enormous windfall. For boomers who are blessed with a home, some savings and a bit of luck, property-value gains and compounding investment returns have helped their already considerable wealth balloon in retirement, rather than shrink. Making matters worse is the fact that government benefits and supports are pegged to income, not net worth. A senior citizen who’s not working but has minimal expenses, and a real estate or investment portfolio worth hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, can qualify for more government support than a struggling young person who works for wages.

These benefits add up fast. The Age Amount, a tax credit for Canadians 65 and older, is worth $9,028 annually for those with net incomes under $45,522. It’s clawed back gradually, up to an income of $105,709. There’s also the Pension Income Amount, a tax break on the first $2,000 of eligible pension income. Then there’s the biggie: Old Age Security. If you’re 65 to 74 and earn up to $93,000 a year—from pensions, investment returns, odd jobs, whatever—you can still get up to about $9,000 per year. For incomes higher than $93,000, OAS is reduced by 15 cents per additional dollar, but it isn’t fully phased out until income hits about $150,000. And through pension income splitting, couples earning a combined $186,000 can still collect about $18,000 a year in OAS benefits, just for being old. With OAS as the primary pillar, seniors’ benefits have become one of Canada’s largest, fastest-growing public expenditures. 

To be fair, seniors are not the only Canadians who receive age- or life-stage-related support. But programs that disproportionately benefit younger Canadians make up a smaller part of the federal budget, especially compared to their share of the population. Employment insurance cost about $29 billion this year, and the Canada Child Benefit, a payment to defray the costs of child-rearing, cost $30 billion. The government’s $10-a-day childcare program has a price tag of just $8 billion. Altogether, these come to $16 billion less than the $83 billion spent this past year on seniors’ benefits.

This inequality is going to get worse. The federal government projects that spending on these supports for younger people will remain mostly flat in the near future. But as more people join the over-65 club, their combined benefits will surge to $108.5 billion by 2031—a 30 per cent increase in only five years, with no sign of slowing down.

Canada now shells out more for its richest demographic than it does for parents rearing children. Statistics Canada estimates that raising one child from birth to 17 costs a middle-income, two-parent family nearly $300,000, or roughly $17,000 a year. That doesn’t include post-secondary education. Nor does it consider that 57 per cent of Canadians aged 20 to 24 still live with their parents, and some even into their thirties. 

The worst part of it? Wage earners’ higher tax burden means that we’re not only getting a smaller piece of the pie, relatively speaking, but that we’re paying for seniors’ supports. The same is true of health-care costs, which are rapidly ballooning due to an aging population. Canada’s population pyramid has gradually inverted in recent decades, with the share of seniors in the population more than double what it was in 1951, when OAS was introduced. Health expenditures rose from seven per cent of GDP in 1975 to 12.3 per cent in 2023. The costs of health care, pensions and social services will keep swelling as the senior population expands and Canadians live longer, with younger generations expected to foot the bill.

The social contract that once promised each generation a better life than their parents’ lies in tatters. Some of this is borne out in hard statistics: in 1981, 55 per cent of Canadians aged 25 to 34 owned a home; in 2024, only 36 per cent did, and they’re mostly carrying much higher mortgage debt than their parents did. But some of it is more amorphous: it’s about how we feel. A 2024 Statistics Canada survey found only 37 per cent of adults between 25 and 34 were highly satisfied with their lives, compared with 61.5 per cent of seniors—the most satisfied of any age group.

This generational inequity poses a long-term risk to Canada’s demographic viability. The country’s fertility rate has fallen to 1.25 per mother. This is one of the lowest in the world, below even most of western Europe, where plunging fertility rates have inspired doomy predictions of a continent-spanning demographic implosion. Some younger people are childless by choice, but the majority—60 per cent of those aged 25 to 34, according to Statistics Canada­—want to have kids. It’s clear what’s holding many of them back: another StatsCan survey found that 38 per cent of people in their twenties were delaying parenthood because they couldn’t afford it. Raising a child in a shoebox apartment when you’re already strapped for cash is no one’s idea of a good time. My partner and I can’t even afford to move to a larger place for our own comfort, let alone raise a child. If we had a baby, I’d have to clear my hockey gear out of the closet to make room for a crib. 

