Back in 2015, Cisco Armstrong was so inspired by Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau that nothing was going to stop him from voting in the federal election.
He and his now wife were going abroad and would miss the election, so they voted early to make sure they could register their support for Mr. Trudeau. “He symbolized progress,” says Mr. Armstrong, who is now 35 and lives outside Sherbrooke. “It was inspiring to vote for change.”
Millennials helped take the Liberal Party from third-party status to winning a majority government. Mr. Trudeau’s power to inspire young voters was reflected in the polls. Turnout among voters ages 18 to 24 increased 18.3 points, to 57.1 per cent compared with 38.8 per cent in 2011.
A survey by Abacus Data after the election found 45 per cent of voters 18 to 25 years old cast a ballot for the Liberals, compared with 25 per cent for the NDP and 20 per cent for the Conservatives.
The young Prime Minister – he was just 43 then – became an instant celebrity on the world stage. He promised “sunny ways.” He pledged electoral reform. He was a champion of progressive causes, and made support for those causes, such as a gender-balanced cabinet, seem obvious and matter-of-fact.
“He was almost designed to appeal to millennials,” says David Coletto, chief executive officer of Abacus Data, a polling firm headquartered in Ottawa. “He reflected a mindset of the public, but particularly among young Canadians, who wanted to change from the Stephen Harper years. And he was the complete opposite of Stephen Harper. He was dynamic, charismatic, dramatic. A celebrity. It was just this perfect moment where I think young people were looking for somebody to get their own version of [Barack] Obama.”
Nearly 10 years later, much has changed. The Liberal Party has trailed in the polls by double-digits for more than a year, and some MPs and party members have called on Mr. Trudeau to step down as Liberal Leader. The NDP has pulled out of its supply-and-confidence agreement supporting the Liberals, and Mr. Trudeau has gone from inspiring to anathema in many voters’ minds.
And Mr. Armstrong, now in the early stages of his career in environmental conservation and raising two children, ages 6 and 2, says he is “highly considering” voting for the Conservatives in the next federal election, set for no later than October.
He points to what he says are the Trudeau government’s “scandals” – most notably for him the SNC-Lavalin affair, which led to the resignation of two cabinet ministers and put the Prime Minister’s style of governing under a microscope. Above all, Mr. Armstrong says, he worries about the high cost of living since the pandemic.
“As you age, responsibilities change, and your value systems change. Your concern for saving the world is kind of trumped by taking care of your kids and paying bills,” he says.
He’s not alone. Millennials like Mr. Armstrong are turning away from the leader and the party they supported a decade ago in favour of the Conservatives. An Abacus Data poll released in November found 38 per cent of voters aged 30 to 44 plan on voting for the Conservatives, compared with 22 per cent for the Liberals and 26 per cent for NDP.
Gen Z appears to be disillusioned with the Liberal Party as well, with 34 per cent of voters 18 to 29 saying they will vote Conservative, compared with 20-per-cent support for the Liberals and 23 per cent for the NDP. The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 2.3 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
Much has changed for these voters since 2015. The economy, housing, inflation and simply making ends meet are all much more top of mind than they were a decade ago, and have taken priority over idealism.
As well, after nearly a decade of power, a fatigue regarding the Trudeau government has begun to set in among many voters, says Laura Stephenson, a professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario who specializes in political behaviour. “Any time that you’ve had a single government, in this case a single prime minister, for a long period of time, I think you get a general malaise,” she says.
The turn toward the Conservatives is not so much an embrace of their politics, says Mr. Coletto, but a spite vote borne out of frustration with a party – and a leader – who once promised them so much.
“Most of it is a rejection of the Liberals,” he says.
A survey conducted earlier this year by Abacus Data found that the rising cost of living and housing affordability and accessibility were the top two issues for millennials, well ahead of climate change and the environment.
Polling by the firm has also found that millennials and Gen Z are more likely than older generations to rate immigration as a top concern, seemingly confounding what many might suppose to be their support for tolerance and openness, Mr. Coletto says.
“I still think those are key values,” he says. “But what’s overtaken them is a sense of scarcity. And so the short-term scarcity of not being able to afford a home, about feeling insecure about where the economy is going and how fast it’s changing, has taken precedence.”
Coming out of the pandemic, the optimism that led many young voters to support Mr. Trudeau has now turned to bitterness.
“Millennials have become the most angry, frustrated, anxious generation,” Mr. Coletto says.
A Leger survey conducted earlier this year found 54 per cent of Gen Z and millennials think previous generations are “rigging the system” for their own benefit and making it harder for younger generations. “The meat grinder that was COVID and then high inflation has left this group pretty bruised,” says Andrew Enns, who conducted the Leger poll.
South of the border, 56 per cent of men aged 18 to 29 voted for Donald Trump last month, up from 41 per cent in 2020, according to an Associated Press survey of voters. Fifty per cent of men aged 30 to 44 did the same, up from 47 per cent in 2020. For women in those age categories, the percentage who voted for Mr. Trump also rose.
A Gallup poll released in January found that, in several countries, young men are more likely to identify as Conservative, while young women are much more liberal.
But Eric Kaufmann, professor of politics at the University of Buckingham and a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, an Ottawa-based think tank, cautions against thinking younger voters are being drawn en masse to Conservative parties.
He points to the recent election in Britain, where young people overwhelmingly supported left-wing parties, and the support among young voters for Tories was less than 10 per cent.
The trend we are seeing among Gen Z and millennial voters is is that while some may be moving away from traditional parties, many no longer identify with one party over another and instead are motivated by an issues-based pragmatism, Prof. Kaufmann says.
He calls it “detachment from party loyalties.”
“There’s that sense of greater individualism. Less of a tie to the established society means you’re floating more,” he says.
