Young Canadians Voted Against Spending Orgy—Their Elders Won

The most memorable meme of the recent Canadian election campaign emerged from the line outside an Ontario microbrewery, where an older Liberal Party supporter named Matt Janes flashed two middle fingers to protesters agitating against Prime Minister Mark Carney.

The obscenity went viral — with Janes becoming infamous as the Brantford Boomer — not just for its crass vulgarity, but for exposing the deep generational divide in Canada. 

Polls showed Canadians boomers overwhelmingly backing the successful Liberal campaign, which Carney centered on confronting U.S. President Donald Trump and his threats to annex the country. Younger Canadians stuck living with their parents and unable to afford starting families supported the Conservative Party, which campaigned on cost-of-living issues, combating crime, and reversing what leader Pierre Poilievre branded the “lost decade” of economic malaise under former prime minister Justin Trudeau. 

A survey from Nanos Research on the eve of the Apr. 28 election showed 52 percent of Canadians over age 55 supporting the Liberals versus just 33.5 percent backing the Conservatives. But the Conservatives drew support from 41 percent of Canadians aged 18 to 34 versus 32 percent for the Liberals and 13 percent for the left-wing New Democratic Party (NDP). In the 35 to 54 age cohort, the Conservatives received 46 percent support versus 39 percent for the Liberals.

Trudeau’s Approach and More Spending

Younger people flocked to the Liberals in 2015, drawn by Trudeau’s celebrity, “sunny ways” campaign, and promises such as electoral reform and legalizing marijuana. (He abandoned the first and followed through on the latter.) His progressive approach to politics was summed up by his pithy comments after appointing a sex-balanced cabinet, “Because it’s 2015.”

But younger voters in 2025 prioritized issues such as housing and affordability over the Liberal platform, which promised an orgy of spending in line with Trudeau’s track record.

“Mark Carney’s party’s policies made owning a house impossible for younger Canadians. All my friends talk about emigrating or have done so,” said Yuan Yi Zhu, a conservative commentator in an X post. “And Carney has the cheek to say the way to fix this is to re-elect the Liberals.”

The election returned the previously embattled Liberals to power, falling three seats short of a majority in parliament, meaning Carney needs the support of a minor party to pass legislation.

“America wants our land, our resources, our water, our country,” he told supporters yelling “no” at his election night celebration in an Ottawa hockey rink. “These are not idle threats: President Trump is trying to break us, so that America can own us. That will never — that will never, ever happen,” said the former governor of the Bank of Canada and Bank of England.

His win marked an improbable turnaround for the Liberals. The party entered 2025 on its deathbed, dragged down by Trudeau and trailing the Conservatives by 25 percentage points in most polls. 

Trudeau’s departure in early January started the reversal of Liberal fortunes, according to polls at the time. Trump’s talk of annexation, along with calling Canada “our cherished 51^st state” and belittling Trudeau as “governor” spooked Canadians across the political spectrum and moved polls even more.

Carney’s Positions

Liberal support quickly soared as Carney sold himself as a safe pair of hands who had guided major economies through the 2008 economic crisis and 2016 Brexit referendum — even though he served as Trudeau’s economic advisor. His dull style, technocratic chops, and anti-populist pedigree — he was recently serving as UN special envoy for climate action and finance — furthered his appeal with Liberal voters and drew support from the NDP and Bloc Quebecois, which pushes Quebec sovereignty.

“He promoted ESG at the UN — two abbreviations that would normally debar him from impolite company. If globalism had a name and a face, it would be Carney’s,” wrote Edward Luce in the Financial Times.

He also blasted the 2022 trucker convoy, calling it “sedition,” in an opinion piece in The Globe and Mail, stating, “Drawing the line means choking off the money that financed this occupation.”

Mostly, though, Carney sold nostalgia for an older generation of Canadians, who have grown wealthy as their property values soared and remember lives of clear paths to prosperity.

Poilievre’s Positions

Poilievre hesitated in targeting Trump, even as polls showed Canadians flocking to the Liberal Party. Some Conservatives — most notably Ontario Premier Doug Ford, a Fox News regular who announced plans to cut power to three U.S. states in retaliation to tariffs — urged Poilievre to campaign on tariffs.

The conservative leader instead campaigned on the anger over what he called the “lost decade” of Liberal Party rule, in which Canadians became progressively poorer in comparison to their American neighbors. 

“The bulk of the problems that afflict our country — falling living standards, declining employment and housing opportunities, rising crime, the growing divisions between our regions and our people — these were not created by Donald Trump. They were created by the policies of three Liberal terms, policies that the present prime minister supported and wants a fourth term to continue,” Poilievre told a rally in Edmonton.

Polls showed affordability issues topped Canadians’ list of concerns. But it wasn’t enough to overcome the Liberal’s anti-Trump campaign.

The Liberals’ focus on Trump had the effect of “turning the election into another front of a largely American culture war,” commentator David Polansky wrote in The Hub. “That this culture war is not really applicable to Canada’s social and political disputes is a feature rather than a bug, as it provides an excuse for deferring any serious audit of the mistakes of the past decade.”

Poilievre, meanwhile, reminded Canadians of Liberal Party shortcomings — only to be rebuked by opponents for his past comments that “Canada is broken.” “This is easily interpreted as unpatriotic by those same Canadians with the help of a pliant media — a dynamic that has lately been intensified by the tariffs and Trump’s ‘51st state’ rhetoric,” Polansky wrote.

Poilievre lost his seat in Parliament, putting his leadership of the Conservatives in doubt. 

Carney, meanwhile, said on Tuesday he had spoken to Trump and would meet soon and work together “as independent, sovereign nations.” For his part, Trump told reporters on Wednesday that he had spoken with Carney, saying, “I think we’re going to have a great relationship.”

But Canada’s problems run deeper than Trump. “The Carney government shows every sign of focusing almost exclusively on the threat from Washington. That may make strategic political sense. But it leaves a dangerous vacuum here at home,” Bricker wrote in The Hub. “Carney won the election. But he did not win the country. And if he wants to hold it together, he will need to do more than manage the fallout from Trump.”

David Agren is a Canadian freelance journalist. His reporting focuses mostly on Mexico and Latin America and appears regularly in The Globe and Mail, The Mexico Brief, America Magazine and OSV News. Follow him on X @el_reportero and Substack.