While researching this story, I spoke to Michaela Hillery, a 34-year-old paralegal in Langley, B.C. In her twenties, she was carrying $15,000 in student debt, so she kicked the kid question down the road. As the years passed, she watched friends and her older sister start families of their own. But even those who planned carefully and made good money were blindsided by the financial realities of parenthood: the high cost of essentials like diapers and formula, the lost income during parental leave and the expense of childcare and RESP contributions. A constant discussion topic among them was how much easier it seemed for their parents’ generation to start families, often on a single income.

Eventually Hillery’s uncertainty hardened into a decision. By 30, she knew she wasn’t going to have children—it didn’t seem plausible. “Maybe in another life, or in a parallel universe where the situation didn’t feel so stark, I might have made different choices,” she told me. “I might have been a mom. And I think I would have been a good mom.”

Decades of generational inequality also impact what kinds of jobs young people can afford to pursue. My ability to work as a journalist today owes little to my writing talent, or even to my stubbornness about sticking with a field so precarious that I’ve occasionally thought about becoming an Uber driver. It mostly comes down to luck: my dirt-cheap rent, and the fact that my parents paid for my university tuition, sparing me the burden of debt that most of my peers carry.

Education is another sphere where shifts in government spending priorities have rewarded senior citizens while punishing younger generations. In the late ’70s, the young people who would become today’s seniors were attending university. At the time, provincial funding covered 72 per cent of university costs, on average, across Canada. Undergraduate tuition was a little more than $600 per year. Beginning in the early 1990s, governments shifted more of that cost burden to students, and tuitions skyrocketed. Canada’s average undergrad tuition is now about $7,800 per year—more than double what it would have been if it had just kept pace with inflation. The average university student now graduates with $28,000 in debt and into a more challenging job market. In 1990, the unemployment rate for young people with a university degree was 6.2 per cent; last year it was 10.6 per cent.

Without my financial advantages, I’d likely have abandoned my field years ago. Or I would have been one of the tens of thousands of young people pushed out of their hometowns in Canada’s most expensive provinces, like Ontario and B.C., for slightly more affordable Alberta and the Maritimes. Since 2016, Alberta has lured, on net, more than 56,000 Canadians between the ages of 18 and 39 from other provinces. Nova Scotia gained 22,000 over the same period. Ontario lost nearly 58,000. 

One Ontarian who made the exodus east is Robert Duhig, a close friend of mine from university. After his physics degree led him nowhere, he took a job as a restaurant cook in Toronto to pay off his student loans. He moved into a co-op building with his partner, paying about $800 for a one-bedroom apartment, well below market rates. But when his relationship ended, he was priced out of the city. He relocated to Halifax in 2023, working his customer-service job remotely. He now pays about $1,600 for a two-bedroom apartment, a bargain compared to Toronto, where rent on a similar unit would run closer to $3,000. Financially, it made sense. But personally, it cost him, forcing him to leave family and friends. His first year away was marked by isolation and depression. We used to see each other several times a week. Now, it’s once every few years. At 37, he’s still paying off his student debt.

Robert is still better off than many of his peers—and it’s nice that some resourceful young Canadians have been able to move to cheaper provinces. At the same time, older Canadians were never forced into leaving their hometowns, or their friends and family, to make that kind of choice. Indeed, many were able to move to large cities, pursuing opportunity. 

These days, there are fewer opportunities to do what Robert did. In Halifax, waves of newcomers, including cost-of-living refugees like Robert, have caused housing prices to spike. His $1,600 rent would now be considered an exceptional deal. Most Canadian cities now qualify as unaffordable—if there is anywhere left to go, it’s to small towns or rural areas, where housing may be cheaper but opportunities are scarce.

Seniors’ benefits have been skyrocketing for decades and, not surprisingly, one of the biggest obstacles to bending that trajectory in a more sustainable direction has been seniors themselves­. Canadian political history is littered with the corpses of those who’ve tried.

In 1985, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney tried to face down the growing burden of old-age entitlements. OAS payments at the time cost Ottawa $7.3 billion, the equivalent of about $28 billion today, so Mulroney made a modest proposal: he suggested the government adjust the benefit only for inflation above three per cent. The backlash from older Canadians was immediate and fierce. Solange Denis, a 63-year-old Quebec woman, famously confronted Mulroney outside Parliament: “You lied to us. You made promises that you wouldn’t touch anything! It’s goodbye, Charlie Brown!” Mulroney backtracked, and “Goodbye Charlie Brown” entered the Canadian political lexicon as a warning about crossing senior voters. 

