Budget analyses

Pushing governments to design their budgets to promote generational fairness is a big part of what we do. Each year, governments create budgets that set out priorities and assign money to them. If something’s not in the budget, it’s pretty unlikely to happen. Our budget push starts months before any actual budget is released, and it continues long afterwards, because budgets are a year-round process. Through it all, we share our recommendations and analyses so that you can decide if you support proposed priorities, and if they are supported by evidence.

Four themes regularly show up in our budget asks:

  • Make life more affordable by reducing the cost of things like child care and housing.
  • Don’t tackle affordability by scaling back climate action – especially pollution pricing. It’s false economy, given the enormous costs of climate change. And it’s intergenerationally unjust when younger generations face the lion’s share of climate risks.
  • Reconnect home prices with local earnings because a home should be in reach of what hard work can earn. This means taxing housing wealth differently.
  • Improve accountability by filling in and fixing current data gaps – including what we spend by age, what we spend on treating illness vs creating health, and how housing price inflation is measured.

If you’ve seen our comprehensive policy solutions, you’ll probably recognize these themes. They’re among our top priorities to improve the health and wellbeing of all generations, from the early years onward. We’ve made progress, but we’ll keep working on them until we convince governments to make budgets that work for all generations!

 

Federal Budgets

British Columbia Budgets

Ontario Budgets

Alberta Budgets

Budgeting for Wellbeing and Generational Fairness

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