"Everything that is created, built, served and sold in this country is increasingly being created, built, served and sold by Millennials and Gen Z," said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as he announced what he calleda budget focusedon aquest for"generational fairness."

"Their success is Canada's success in the future, sure, but also right now. But the economy isn't rewarding them the way it used to reward their parents and grandparents.

"That's not right. That's not fair."

The notion has gained a lot of traction in recent years that an entire generation has behaved like selfish parents who, instead of bequeathing their house to their struggling offspring, trade it for a reverse mortgage and spend the money on cruises and country club memberships.

• This week, Cross Country Checkup wants to know what you think of the government's proposed 'right to disconnect' policy. Fill out the details on this form and have your say.

"If you look at [younger Canadians']life prospects, I think it's fair to say that they have had and will have a more difficult time of it than, say, my generation, who were quite lucky in the post-war period," said economist Robin Boadway of Queens University.

That certainly seems to be the view of many who reached adulthood in an era when home ownership for those just starting out can seem like an unattainable dream. But the economic trends that skewed the balance of power between generations were decades in the making and economists say one budget won't be enough to restore that balance.

• ANALYSISWith its eighth budget, the Liberal government tries to re-win the fairness fight
• Are you renting with no plans to buy? Here's what the federal budget has for you

"I'm kind of a boomer hater," said a participant in afocus group organized by the Macdonald-Laurier Institutein September. "They're the people telling us to just walk in and hand in a resume... but they're the people that could just walk into a business and they'd have a career for the rest of their life."

"The boomers had the easiest life in human history," said another participant, who citedpandemic restrictions asanother example of governments prioritizing theneeds of older generationsover those of everyone else.

"Some people gave up half their high school experience so the older generation could live a few more years in their fully funded retirement. In school, tuition wasn't lowered, but seniors got an Old Age Security bump."

The pessimism of youth

Survey after survey has found that younger Canadians are more negative about the present and more pessimistic about the future than older demographics.

The problem for the Trudeau government is that this pessimism also expresses itself in low levels of support for the Liberals. Most polling suggests that the Liberal Party which came to power in 2015 in part thanks to the support of younger voters now trails the Conservatives by almost 2-1 among the under-40s.(The combined Liberal-NDPvote in the under-40 demographic remains larger than the Conservative share.)

The relentless focus of both opposition leader Pierre Poilievre and (lately) the Liberals on issues of affordability, especially housing, shows that both parties see themaskey to winning over disaffected younger and first-time voters.

"Income matters less than it used to. Access to secure housing matters so much more," saidPaul Kershaw, a professor at the UBC School of Population and Public Health and founder of the group Generation Squeeze, which lobbies for what it calls "intergenerational equity."

Kershaw said his own Vancouver home is an example of how real estate consolidates wealth.

"I've gained about a million and a half in wealth in the last 20 years while I've been watching TV, cleaning in the kitchen and sleeping," he said. "And that's coming at the expense of a younger person being able to be just as smart as me, just as hardworking as me, but who now can't live where I do."

Kershaw said he's seen his students struggle "to get the degrees that are necessary to compete for jobs that don't pay as much as in the past. And then they face home prices that are up to a staggering level, which means they have to pay more for rent because they're locked out of ownership.

"That demographic, in all honesty, we need to beg their forgiveness."

Taking the best, leaving the rest

Kershawsaidthe housing shortage is just one exampleof "over-extraction" by theboomer generation.

"Climate change reflects the over-extraction of the atmosphere's ability to absorb carbon," he said. "We've done that over the last many decades. Now the legacy is extreme weather for those who follow in our footsteps."

Many young people are despondentabout environmental degradation and climate change. Those fears are compounded by anxiety about their own economic futures.

"The third example of over-extraction," Kershaw told CBC News "is over-extraction of the revenue produced from economic growth.

"The fastest-growing part of the federal budget is spending on Old Age Security. The second-fastest part is the Canada Health Transfer, half of which goes to the 20 per centof the population that's over 65."

Boadwaysaidfederal spending is even more skewed than provincial spending, which at least pays to educate the young.

"We used to do what we called 'generational accounting,' which looked at the budgets of the different levels of government and found out which generations were net beneficiaries and which generations were net payers," he said."Some of those studies were done in the 1990s and they showed that government budgets at that time were very pro-old people, very anti-young people."

Billions of dollars in debtgovernments took on to deal with events such as pandemicand the 2008 financial crisis have simply been added to the ledgeras a problem for future generations.

"One of the rules of government is to try and smooth over differences that generations face simply because of when they were born," said Boadway. "We introduced unemployment insuranceafter the [1930s] because of the calamitous Great Depression. And when people were coming back from the war, we created special opportunities for them. We financed both the First and Second World War through borrowing and the government borrowing was meant to spread the burden across generations."That'sno longer happening, he said.

"Governments are building up debt for reasons that have nothing to do with spreading burdens across generations, but have more to do with providing current services to existing generations," said Boadway, "transferring burdens to future generations."

Housing gap too big to close quickly

Since the lack of housing is the most visible and urgent symptom of generational unfairness, the budget was heavily focused on that issue.

"We will build more homes faster than we've seen in generations," Trudeau promised on budget day. "We don't think it's fair that a teacher or electrician pays taxes on 100 per cent of their income, while a multimillionaire pays taxes only on 50 per centof the passive income they make on capital gains. So we're going tomake them pay a little more."

Topics on microeconomics