Student activist Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois demonstrates in Montreal, Tuesday, May 22, 2012. Students took to the streets in Quebec to protest a tuition fee hike — but a combination of demographics and disinterest is keeping the youth vote in check. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes

This is the second in a five-part series by pollster Frank Graves on the key forces which could be shaping Canadian politics for decades to come. You can read part one here.

Canadian society has never been older. The more apocalyptic scenarios about the ‘grey tsunami’ are no doubt exaggerated, as we can see in successful Scandinavian societies which are faring very well despite the ‘pig-and-python’ demographic.

Yet there is something disturbing about the new generational faultlines in Canada.

These problems are expressed clearly in the economy — and even more vividly the political realm. Youth unemployment is extremely high, the belief that post-secondary human capital is worth the ever-mounting debt associated with it is weakening and the new gen Y and millennial entrants are finding a labour market cluttered at the far end with stubbornly-entrenched boomers who have seen ‘freedom 55’ recede into freedom 75 and beyond.

Moreover, younger Canada is dramatically different from older Canada. It is much more ethnically diverse. It grew up in a digital age and has different attitudes to community, privacy and authority. It is also much more secular and better-educated than previous generations.

We also now see a widening gap emerging on core values, because the socially conservative values which are still powerful in older Canada have little relevance to younger Canada.

All of these differences place young and old Canada on either side of a battlefield of clashing values and economic interests (although there are still large areas of shared values and interests as well). The tensions may be no greater than they were in the 1960s and early ’70s but one does not get the sense that dramatic reforms on the order of those that came out of that period of social conflict — civil rights, women’s equality — are on the horizon for this generation.

Couple this with an unusually grim long-term economic outlook and we can see the ingredients for crisis coming together, in an aging society that desperately needs the innovation and dynamism of its younger cohort to fend off the daunting economic challenges we face.

Click to enlarge[start_gallery] [start_gallery] [end_gallery]

When we look at Canadian politics, the picture grows darker still. Simple arithmetic can make some of the point. Twenty years ago younger and older voters made up roughly similarly shares of the electorate. Today, older voters take up a share of the voting public roughly fifty per cent larger than younger voters.

As the older cohort grew relative to younger voters, the young vote started to tune out. In the 1993 election younger voters participated slightly less than seniors, at around 65 per cent. Today the youth voting rate is about half that — while seniors’ voting rate has remained steady. Effectively, the youth vote has about one third to one quarter the political impact today that it did twenty years ago.

Throwing one final ingredient into the mixture, we note that while the senior vote tended to be fairly evenly split between Liberal and Conservative options in the past, it now shows a dramatic convergence around the Conservatives. Putting these three factors together goes a long way to explaining why a federal government which champions values of security, safety, family and respect for authority has been so successful.

Click to enlarge[start_gallery] [start_gallery] [end_gallery]

The political calculus couldn’t be clearer: it makes great sense for a conservative politician to concentrate on emotionally resonant policies and communications which will appeal to a group that votes en masse. It also makes sense to discourage the participation of younger voters (who wouldn’t vote for you anyway) through negative advertising and policy positions that are of little interest, or antagonistic, to those younger voters.

The net result, however, is a gerontocracy which reflects the exaggerated and imagined fears of older Canada precisely at a time when we urgently need the more optimistic and innovative outlook of the relatively scarcer youth portion of our society. So good politics becomes highly suspect as a tool for meeting the severe challenges of the 21st century.

This growing disconnect between the public interest and what works in the political marketplace is a serious challenge. The mounting generational tensions in our society are just one particularly unwelcome expression of this.

Tomorrow: Why social media isn’t helping

Frank Graves is the founder and president of EKOS Research Associates, Ltd.

This paper draws on data collected from four separate surveys conducted at various points between December 2011 and November 2012. Their margins of error run between +/-1.3 percentage points and +/-2.9 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.