Rising pessimism among young people can be overcome with solutions for inclusive, sustainable growth, say panelists at University of Alberta

Photo credit: Jason Franson

The Coalition for a Better Future held a Campus Tour event at the University of Alberta where students, faculty and staff joined conversations about Canada’s future prosperity.
From left to right: Andrea Hepp, President of Atlas Carbon Storage at Shell; Simon Dyer, Deputy Executive Director of the Pembina Institute Hon. Lisa Raitt, co-chair, Coalition for a Better Future; Hon. Anne McLellan, co-chair, Coalition for a Better Future and Marvin Washington, Dean of the College of Social Sciences & Humanities.

Young Canadians continue to feel anxiety and pessimism about the economy and the environment, but there remains hope and optimism for an inclusive, sustainable future, said panelists at a recent event at the University of Alberta.

Coalition for a Better Future co-chair Lisa Raitt highlighted during the discussion that there is a sense of dissatisfaction among Canadian youth over issues such as housing affordability, wage stagnation, and access to quality jobs. The Coalition's polling, led by Nanos Research, shows 64 per cent of young Canadians (aged 18-30) believe economic growth is heading in the wrong direction, and many feel excluded from economic opportunities.

This prompted a question from an audience member about why economic growth is important at all given sustainability issues. “Why are we trying to grow on a planet that has finite resources, whose planetary boundaries we've been exceeding for far too long?” the attendee said. “My students just tune out when they're like, ‘Yeah, I still don't see a new narrative being presented to me.’ And they don't have faith in the systems around them and that the leadership is actually going to present a new narrative to them that they can get on board with.”

**“If we fix that with a long term economic plan that they can get behind, that they’re excited about, that’s the best thing we can do for them.”**

Lisa Raitt, co-chair, Coalition for a Better Future

In response, Raitt noted that Canadian youth are often over-credentialed but under-waged and have no buying power. “If you can fix that with a long term economic plan, maybe that gives them a little bit of breathing space to be more optimistic about what the future looks like,” she said, adding students are burdened with debt and jobs are few. “If we fix that with a long term economic plan that they can get behind, that they’re excited about, that’s the best thing we can do for them.”

Raitt spoke at a Campus Tour Event hosted by the Coalition for a Better Future and supported by Shell Canada. This program brings the co-chairs to universities, colleges and training centres across the country to speak with the leaders of tomorrow.

In addition to Raitt and co-chair Anne McLellan, Simon Dyer, Deputy Executive Director of the Pembina Institute, joined the discussion moderated by Dr. Marvin Washington, Dean of the College of Social Sciences & Humanities. Andrea Hepp, President of Atlas Carbon Storage at Shell, was also present.

Dyer said he understands the frustration of Canadian youth, given that 2023 was on record as the hottest year. “It’s pretty terrifying, right?” he remarked. “We might have hit that 1.5-degree threshold already. So you can understand the anxiety and the anger.”

However, Dyer expressed optimism that important conversations around solutions are happening, even though it feels as if progress has been slow.

“The level of policy attention in the past five years is greater than the previous 50,” he said. “The world installs more renewable energy every day now than existed in the entire world up to 2005. So I mean, we are talking about growth in solutions at a rate that we've never seen before. So it feels like we are trying things that we've never tried before. So I'm not ready to give up yet.”

McLellan said it has to be “the right kind of economic growth,” which means inclusive and sustainable.

“We can't keep doing the things we've been doing,” she said. “The people who put the Coalition together initially knew that there's no point in going out and just talking about economic growth in the same terms we always have. Because you're right, people will turn off for whatever reasons: young people for a certain set of reasons, seniors for a certain set of reasons. They just say, ‘No, that hasn't worked,’ or ‘it hasn't worked the way I thought it
should.’ ”

**“We can't keep doing the things we've been doing.”**

Anne McLellan, co-chair, Coalition for a Better Future

Hepp said engaging young people in the solutions that will shape the future is why Shell Canada has partnered with the Coalition. Through the Campus Tour, more than 500 students from all over Canada have been directly discussing these critical issues.

“To me, this means a lot,” she said. “It's really about how do we fuel our Canadian economy.”

She said the students in attendance are “our future leaders” and “our future role models,” adding, “How do you build us a better, sustainable future for your generation and for future generations and their generations? ”

Thinking of the future strength of Canada’s economy, Dyer pointed out that Canada is not investing in the energy transition to the level of other countries, saying that while “the rest of the world was talking about the clean energy boom, we were sort of looking inwards and having some pretty provincial fights about the issue.” He says that as a country, “we have to think bigger.”

Dyer pointed out that sustainable growth involves more than just renewables. “We have to basically pull every lever that's available to us,” he said, adding there’s a role for carbon capture and storage, referring to Shell’s Quest Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) project. “We have to move beyond the rhetoric and actually start implementing things.”

Another issue raised by an audience member was the labour and union movement and how young people view the workforce.

“We're at a pivotal moment right now with unions and labour again, where young people are starting to notice that they exist,” the audience member said. “We have a democratic society, but in many places, we have totalitarian workplaces. And so if we look at unions as creative and collaborative forces that can work together with employers and create the possibility for inclusion, for that belonging that you're talking about, for opportunities for lifelong learning, a means of, I think, creative participation in our societies, I think we'd be better off.”

McLellan responded that there are times that bring unions, employers, and trade and industrial associations together, the most recent being during the COVID pandemic. “You do see these periods of collaboration, and I would like to think that generally, the relationship between organized labour and their employers is one of pragmatic efforts,” she said. “There's a pragmatic working relationship because both understand that's the only way they survive.”

Raitt mentioned that the Coalition has relationships with labour organizations but noted that they need to be more represented within the Coalition.

“We're mindful that the voice has to be there, but we're also mindful we don't represent that voice. And our notion isn't to prescribe what a workplace should look like, but it's to encourage people to work together in the workplace,” she said.

A key focus of the discussion was what economic growth means to individuals. Raitt said that ahead of the upcoming federal election campaign, policymakers should know what’s important to Canadians. For her, she said, economic growth means having the revenue to address Alzheimer’s and dementia issues and help patients.

“That's my personal concern. So that's something that I want people to understand and know about. Economic growth means we're going to have enough money to be able to pay for good care for our aging demographics and people who are afflicted with dementia because it's a growing area,” she said.

For McLellan, economic growth means improved infrastructure in rural Canada. As someone who grew up on a dairy farm and whose family still runs a dairy operation, she understands the necessity of reliable infrastructure and broadband for doing business.

“Robots milk the cows, right? So what do robots need? Reliable power. They need a grid that is stable and efficient, and that's what they don't have in Nova Scotia right now. So economic growth, if we tell a personal story, it's about reliable infrastructure, and in my specific example, it is the grid, but it could be broadband. It's a basic aspect of infrastructure.”

Raitt reiterated the importance of ensuring rural Canada also benefits from economic growth and pointed to the Coalition’s Scorecard, which measures progress on a number of key economic metrics.

“We take a look at the long term economic issues that are facing rural Canada, for example, broadband, right? The ability to do business when you don't have an internet connection that is stable and is fast makes it a lot more difficult,” she said. “We want young people and rural Canadians and all Canadians to be able to say, ‘Okay, we're measuring how we're doing in Canada. We're not doing that great. We want change.’”