Some writers claim that advanced democracies are drifting into gerontocracy, where older citizens—by virtue of their numbers, turnout, and institutional hold—shape outcomes in their own interest, to the detriment of younger generations?
This is a powerful narrative. It is also wrong. Or more precisely: it mistakes visibility for causality and substitutes demographic theory for evidence of a gerontocracy.
The arithmetic of voting is not the mechanics of power
Yes, older Canadians vote at higher rates. In federal elections, turnout among those 65+ is typically 20–25 percentage points higher than among those under 35. That is a fact.
But the conclusion drawn—that older adults have captured political power —is a leap.
Elections are not a closed system. Younger Canadians are not excluded. They are not structurally disenfranchised from voting.
To attribute policy outcomes to older voters because they vote more often confuses participation with domination.
If turnout determines outcomes, then the remedy is participation—not in recasting one group’s engagement as illegitimate or suspect.
The fiction of the ‘self-interested senior’
The gerontocracy thesis rests heavily on a stereotype: that older voters act as a cohesive bloc, advancing narrow, self-serving interests.
This collapses under minimal scrutiny. Older Canadians are:
- income-diverse – from Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS) recipients to high-income retirees
- politically support all parties
- regionally and culturally varied; and
- healthier and more able to contribute to society than previous generations.
More importantly, older adults advance policy positions that often benefit all generations.
These include:
- pension policy – advocating for defined benefit pension plans
- pensions – advocating successfully in 2017 to prevent Bill C27 which would have eroded defined benefit plans.
- pension protection – advocating successfully for the Pension Protection Act of 2023 to grant pensioners a super-priority and ensure workers are protected in the event of a company becoming insolvent.
Note: these pension improvements will protect today’s workers as they enter their retirement years.
as well as:
- publicly funded health care that is universal for all
- funding to increase the stock of social housing for seniors (and with more such housing stock, there would be more for all)
- Pharmacare and dental care that is available to all
- public transportation that benefits all ages
- improvements to income security programs such as OAS/GIS to ensure adequate incomes for older Canadians so that younger Canadians are less financially responsible for their parents and grand-parents
Canada’s social programs are built on universality and accessibility. Survey evidence consistently shows strong support among older voters for:
- universal health care
- public pensions
- social spending
- intergenerational programs
These are not narrow personal preferences. They are system-level preferences affecting all generations. To recast them as selfish is not analysis—it is stereotyping without evidence or at best, bad evidence.
The empirical record does not support the presence of a gerontocracy. If older voters were successfully shaping policy in their own interest at the expense of others, we would expect to see a clear pattern of:
- rising relative incomes for seniors
- declining relative resources for younger groups
- policy bias concentrated on older cohorts
The Canadian record is more complicated.
Seniors’ incomes: Improved, but not dominant
It is true that senior poverty has declined significantly since the 1970s.
Programs like Old Age Security and Guaranteed Income Supplement reduced poverty rates among seniors from over 30% in the 1970s to under 10% today (using the MBM).
That is a policy success. But it is also a historical correction.
Seniors were once the poorest group in Canadian society and old age pensions were put in place in the late 1920s to ensure urban seniors who could no longer work had an income. These benefits today are taxable and, as a result, seniors pay more taxes today than previously, which help support programs for all Canadians. In 2024, seniors paid $15-20B in taxes on OAS/CPP and pension income while the total amount of income tax paid by seniors including the OAS clawback is estimated at $55 to $75 billion.
Younger cohorts: Facing different pressures
Younger Canadians today face:
- housing costs that have outpaced income growth for several decades
- labour markets with higher precarity and increased worker exploitation
- delayed asset accumulation at younger ages
These are real pressures. But they are not the product of seniors voting patterns. They are the product of housing supply constraints, financialization of real estate assets, and labour market restructuring in the gig economy with fewer unionized workers and more systemic increases in the wealth of company owners and senior managers; in other words: structural economic forces.
The real distortion: Program fragmentation
What some current commentators attribute to a gerontocracy is better explained by policy architecture.
Canada’s income security system is:
- age-segmented
- program-specific; but
- poorly integrated
The result:
- relatively stable incomes at 65+ (OAS/GIS/CPP)
- weakening supports before that (e.g., ages 60–64); and
- sharp transitions between systems especially at age 65.
This is not because seniors demanded it. It is because programs were built incrementally, in response to specific risks, without full integration.
The system is not biased. It is uneven.
Power is institutional, not generational
The gerontocracy thesis makes a second critical error:
It treats age as the primary axis of power.
But power in modern democracies is structured through:
- institutions (courts, legislatures, bureaucracies)
- rules (electoral systems, tenure, incumbency)
- economic concentration of income and wealth in increasingly fewer hands of billionaires.
Older individuals occupy positions within these systems. But they do not define them.
Replace a 70-year-old judge with a 45-year-old and the institution does not transform. Replace a senior politician with a younger one and the same incentives remain.
The persistence of leadership is not a function of age. It is a function of institutional design. In reality, older adults outside the workforce have limited ability to provide input into policies and programs that affect them. Older adults and indeed the seniors’-led and retiree organizations that attempt to represent them are largely invisible with little real power to influence decision-making
The politics of Ageism
There is something else at work here.
Age is one of the last categories for which prejudicial discrimination remains socially acceptable. We would not accept arguments that attribute policy outcomes to:
- racial groups
- gender groups; and
- immigrant populations
Yet when it comes to older adults, sweeping claims about selfishness, dominance, and distortion are presented as analysis.
This should give us pause because it suggests that the gerontocracy narrative is not simply descriptive. It is normative. And it invites resentment – while at the same time ignoring the actual contributions of retired older adults to the well-being of their families and communities through elder and child care, forming the back-bone of volunteers for community non-profits, condo and strata boards and faith-based groups among others.
The convenience of generational blame
The appeal of the gerontocracy thesis lies in its simplicity. It offers a single explanation for complex outcomes. It locates responsibility in a group rather than in a system.
And in doing so, it allows us to avoid harder questions:
- Why has housing policy failed to keep pace with demand?
- Why do labour market risks fall unevenly across cohorts?
- Why is income support fragmented across programs and ages?
These are design questions. They require structural answers.
Blaming seniors is a lot easier than focusing on the role, for example, of multinational corporations.
A better framework: The life course
A more accurate way to understand the system is through the life course.
People move through stages:
- education
- work
- building families and communities
- retirement
Policies that appear to favour one stage often reflect risks at another. Public pensions, for example, are not static transfers from young to old. They are part of a life-cycle system in which individuals contribute and receive over time.
The relevant question is not who wins at a given moment. It is whether the system provides adequacy and continuity across the entire life course.
What is actually missing
If there is a critique to be made, it is not that older Canadians hold too much power. In fact, older adults are generally ignored in decision-making that affects them.
This is a system that lacks coherence.
We have strong income supports at 65+ but weaker supports before that along with complex interactions and clawbacks.
The result is not a gerontocracy. It is a patchwork system that produces uneven outcomes.
Conclusion
The idea of gerontocracy captures something real: the persistence of leadership and the visibility of age in positions of authority.
But it misidentifies the cause. The issue is not that older people vote more or hold office longer, or indeed have any influence on policy. It is that the system within which they operate has not been designed to produce coherent outcomes across generations.
Blaming seniors for this is analytically weak but politically convenient. And convenience, in policy analysis, is often a warning sign.
If we are to address the challenges facing younger Canadians—housing, income stability, opportunity—we will not do so by reframing the problem as one of age. We will do so by confronting the structures themselves.