The photo that could cost Mark Carney the Canadian election

Caryma Sa’d has captured the definitive image of the Canadian federal election. Over the weekend, the independent journalist posted a photograph from an event in Brantford, Ontario for Mark Carney, the former Bank of England governor who has replaced Justin Trudeau as Liberal leader and Prime Minister. The pic shows an older gentleman appearing to give two middle fingers to the camera while similarly-aged Carney enthusiasts around him laugh. In isolation, just another snapshot from an ill-tempered election. In the context of this poll, a readymade icon of everything Carney’s critics say he stands for and everything his Conservative opponent Pierre Poilievre is against.

Elbows and/or fingers up. #cdnpoli #Brantford #Elxn45 #ProtestMania pic.twitter.com/jTKswfmgVp

— Caryma Sa'd – Lawyer + Political Satirist (@CarymaRules) April 19, 2025

The two-finger salute has already become a meme. Legal scholar Yuan Yi Zhu tweeted the image with the caption: “The last thing you see before you are priced out of a house, forever.” The YouTuber JJ McCullough combined it with a graph ranking real GDP-per-capita growth in OECD countries since 2015 – when the Liberals came to power – with Canada second from bottom. On Reddit, the man’s raised arms (and fingers) were mocked up as a Liberal poster complete with the slogan “elbows up,” a reference to Saskatchewanian hockey great Gordie Howe, a burly fellow prone to giving opponents the cubital treatment. (The term made a comeback in response to Donald Trump’s tariffs and threats to annex Canada, with Liberals in particular using it to rally the Canuck fighting spirit.) What might have been a fleeting moment of political bravado has been immortalized by Canada’s millennial and Gen Z Tories as the embodiment of boomer liberalism.

Yes, I said millennial and Gen Z Tories. Electoral dynamics are a little topsy-turvy in the True North. As I noted last year, a significant segment of young’uns trend rightwards in Canada while the olds are the backbone of the center-left vote. The election, which takes place on Monday, is forecast for a Liberal victory, with Carney’s Grits polling at 43 percent to 37 percent for Poilievre’s Tories. The crosstabs, however, reveal a stark generational divide. If the franchise was limited to 18-to-34 year olds, the Conservatives would narrowly win the contest; if only over 65s could vote, the Liberals’ victory would be even mightier.

What’s that all about, then? In a word: boomers. The boomer, born roughly between 1946 and 1964, is the bête noire of Canadian right-wingery. He is a retired government employee on a generous public pension who came of age in times of plenty, bought his spacious house on the cheap, then pulled the ladder up behind him. He imagines himself to be an aging hippie but grew up in North York in the Sixties where the closest he got to the counterculture was buying The White Album from Sam the Record Man.

He watches, listens, streams and surfs the CBC. The progressive-minded public broadcaster is the source of all his independent thinking and Facebook the soapbox from which he regurgitates chapter and verse of last night’s edition of The National. If the CBC were a church, he would be a lay preacher. The Carney boomer reckons the young are lazy and entitled, Tory voters racist and stupid, and Americans crazy and tacky. He believes above all in the three most important Canadian values: peace, order and asset-hoarding.

And his grandchildren have had it with gramps. As a young man, in the 1970s, he was hosed down with public spending and services by Trudeau père, and in the past decade, in his golden years, by Trudeau fils. His idea of paying it forward was to vote to ramp up immigration, stymie housebuilding, and shift the tax burden onto young workers. Between 1972 and 1976, at the height of Trudeaupia, housebuilding kept pace with demography, with annual population growth of 298,864 and annual housebuilding starts of 249,045.

Compare this to 2022-24, the final years of Trudeaupia II, when the population shot up by 1,006,142 per annum — mostly thanks to immigration — but housebuilding starts languished at 249,161. (No, you’re not misreading that. Canada, with a population today of 41.5 million, is building the same number of houses per year as it did when the population was 23 million.) In 1980, the median family income was $23,894 in Canadian dollars and the median house price $47,200 but while the median family income hit $96,220 in 2020, the median cost of a house soared to $336,900. Little wonder that homeownership is going backwards: while 44.1 percent of 25-to-29 year olds owned a home in 2011, that figure was down to 39.6 percent by 2021. If only they hadn’t splurged so much on avocado toast.

Boomers are going out of this world the way they came into it, on easy street, and whatever else might be said of them, they turn out to thank their benefactors at the polls. Since the mid-1960s, the Liberals have been in power for two-thirds of the time. The party is well aware where its support comes from, which is why Carney’s messaging is overtly targeted at seniors, complete with endorsements from fellow boomers and occasional Canadians Mike Myers and Neil Young, plus pledges to protect retirees’ savings from the impact of Trump’s tariffs. As National Post columnist Geoff Russ says, the Liberals are “mercenaries for the gray-haired and the asset-rich.” Meanwhile, Poilievre’s Conservatives are targeting working Canadians with promises to build 2.3 million new homes, cut taxes for first-time buyers, slash immigration and deport criminal migrants, and take an ax to federal spending. This is the platform that is winning over a considerable number of millennials and zoomers, while the baby boomers are flocking to the party of big-government progressivism.

Like British boomers, their Canadian counterparts have voted to redistribute wealth from young workers to themselves all the while campaigning to deny their grandchildren the same chance at homeownership. Even as they do so they whine and pout and demand to be affirmed in their delusion that theirs is a generation who had it tough and worked so much harder for what they have. Boomers upended a society organized around virtue, order and authority in favor of one organized around the principle that they must always get what they want, when they want it, and at someone else’s expense. The children of the Sixties are still children in their sixties.

For a certain strain of Canadian boomer, a vote for Mark Carney is another surly strut against those urging them to take responsibility, albeit those telling them what to do are no longer their parents and teachers but their children and grandchildren. But you can’t tell them what to do. They walked to school, played outside, saw the Rolling Stones live and went on a protest against something one time. They’ll do whatever they want, and if you don’t like it, you can spin on it.