A health care worker at a Toronto hospital in November, 2022. Canadians over 65 use roughly four times as much medical care as those under 50, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
You wouldn’t expect David Eby and Danielle Smith to land in the same place on fiscal policy.
One leads a New Democratic government shaped by an activist tradition that expands public services. The other heads a Conservative government that promises lighter market regulation, while battling over sex education and gender pronouns.
Yet when you strip away the rhetoric and read the numbers in their 2026 budgets, the resemblance is striking.
Both are directing the lion’s share of new spending toward medical care. Both are running large deficits to do so. Both are allowing investments in housing, postsecondary education, child care and support for young workers to grow far more slowly.
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That two governments who disagree on so much arrived at this same point because of something embedded in Canadian political culture: a willingness to protect older voters at almost any cost, even when it shifts the burden to younger generations.
Unless citizens confront this inversion, provinces will keep tabling budgets that are anti-child, anti-parent and anti-young worker, regardless of which party holds power. The warning signs are visible: new data show B.C. now has the highest rate of children starting kindergarten developmentally vulnerable in a quarter century – the worst in the country. These children face higher risks of school failure, incarceration and preventable illness. When Alberta last collected comparable data, its rate was nearly as high.
Demographics are part of the pressure behind this fiscal pattern. Canadians over 65 use roughly four times as much medical care as those under 50, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information. As baby boomers move into their 70s and 80s, demand for care inevitably climbs as the share of seniors doubles compared with when boomers were young.
That much was predictable decades ago. What was not predetermined was the response.
Provinces chose not to modernize revenue systems to prepare for aging-related health costs. By contrast, Ottawa reformed the Canada Pension Plan in the 1990s, raising premiums by 68 per cent so boomers would pre-fund a substantial share of their retirement benefits.
Today, both left- and right-leaning provinces govern in the shadow of that choice.
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In British Columbia, overall medical care will receive another $3.2-billion annually by 2028 – more than double the combined increase for pre-university education, child care, trades training and social services. Adjusted for age, that’s about $2,100 per retiree versus roughly $440 per resident under 45. The province projects an additional $37-billion in deficits in the next three years.
Alberta follows suit. Total medical spending will rise by $7.6-billion annually by 2028, dwarfing increases for social services, education and postsecondary and leaving housing at less than one per cent of spending. Age-adjusted, that’s roughly $4,300 per senior compared with about $1,200 per resident under 45. The province forecasts $24-billion in deficits over three years.
The increase in medical spending reflects demographic pressure. But that pressure does not dictate the response. Expanding it without matching revenues – and covering the difference with debt – is a political choice.
Governments could have paired rising medical costs with new contributions tied to aging. They could have slowed health spending growth to free more funds for generations being crushed by housing prices, navigating underfunded postsecondary systems or entering a fragile labour market.
They chose not to.
Part of the explanation is electoral arithmetic. Older Canadians vote at higher rates and are more politically organized. Children can’t vote. Young adults vote less consistently. Parents stretched thin by rent, mortgages and child care have less time to mobilize politically.
But turnout alone does not explain cross-party ageism toward younger Canadians.
Expanding medical care is now treated as a moral imperative – almost beyond scrutiny – while asking financially secure retirees to help finance their longer lives is framed as politically perilous. Across party lines, the safer path is to protect age-linked medical spending and let the fiscal consequences fall elsewhere.
That “elsewhere” is younger Canadians: slower investment in housing and education, and deficits that leave them unpaid bills.
Every year we delay modernizing how we finance boomers’ healthy retirements, the costs deepen and younger Canadians remain the collateral damage. Partisan battles may dominate the headlines, but beneath the political theatre the fiscal outcome is the same: budgets that discriminate against children, parents and young workers.
That’s not the legacy most voters want to leave. The window to repair this imbalance is closing. Voters should start demanding better now, from whichever party they support.
Dr. Paul Kershaw is a policy professor at UBC and founder of Generation Squeeze, Canada’s leading voice for generational fairness. You can follow Gen Squeeze on X, Facebook, Bluesky, and Instagram, as well as subscribe to Paul’s Hard Truths podcast.