Jacob Citron, a 32-year-old life insurance adviser in Toronto, says he doesn’t believe in being part of a political party. “I think it’s antithetical to democracy,” he says.
He voted for Mr. Trudeau in 2015, inspired by the promise of electoral reform. When that promise failed to materialize, Mr. Citron vowed to never support the Liberals again. He voted for the NDP in 2019 and the Green Party in 2021.
Now, he says, he will likely vote for the Conservatives in the next election in reaction to the high cost of living.
“I can afford an apartment at Yonge and Eglinton [in Toronto] but I can’t buy a house,” he says. “It would be nice to own a condo without mortgaging my future. And it’s pretty clear to me that the current government either was asleep at the wheel for too long or just isn’t putting in the right incentives to help our whole generation.”
The Conservatives, led by Pierre Poilievre, are striking a chord with voters under 40 with a straightforward message that takes aim at Mr. Trudeau’s government and what they say are its failures when it comes to housing, the economy and the cost of living.
“He’s definitely tapped into the emotional frustration and fatigue that surrounds this. He’s in his early 40s himself. He’s regularly kind of profiling and connecting with people that are facing these issues,” says Kate Harrison, vice-chair at Summa Strategies, an Ottawa-based public affairs services company, as well as a board member of the Canada Strong and Free Network, a Conservative advocacy group.
Rahat Hossain, a 32-year-old psychiatrist in Toronto, says he “grew up really attached to the notion that the Liberal Party of Canada was the natural governing party.” But now he’s considering supporting the Conservatives in the next election – with some reservations.
“They would have my vote if Poilievre starts to change his position to more of a red Tory – financially conservative, cut taxes, but socially more progressive,” he says.
Mr. Hossain says he doesn’t know what Mr. Trudeau and his party stand for any more. “I don’t think they stand for anything other than holding on to power.”
That feeling is coupled with concern over the cost of living. ”Even from my privileged position, money is on my mind all the time,” Mr. Hossain says.
Ana Moore, a 39-year-old who lives in a condo in Toronto with her husband and their three-year-old daughter, supported the Liberals in the past two elections, but her attitude toward the party, and Mr. Trudeau in particular, soured after the snap election of 2021.
“I felt like I needed to vote. But I also felt like this was a bit of a dupe to kind of hang on to power,” she says.
Ms. Moore, who works in health care consulting, says she was originally drawn to the Liberals because they seemed like the party most likely to support families when it comes to child care, and because of Mr. Trudeau’s progressivism, especially his commitment to a gender-balanced cabinet.
“As a professional female, I thought that’s fantastic. If our country can represent that at that level, that may change things in corporate Canada or corporate America. It would reflect the values of a younger generation, a more progressive stance on leadership roles and representation,” Ms. Moore says.
But after what she sees as a series of disappointments, Ms. Moore is leaning toward voting Conservative, primarily because of her frustration with what she says is the current government’s mismanagement of the economy, especially when it comes to the cost of housing.
“It would be nice for a family of our size to grow and be able to afford a house and not feel like we’re really stretching it,” she says.
Philippe Mathieu, a 26-year-old teacher in Sudbury, says the Liberals’ handling of immigration is just one example of their mismanagement of the economy.
“To be clear, I am pro-immigration. But there have been record number of population increases without the appropriate housing to sustain it,” he says.
Proof of the Liberals’ failures can be seen almost everywhere he now looks, Mr. Mathieu says.
“I look at the price on the shelves. I look at the prices of homes. I see all these people on the streets and I ask myself the question: Does this look successful?” he says. “I’m not sure I would call myself a Conservative. I don’t think so. But I just don’t see any other way of voting right now.”
Millennial and Gen Z voters are not unique in their dissatisfaction with the Liberal Party. The Abacus Data poll from this month found the Conservatives leading in every age group among both men and women.
By the time of the next election, Mr. Trudeau will have been Prime Minister for 10 years. Holding on to power for more than a decade is exceedingly rare in Canadian politics. Only two prime ministers have managed to do so in the past 100 years: Pierre Elliott Trudeau, from 1968 to 1979, and William Lyon Mackenzie King, from 1935 to 1948.
The tide turns, for one reason or another, and voters cast a ballot for change.
On top of that, the optimism that many young voters had in 2015 and even 2019 that Mr. Trudeau would fulfill his promise to reform the electoral system, champion the environment and usher in an era in which they could enjoy the same prosperity as their parents’ generation has dropped into frustration, Prof. Stephenson says.
“If they thought in the past that Trudeau was going to be this great person to bring in all these changes, they’re going to to be sorely disappointed. And I think that’s what we’re seeing,” she says.
“For young people, it’s about surviving day to day,” says Nik Nanos, founder of Nanos Research.
“Forget about thinking about saving money or investing savings or even having savings. So, when that happens, should we really be surprised that they start turning towards alternatives?” Mr. Nanos says.
The Liberals have been working hard to win back young voters. The party’s last budget, unveiled in April, was explicitly geared toward generational fairness. It mentions millennials and Gen Z 21 times.
But even with the billions invested in housing and other programs intended to appeal to younger voters, there has been no evidence that it has done anything to improve the government’s approval rating among young people, the way they feel about the Prime Minister, or how they say they would vote if an election were today, Mr. Coletto says.
That, he says, is evidence that it is too late for the Prime Minister to win back the voters who once carried him to a majority in a wave of optimism for a brighter future.
“I’m increasingly of the view as we get closer to that inevitable election, that Canadians generally, but particularly younger Canadians who are feeling the effects of inflation and housing crisis and a world that seems very, very unforgiving to them, feel that the federal government and the Prime Minister can do nothing to make that any better for them,” he says.
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