Jon Liedtke joins 610 CKTB’s Gene Valaitis for Liedtke Has a Take!
Gene Valaitis and Jon Liedtke analyze an online debate regarding retiree voting rights, housing NIMBYism, tax-weighted voting, Demeny voting, and low youth voter turnout.
Transcript (Gemini Generated):
Gene Valaitis: Liedtke’s got a take. Good morning, Jon Liedtke.
Jon Liedtke: Good morning, Gene Valaitis.
Gene Valaitis: Hey listen, um, I was online over the weekend. A big debate erupted on X or Twitter, whatever you call it, about stripping uh voting rights from retirees. Now, is there a legitimate point about older voters holding back Canada’s economic future? And be careful with your answer, ’cause I’m at a certain age here. (laughs)
Jon Liedtke: You know, listen, Gene, you know, this whole thing erupted because the CEO of Shopify decided to engage in a little bit of a thought experiment about whether or not if you take out your pension, do you become a dependent and does that mean that you shouldn’t have a right to vote, the same way that dependents of, you know, parents, children don’t have a right to vote? And this spawned from a conversation about a housing project in San Francisco that didn’t get built because of NIMBY attitudes.
But no, Gene, of course you can’t blame an individual senior for defending their home equity. For most, it’s their entire retirement safety net. But collectively, we’re talking about a systemic chokehold. Older demographics have every financial incentive to choke off new housing supply to keep their own asset values artificially inflated. I’m not speaking about any one person. Then when you throw in classic local NIMBYism, where people simply refuse to let their neighborhoods evolve and grow, you can see what the dynamic actually is. And I want to be honest about things: NIMBYs are, quite frankly, conservatives just wearing progressive outerwear. (chuckles)
Gene Valaitis: (laughs) Okay, and for people who don’t know, NIMBY is “Not In My Backyard.” So, is local NIMBY political power the primary bottleneck to solving Canada’s housing crisis, or are online commentators just scapegoating we seniors, of which I am proudly one?
Jon Liedtke: The bottleneck, Gene, is a government incentive structure that’s completely backwards. Municipalities are terrified of raising property taxes on reliable older voters, so they shifted the entire tax burden—and we saw this at various levels of government—onto development fees. That gets tacked straight onto the price tag for new, younger buyers, blowing entry-level costs out of the water.
Now, look, in the past, post-war generations built generational wealth partly off of massive government tailwinds in terms of housing subsidies or providing housing or land. Today, no politician wants to fix housing supply if it hurts them at the ballot box. So until the demographic math forces their hand, or until that equity gets passed down, our status quo is locked in.
Gene Valaitis: Mm. Now one idea that’s been floated around on this online debate is something called tax-weighted voting. Ex- explain that. What—what’s it really mean?
Jon Liedtke: You know, it’s a provocative thought experiment designed to stir the pot, absolutely. This is an idea where non-taxpayers would get zero voting. Now, when this conversation was online, the idea was if you just simply buy a hamburger, for example, you’d be paying a tax, that would give you a vote. When they say “no taxpayers,” they mean someone who doesn’t spend any money whatsoever, period.
Uh, but look, corporate executives love this idea to talk about because this is how boardrooms work: more shares, more votes. But our country is not a corporation, and our democracy is not a board of directors. I’m not going to trade away one person, one vote after generations of efforts to secure this. And, you know, calling a retiree who paid taxes for 40 years a dependent, that’s an absurd premise. But the core argument about time horizon, that’s very real. Younger Canadians have a much longer runway and way more skin in a future game. So we need to have a collective reckoning on generational stewardship. But right now, self-interest is winning.
Gene Valaitis: Yeah. Um, ex- explain this notion, ’cause I’ve been following this debate because of my age. Um, I- I’m not even sure if I’m pronouncing this right, but Demeny voting. Explain that one. This—this is—this is kind of interesting, actually.
Jon Liedtke: Yeah. So this is—this is really interesting. This would be where parents get extra votes on behalf of their children to balance out an aging electorate. Now, to me, this is non-negotiable. You don’t touch “one person, one vote.” So it’s a non-starter that opens a dangerous back door. But the real problem isn’t that parents lack proxy voting; it’s that youth voter turnout is historically dismal. And that’s the vicious cycle: young people don’t show up to vote at local ballot boxes, so municipal councils ignore them and cater exclusively to the people who do show up to vote, and that’s why we’re in the system we’re in.
Gene Valaitis: Hm. Okay, so when both high-earning professionals and young, broke Canadians are express- expressing this level of frustration with the status quo, um, where—where, you know, it almost feels like the generational contract is totally broken. So where does this war over homes, taxes, and entitlements head if the politicians just keep ignoring it? I mean, it is there.
Jon Liedtke: Oh, of course it’s there, and it exists. So if we want to break the cycle, we can’t keep, you know—you don’t want to disincentivize people from voting. You don’t want to turn them away from it. So I would suggest we could look towards gamifying civic participation. So, I’m not saying that these are ideas to implement, but real incentives could be giving young voters a tax break, maybe a direct stipend, a micro-scholarship, heck, free food at polling stations. Or we could tie civic engagement to mandatory national service, and if you take your vote, you could get a credit and maybe opt out of that service because you did your service. We can be creative about these things.
But we have to be realistic: most establishment political parties don’t actually want higher youth voter turnout. They say they do, but they don’t, because if there was higher youth voter turnout, you’d see a massive wave of angry, hyper-engaged, social-media-using young voters who would instantly shatter the comfortable status quo that the party elites rely on. And just look right now to the US with the Democratic Socialists taking over and shaking things up like that. It’s completely upending things, and that’s not what these party elites want whatsoever.
Gene Valaitis: Mm. A great take this morning. I thank you.
Jon Liedtke: Thank you, Gene.
Gene Valaitis: And we will talk to you on Friday.
Jon Liedtke: Cheers.
Gene Valaitis: All right, there he goes. Jon Liedtke. Liedtke’s got a take. Some days you’ll agree, some days you won’t, but we love having Jon on the show.
This aired on 610 CKTB
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