Then, in the ’90s, the Chrétien government proposed replacing OAS, the Guaranteed Income Supplement and some tax credits with an income-based benefit for Canadians 65 and up. The government estimated that 75 per cent of seniors would see no change or be better off—but some high-income seniors would receive less. But Chrétien had already spent precious political capital raising CPP premiums by 68 per cent. Facing backlash just as Mulroney did, Chrétien shelved the idea.

Stephen Harper was the next to try, proposing in 2012 to raise the OAS and Guaranteed Income Supplement eligibility age from 65 to 67. Canada’s auditor general estimated the change would save $10 billion annually. But Harper’s office was bombarded by angry emails, including some calling him a traitor. Justin Trudeau campaigned against the change in 2015 and, after winning in a landslide, he killed the proposal.

What makes reform so politically difficult is that many older Canadians do not see themselves as wealthy. Their homes, assets and cash in the bank place them among the richest people in the country. But self-perception, forged in youth and middle age, hasn’t caught up to decades of wealth appreciation. Reducing benefits feels less like a policy tweak and more like an attempt to pillage their hard-earned assets.

So today, seniors’ benefits eat up more federal budget dollars than ever, yet we hear less than ever about pruning them. Mark Carney’s first budget included substantial investments in housing, defence and infrastructure. But on generational inequality, his government has resisted even modest reforms. Most notably, he scrapped the Trudeau Liberals’ planned increase to the capital-gains inclusion rate from 50 to 66 per cent, which would have forced seniors enjoying capital gains from investments to pay modestly more tax on their windfalls. But why anger older voters? In the 2025 federal election, just 56 per cent of Canadians 18 to 24 voted, compared with 78 per cent of those 65 to 74. This pattern has held in every election since Elections Canada began tracking turnout by age in 2004. As seniors make up more of the population, the political appetite to reduce their entitlements will shrink further.

None of this means we’re doomed to dig ourselves into a fiscal hole forever. Almost every Western country is facing some version of this problem—and some have shown more fortitude about confronting it than we have. France raised its retirement age from 62 to 64 in 2023. In typical French fashion, the move triggered massive street demonstrations, drawing more than a million protesters, but the government stuck to its guns. Germany, the Netherlands and the U.K. have scheduled gradual increases in their retirement ages to 67 within the next few years. Denmark raised its retirement age to 70 in 2025, even amid weeks of protest that prompted the Copenhagen Post to declare that “the political war over senior life has begun.”

Paul Kershaw is a policy professor at the University of British Columbia’s school of population and public health who has spent nearly a decade banging the drum to reform Old Age Security. Kershaw, who’s 52, belongs to the last generation for whom homeownership remained broadly attainable. Since he bought his Vancouver home in 2004, its value has climbed by more than $1 million. Kershaw has watched that same path of homeownership close behind him, which is one of the reasons that in 2012 he founded Generation Squeeze, a think tank focused on intergenerational equity. “The current political bargain asks young people to sacrifice their standard of living to safeguard windfalls for older people,” he says.

Kershaw proposes clawing back OAS payments at lower income thresholds, bringing it line with programs like the Canada Child Benefit. He estimates this would save $7 billion annually, reducing benefits by about $3,000 a year for the one in five retirees with household incomes above $100,000. He is also pushing to phase out the Age Amount and Pension Income Amount, which benefit seniors exclusively, generating another $7 billion, for a combined $14 billion annually. He’d direct $2.5 billion of these savings toward eliminating senior poverty outright, providing roughly $5,000 a year to the roughly 400,000 retirees currently below the poverty line. The rest would go toward housing, programs to improve youth employment, childcare, post-secondary tuition relief and newer programs like the Canada Groceries and Essentials Benefit, which replaced the GST/HST credit this summer.

To me, none of this feels radical. The cost of seniors’ benefits are spiralling upward annually. Public debt is growing. And the money we’re spending on a small, affluent group could be more effectively used to help others—including seniors who are in need. 

