This the third op-ed in  Research Money's ongoing “Youth Voices" series, where our weekly Voices op-eds will regularly present the perspectives of young professionals and youth. The first Youth Voices op-ed was published on March 4, 2026, and the second op-ed on April 1, 2026. Please send your op-ed submissions to Mark Lowey, managing editor, at: mark@researchmoneyinc.com

By Max Peacock and Alexander Zelenski

Max Peacock (L) is a digital strategist and Alexander Zelenski (R) is an innovation analyst and researcher – both at the Institute for Collaborative Innovation Canada, based in Ottawa.

Between 2019 and 2023, the share of Canadian youth rating their own mental health as “fair” or “poor” more than doubled – from 12 percent to 26 percent. Among young women, it climbed to 33 percent.

Statistics Canada didn’t poll different teenagers in different years and average them out. It followed the same kids into young adulthood and watched their wellbeing collapse in real time.

That isn’t a pandemic blip. It’s a warning sign.

The World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report 2026 names inequality as the single most interconnected risk on the planet – the one that pulls every other risk along with it.

The Munich Security Report 2026 calls our era "Under Destruction," driven by populations who feel the social contract has stopped delivering.

In Canada, those conditions land hardest on people aged 15 to 29. And we are flying blind on them.

The federal government’s last State of Youth Report came out in 2021. Public engagement on the second one closed in March 2025. Canadian Heritage targeted publication for “summer 2025.” A year later, it remains unpublished. Canada’s official evidence base on the cohort most exposed to the polycrisis is half a decade old.

The data we do have is unsparing. Home ownership among Canadians aged 25 to 29 fell from 44.1 percent in 2011 to 36.5 percent in 2021 – the steepest drop of any age group.

Median full-time, full-year earnings for 25-to-34-year-olds, in 2025 dollars, are slightly below where they sat in 1976, while average home prices have roughly tripled.

Canadian-student college enrolment fell by more than 101,000 – a 14.6-percent decline – over the decade to 2022/23, even as the youth population grew.

Roughly 914,000 Canadians aged 15 to 29, or 11.5 percent of the cohort, are now not in employment, education or training – an increase of more than 201,800 since 2023.

Policy Horizons Canada’s January 2025 foresight report, Future Lives: Social Mobility in Question, sketched a 2040 in which postsecondary education no longer delivers mobility, homeownership becomes inheritance-dependent, AI compresses the value of knowledge work, and young Canadians live with cognitive dissonance between their aspirations and what they realistically expect.

Read the data above and that 2040 looks less like a scenario and more like an early arrival.

A cohort that is being structurally squeezed

Canada’s science, technology and innovation ecosystem runs on the cohort that is being structurally squeezed. The transmission runs through three channels.

The talent pipeline is narrowing in real time. Postsecondary education is the on-ramp to the research and innovation workforce, and 14.6 percent fewer Canadian students walked through the college front door over the past decade. Domestic university enrolment turned negative in 2022/23, before the federal government’s international student cap shock.

When a generation calculates that a degree no longer prices in a house, a stable career, or a livable city, fewer of them choose research-track education at all – and the ones who do start rationally optimizing for exit options.

Brain drain is no longer hypothetical. Net emigration from Canada hit roughly 65,400 in 2024-25, the highest in Statistics Canada’s 50-year series, and two-thirds of the people leaving are aged 20 to 44.

The Ottawa Science Policy Network’s 2024 brain-drain survey found 64 percent of Canadian graduate students say they are likely to move abroad after finishing.

Bank of Canada research finds that roughly 40 percent of Canadians who would rank in the U.S. top one percent of earners have already crossed the border. Every researcher we lose to a U.S. lab or a European institute is decades of public R& D investment compounding somewhere else’s economy.

The democratic mandate for science is hollowing out. Youth turnout did rebound in the 2025 federal election – up to 55.9 percent from 46.7 percent in 2021. But trust did not move with it.

Andrew Parkin’s December 2025 read of the Environics data is brutal: between 2023 and 2025, trust in the prime minister rebounded 21 points among Canadians 60 and over (to 44 percent) and exactly one point among Canadians 18 to 29 (to 24 percent).

As Liam O’Toole, Jacob Robbins-Kanter, and Jean-François Daoust put it in Policy Options last November, this is “frustration born of exclusion” – a generation that increasingly believes the system is stacked for homeowners and retirees.

Science, technology and innovation (STI) funding is a long-horizon political bet. It depends on a public that believes public institutions can deliver. If the cohort that has to carry the next 30 years of that bet has already concluded the institutions don’t work for them, the political constituency for ambitious public science erodes from underneath.

Canada needs a youth-specific risk assessment

We tend to file “youth issues” under social policy – housing portfolios, mental health budgets, ESDC labour-market programs. They are. But in a polycrisis frame, what is happening to Canadians under 30 is also an economic risk, a security risk, and an innovation risk.

The World Economic Foundation’s  2026 risks chapter makes the link explicit: under-30s see the world differently from older cohorts, and inequality is the connective tissue between every other shock – climate, AI disruption, geopolitical fragmentation, democratic backsliding.

Canada cannot run a credible STI agenda – Carney’s productivity push, the AI Safety Institute build-out, Tri-Agency reform, the critical-minerals strategy – on a generational base that has quietly opted out of the project. Talent, mandate and trust are upstream of every STI line item.

Canada needs a youth-specific risk assessment, and it needs it before the next budget cycle.

That assessment should do three things. First, treat under-30 wellbeing – economic, mental, civic – as a leading indicator of national resilience, not a downstream social outcome.

Second, integrate it directly into the STI policy stack: every major innovation initiative should be stress-tested against what it means for the talent pipeline, the political mandate, and the brain-drain risk. 

Third, get the second State of Youth Report out the door. A 2021 baseline isn’t a baseline anymore. It’s a memory.

The institutions that fund and steward Canadian science have a particular role here.

Granting councils, innovation agencies, university leaders and policy shops can press for integrated youth-and-STI indicators in federal reporting.

They can fund the longitudinal data that Statistics Canada and CIHI have started but cannot sustain alone.

And they can stop assuming the next generation of Canadian researchers, founders and policy talent will simply show up – and start asking, honestly, why a growing share of them are choosing not to.

The polycrisis is not an abstract horizon risk. It has an age. And the cohort that inherits it is sending us, in housing data and emigration files and mental-health surveys and Environics polls, a single coherent message.

Canada needs to be in the room when the next generation decides whether the country is worth staying for.

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