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.

Federal Budgets British Columbia Budgets Ontario Budgets Alberta Budgets Budgeting for Wellbeing & Fairness

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!

“Gen Squeeze is my go-to source for provincial and federal budget analyses. Their team has a knack for translating huge amounts of data and research into crisp takeaways and helpful infographics. For folks who lack the time (or patience!) to sift through extensive budget documents on their own, Gen Squeeze can be trusted to do the heavy lifting and weigh in on how well we are — or aren’t — tackling some of the most pressing issues facing our country.”

— Ian Klesmer, Gen Squeeze supporter