Founder, Lead Researcher & Executive Chair

Dr. Paul Kershaw is an award-winning tenured professor at the University of British Columbia, public speaker, regular media contributor and Founder of Generation Squeeze.

Paul received the UBC President’s Award for Public Education through the Media in 2023, and the 2016 award for Academic of the Year from the Confederation of University Faculty Associations of BC.  He has been honoured twice by the Canadian Political Science Association with national prizes for his gender and politics research. Paul and the Gen Squeeze team received BC Housing Central's Affordable Housing Champion award in 2017, and the Government of Canada 2018 award for excellence in moving 'Knowledge to Action' on housing. 

Paul’s work has contributed directly to historic investments in $10 a day child care across Canada, the first ever tax on empty homes in North America, eliminating limitless rent increases in Ontario for units built before 2019, changes to municipal zoning, approval of dozens of new rental housing developments facing NIMBY’ism, a shift in BC to reduce income taxes by taxing unhealthy home prices more, and the first-ever reporting of age trends in federal public finance. Paul and Gen Squeeze also successfully led the Intergenerational Climate Coalition to intervene in Saskatchewan, Ontario and Supreme Courts to defend the constitutionality of pricing pollution on the grounds it is needed to promote population health and intergenerational equity.

Paul is a policy professor in the UBC School of Population and Public Health, and Director of the UBC Masters of Public Health program.