If you’re a young person in Canada today, you’ve probably heard the accusation that people your age are 'entitled'. The label suggests that Millennials and Gen Z expect more, but aren’t willing to put in the effort needed to earn it. This narrative is often used to explain why younger generations are struggling to afford school, rent, and other living costs. It is commonly argued that young people would be better able to get ahead if they simply worked as hard as those who came before them instead of complaining about their circumstances.

Put simply, I think this argument misses the mark by a long shot. Here’s why I think you should feel the same, using data you can trust. 

Labelling young people as 'entitled' fails to acknowledge the economic realities young Canadians are facing. To make progress on real affordability solutions, we need to take a closer look at how difficult it actually is to build financial security today.

The data are clear that Gen Z and Millennials are facing growing economic pressures at nearly every stage of adulthood. They go to school longer to land jobs that pay less and offer less security, only to face housing prices disconnected from what they can earn from their hard work. 

For those trying to establish themselves, financial pressures often begin long before entering the workforce. The average Canadian graduate leaves school with roughly $29,000 in debt, often after five or six years of higher education. Even after making that investment, stable, high-quality employment is far from guaranteed. For the first time, men over 65 now out-earn men aged 25 to 34. These financial constraints are a significant factor contributing to delays or uncertainty around starting a family. For those who do choose to have children, 42% of parents report having trouble finding affordable child care. 

Growing unaffordability is most visible in housing. In 2000, an entry-level home in many major Canadian cities cost roughly three times what a young couple earned. That ratio is now exceeding 12 times what a couple earns in Toronto and 17 times what a couple earns in Vancouver. It’s no wonder that more young people are delaying milestones like being able to own a home and afford to start a family.

Despite numbers that spell out how much harder it has become for younger generations to get ahead, many discussions about unaffordability quickly shift toward blaming individual choices, attitudes, or values rather than examining broader social and economic conditions. Here are some examples:

“We have produced a few generations now of very soft people that expect everything to be handed to them.”

“It’s crazy how much people think they’re entitled to something. There’s lots of things I don’t have the luxury of owning that my parents did. So what do I do? Work harder and figure it out.”

“I don't think the problem with Gen Z, though, is laziness, for the most part, I think its entitlement, they were taught growing up that they are some special amazing person that deserves for the world to reward them for just existing or for minimal effort and that attitude translates to the workplace.”

“I work in the environmental field and I hear from them now they have it so much harder. Nope. We all worked shitty entry level jobs, camping all summer for shit pay, volunteered to gain experience in order to get the permanent good jobs in our 30’s. They aren’t the first generation to work for what they have, and they in many ways have it a lot better (in my field at least).”

— Reddit users commenting on discussions about youth happiness and affordability

While some young people may fit this stereotype, a sense of entitlement is not an adequate explanation for what is actually happening to today’s younger generations. Just like those who came before them, Millennials and Gen Z are working hard – but their hard work simply no longer pays off the way it did for previous generations, thanks to record level post-secondary debt, high housing prices and rents, lower earnings, and high costs for essential services like child care. 

The  deterioration in young people’s well-being and standard of living is driven by economic pressures, not by a growing sense of entitlement. Millennials and Gen Z are nowhere close to getting a bargain — in fact, they must work harder to achieve the things that many older Canadians could previously take for granted.

If we are going to talk about entitlement, let’s explore a more fundamental question: who’s actually benefiting most from current systems? 

To answer that, we need to explore who receives the most from taxpayer-funded spending, and who is being asked to pay for it. On this question, the data are equally clear: the largest share of government budgets goes toward programs that support healthy retirements for older Canadians. Meanwhile, young Canadians are paying 20–40% more of their taxes toward supporting retirees than today’s seniors paid during their own working years.

Let’s dig into the fastest growing part of the federal budget, Old Age Security (OAS). OAS accounts for nearly one-fifth of all spending. This program is uniquely generous in its eligibility compared to other cash benefits, which means that the growing bill for OAS includes billions paid to retired couples with six-figure household incomes. Canada is on track to send $17.5 billion a year to these seniors by the end of the decade, even as 400,000 seniors live in poverty and young and working-age Canadians struggle to afford the basics.

The costs of an aging population don’t stop at retirement income. Medical care is the largest expense in every provincial budget, and population aging is the main driver of rising spending. For our first 50 years of life, medical care costs roughly $3,000 per year — it then rises quickly, reaching nearly $37,000 a year by age 90. The added cost of services used by a population that is getting older is large enough to turn what would otherwise be provincial budget surpluses into persistent deficits.

Both OAS and medical care are important investments, ones of which we should be proud. They have helped reduce seniors’ poverty to levels below those other age groups, and contributed to lengthening lives. The problem is that governments knew for decades that population aging would yield enormous cost pressures — yet failed to adequately prepare by ensuring revenue systems could match rising demand. Now, rapidly growing investments in OAS and seniors’ medical care consistently crowd out investments in younger generations. Governments have failed to adapt these priorities even as evidence mounts that young people’s financial security and wellbeing are deteriorating.

Despite these spending trends, young people are stepping up to finance healthy retirements for their aging loved ones. At the same time, Millennials and Gen Z will inherit the deficits governments are accumulating to cover rising costs, potentially facing greater financial pressures when they reach the same stage of life as today’s seniors.

If we want to call a generation entitled, I don't think Gen Z fits the image. 

These narratives matter. The language we use shapes how we understand problems and the solutions governments pursue. When we call young Canadians 'entitled' for struggling to build a better future, we don’t just invalidate their experiences — we misidentify the forces driving Canada’s affordability crisis.

Mislabelling a problem makes it harder to solve. Calling young people 'entitled' frames affordability as a problem of individual attitudes rather than systemic conditions. Looking for individual solutions to systemic problems risks accepting a world where financial insecurity becomes the norm rather than a challenge we can tackle together.

So before you call someone struggling with Canada’s affordability crisis entitled, ask yourself: are we really getting to the root cause of the problem — or simply making it harder to fix?

There are solutions that can restore the value of hard work for generations of young people while protecting the services on which an aging population relies. We don’t have to wait for Prime Minister Carney’s efforts to diversify the Canadian economy to pay off. We can take meaningful action to improve affordability right now.

The place to start is by making OAS responsible, modern, and fair. Currently, retired couples with household incomes of $186,000 can still receive the full $18,000 subsidy. Lowering the threshold to $100,000 of household income would ask the top 20% of OAS recipients — those with incomes at least 35% above the median on which families get by — to take slightly less. On average, these retirees would receive about $3,000 less a year after tax.

This one change would free up billions to alleviate affordability pressures that weigh heavily on many Canadians. We could eliminate seniors’ poverty, help a million young people afford rent, and fund 100,000 more $10-a-day child care spaces. 

Young Canadians aren’t entitled for feeling discouraged by economic conditions that don’t reflect how hard they work. Let’s be compassionate and recognize that they are adapting to circumstances fundamentally different from those experienced by previous generations.

If you’re frustrated by how current conditions are shaping your everyday life and limiting the choices available to you, share those feelings with us and turn them into collective action that can create meaningful change. Together, we can work toward a future where hard work can once again translate into the future we are working so hard to build.

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