But the reaction against these modest suggestions has been vigorous. The Canadian Association of Retired Persons, which represents more than 330,000 members nationwide, has framed Kershaw’s proposals as “an attack on every middle-class senior in Canada.” CARP president Anthony Quinn has argued that Kershaw overlooked a key detail: OAS clawbacks are based on pre-tax income, not what seniors actually take home after taxes, living expenses and medical expenses are factored in. He notes that Canadians over 65 contribute more than $100 billion annually in taxes, even as they’re portrayed as “lazy, greedy and entitled.”

John Stapleton is a social policy analyst at the National Institute on Ageing, a think tank that operates out of Toronto Metropolitan University. At 76, he’s also a senior citizen. Like Quinn, he objects to what he calls stereotypes about rich retirees who apparently own expensive cottages and investment properties and take constant vacations. This does not reflect life for most seniors, he says, who face their own late-in-life financial challenges: chronic illness, life-changing medical diagnoses or long-term care. This is a fair point: assisted living in Canada runs to at least $30,000 a year, and likely far more depending on the care needed.

Stapleton has his own ideas about how to support younger Canadians. The first would be to tax wealth directly, including inheritances and large capital gains. (Of course, there’s an irony here, in that inheritances are one of the only ways in which elderly people’s wealth trickles down to younger people.) He would eliminate the capital-gains exemption on primary residences. And he would levy higher taxes on the ultra-wealthy. That’s not a bad idea: a 2020 estimate by the Parliamentary Budget Officer calculated that a one per cent tax on net wealth above $20 million would apply to only 13,800 Canadian households but generate $5.6 billion in net revenue. Still, $5.6 billion is not as much money as it sounds like: the federal government projects that the cost of providing seniors’ benefits will increase by more than that amount in the next 12 months alone, from $83 billion to $89.3 billion, marching inexorably upward year by year. Stapleton also argues that more money should be invested in preventative and primary care, so that Canadians don’t need to resort to ER visits to manage their health. Doing so yields worse outcomes and ultimately costs more. 

I don’t see anything disagreeable in Stapleton’s policy ideas, but that doesn’t mean they’re simple to implement. The debate over wealth taxes is politically, ideologically and emotionally charged. And given the magnitude of the generational inequality we’re facing, it must be asked: why not do it all? Fix health care and OAS, tax the ultra-wealthy and reform the tax structures that disproportionately benefit rich seniors. We could use some of that money to reduce the enormous cost burden on those who end up requiring long-term care.

The reason, of course, is that doing it all will mean asking high-income seniors to accept just a little bit less. I came to terms long ago with the likelihood that the kind of middle-class life boomers took for granted will always be out of reach for me: owning a nice house with a yard, raising children on a single income (or even two), retiring with financial security or simply being able to afford to care for my parents as they age. For many young Canadians, even more basic markers of stability—owning a car, building an emergency fund, buying groceries without anxiety—are unattainable.

It is obvious that many seniors, individually, understand this problem and support efforts to change the status quo. The question is whether their generation as a whole is willing to sacrifice just a little bit more for their children, grandchildren and Canadians yet to be born. Absent that, Canada will age into a weaker, more indebted nation. Its young will continue to lose faith and hope in a better future, with all of the predictable consequences: loss of trust in institutions, democratic decay and growing inequality.

I know this because I see it all the time among my peers. During a party game a few years ago, I had to ask a Gen Z friend to name the first words that came to mind when she thought about the future. Her answers were downright apocalyptic: destitution, famine, pestilence. It was a joke, but also not a joke. 

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Canada can still choose a different future: one where young people do not experience life as a Sisyphean ordeal, building to nowhere, one where hard work can again lead to the kinds of good, dignified life our elders have enjoyed. The pessimist in me isn’t sure that’s possible anymore. The optimist in me knows we can solve overwhelming problems—as we did decades ago, when building the safety net that lifted seniors out of poverty in the first place. We have no choice but to try.

This story appears in the October 2026 issue of Maclean’s. You can subscribe to the magazine here or send a gift subscription here.

What did you think of this story? Send a comment for publication to letters@macleans.ca, and supply your name and address. Comments should be fewer than 200 words, and may be edited for length and clarity.