At University Hospital in London, Ontario, Amanda Vanderley, 25, works grueling 12-hour shifts as an emergency room nurse. Each day includes not just providing critical care and assisting doctors with emergency procedures but also managing patients’ anxieties.
On the drive home after a long shift, her own anxieties rush in. Especially about how she and her husband Mattias, 23, a data analyst, will make ends meet.
Amanda’s $38 an hour, together with Mattias’s income, brings them around $135,000 annually before taxes. But after Canada's high taxes, they are left with $85,000 to $90,000 in Canadian dollars, or the equivalent of $60,000 in U.S. dollars. The financial strain is palpable—they’re barely managing day to day, let alone contemplating buying a home.
“I can anticipate and plan for the emergency room. But the thought of buying a house right now is overwhelming,” she said. “It would wipe us out.”
The couple rents an apartment in the basement of a house. Vanderley worked 70-hour weeks for two months to help pay for their wedding in August.
“If we want to go on a vacation, I have to work extra shifts. If Mattias and I want to start a family, I’ll either need to make more money or pick up more hours,” Vanderley said.
That financial precariousness—widely shared among Canadians in their 20s—is leading to a remarkable change in the country’s politics. Mirroring a similar shift to the right in the U.S., many young voters here are abandoning Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party for the Conservative opposition. The next election must take place by October 2025, and both parties are conscious of young people’s complaints that the Trudeau government has failed to address economic concerns such as high housing costs and inflation.
“I’ll be supporting the Conservative Party in the next election because I’ve seen the damage that big government and reckless spending has done,” Vanderley told me.
Eric Lombardi, 30, a management consultant in Toronto, who volunteered for the Liberal Party in high school and voted for them in the last two elections, is also disenchanted.
“The things that gravitated me toward Trudeau at the time were issues like the legalization of marijuana. I’m a freedom-oriented person. I’m a gay man. The Liberals were always far more supportive of my community vocally,” Lombardi told me.
Today, he’s leaning toward supporting the Conservative Party.