OK, Boomers: Canada’s Surprising Electoral Generation Gap

by Chris Queen

Canadians go to the polls to elect a new prime minister next week. The center-right Conservative Party’s Pierre Poilievre is facing off against the Liberal incumbent, Mark Carney. For those who haven’t been following the situation in Canada, Carney is the Kamala Harris of the Great White North; he’s only in office because former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau resigned.

Polling shows Carney’s Liberal Party in the lead, partially because Canadians are lashing out in defiance against President Donald Trump’s tariffs and tongue-in-cheek rhetoric about making Canada the 51st U.S. state. But the numbers are fascinatingly close, with 43% supporting Carney’s party and 37% supporting the Conservatives.

There’s a fascinating generation gap among Canadian voters, as Stephen Daisley points out at The Spectator. It happens to be an upside-down generation gap, compared to what you might expect.

“If the franchise was limited to 18-to-34-year-olds, the Conservatives would narrowly win the contest; if only over-65s could vote, the Liberals’ victory would be even mightier,” Daisley writes.

Side note: Nothing in Daisley’s article mentions GenX voters, so I looked at the crosstabs, and the polling among my generation falls closely in line with the general vote, with 42% supporting the Liberals and 39% supporting the Conservatives. Man, we GenXers get the shaft all the time.

Daisley notes that it’s the Boomers who are giving Carney and his Liberals the biggest edge: