What are the most personal causes that stir the hearts of our nation’s political leaders? The Star asked the leaders of Canada’s major political parties to share the issues that move them deeply. Today, in the third of a series, we look at the struggles facing young families, the cause chosen by federal Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer.

When Tricia Grant was pregnant with her first child five years ago, she and her husband Sean were both self-employed. He is a barber, she was an athletic therapist. But that meant she couldn’t take a year-long maternity leave because she hadn’t been paying into the Employment Insurance for self-employed workers — a cost which may not have made sense for her family anyway.

She worried about losing the clients she had worked so hard for, and the career she is still paying off post-secondary debt training for. She worried they wouldn’t be able to pay the mortgage on the home in Oshawa. They saved and scrimped for years to afford the 20-per- cent down payment.

“Am I going to even be able to afford this child,” she remembered thinking.

Young families in Canada, like Grant’s, want many of the same things previous generations did — home ownership, children, stable jobs — but achieving these dreams is more difficult than ever before, experts say.

Compared to four decades ago, young people going into debt for increasingly expensive post-secondary education to get jobs where they work hard but are paid less, says Paul Kershaw, a University of British Columbia professor and founder of the Generation Squeeze advocacy group. They are then paying hundreds of thousands of dollars more to get into an average home — more likely a condo. If not, they are paying more and more in rent.

It takes a typical person between 25 and 34 years of age 13 years to save a 20 per cent down payment on an average priced home in Canada (this jumps to 29 years in Metro Vancouver and 21 years in the GTA), compared to the five years it took for young adults around 1976, according to a report from Generation Squeeze.

Renting is also increasingly out of reach to families who work in Toronto and earn less than $100,000.

The cost of living has gone up and as people delay having a family until they can’t wait any longer, they then face monthly child-care costs that amount to another rent or mortgage payment, Kershaw says. Parents in Toronto pay the highest median fees in the country, with infant care topping $1,685 a month or $20,220 a year, according to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

“Then there are the existential questions that didn’t really exist in my parents’ generation,” says David Coletto, CEO of Abacus Data, which researches Canadian millennials. “We’ve got climate change. And a fast-moving, evolving economy where it isn’t clear which jobs will be here in ten years. … It’s no surprise that you do see a level of anxiety with young families about what they are supposed to achieve and what is expected of them given all these constraints.”

And while the focus on the struggles young families face now tends to be on major expenditures like housing and childcare, there are also more expenses and ways to spend money than ever before, says personal finance expert Rubina Ahmed-Haq. Not only are there the additional costs of cellphone and internet bills, there are increasing numbers of monthly subscriptions to be had from Netflix to meal kits on top of the ease of one-click online shopping.

“You don’t have to go a mall to spend money,” she says. The ease of consumerism may be tempered with a shift towards minimalism and sustainability, but it all impacts how much money young families are able to put into savings.

“I definitely think things are more difficult now — the prices of houses are insane,” Grant says. “And the cost of living has increased tremendously.”

After her son was born five years ago, Grant went back to work three days a week three months later. Her mother took care of baby Carter on the other two days when they could not afford daycare. When he was in daycare, missing work when he got sick — a frequent occurrence due to the germ factory that is daycare — meant she or her husband Sean would miss out on a day or more of pay.

After two years, Grant had enough and got a job at TD Insurance. The benefits — including dental — and flexible work options allowed her to be there for her son’s milestones and provide her family with extra financial stability. It also meant they could consider having another child.

“I had a really hard time feeling pressured to go back to work and feeling guilty not being there for certain milestones with my baby. I carried a lot of anxiety from that,” she says. But choosing to stop being self-employed as an athletic therapist also meant compromising on her independence and ambitions — something an increasing number of self-employed women may have to reckon with when it comes to starting a family.

Eight weeks ago, Grant, 34, gave birth to their second child, Clarity. This time around she is on a maternity leave with benefits and it has been much less stressful though it still took a lot of financial planning. She got Clarity onto daycare waiting lists before she was even born. The cost will be the same as a mortgage payment.

Coletto’s research on millennials has found that young families today are struggling to decide when, or if, they can afford to have children. And women continue to bear the burden of high child-care costs and are the ones who stay home or work part-time because child-care is too expensive, says financial planning expert Jessica Moorhouse. “These are things people are talking about way, way more now when they are considering should we have a family and how many kids.”

Like many other couples, Moorhouse, who is self-employed as is her husband, say they have been delaying having children to focus on career growth and reaching a place where they feel financially stable.

She adds that it’s not as simple as just crunching numbers. “As a woman, in this day and age, we want to work, it’s not necessarily that we have to work. I went to university and I got this degree and I love my job and my career.”

And like Grant, she says the idea of a job now is very different from her parents’ generation.

“There is no such thing as job security anymore and we have had to alter our perceptions about what living that adult best life looks like,” she says. This means changes to the ways young families think about extended health care and dental benefits and saving for retirement.

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“It’s a hard thing for people to grasp, that no one else is going to take care of you,” she says. “Yes, there is Old Age Security. Yes, there is CPP (Canada Pension Plan), but that is supplemental. You can’t live off that in your retirement.”

Grant says politicians need to recognize how the changing nature of work — including a shift towards self-employment and contract work — is making things like affording a home, saving for retirement and having children more of a struggle for young families.

When you are having a child, it should be exciting and joyful, she said. You shouldn’t be thinking: ‘did I make the right choice?”

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