What are Youth Thinking this Election?

Two young people walk past an Elections Canada sign. Photo Taken by The Canadian Press/Sean Kilpatrick

Canada’s 2025 election campaign has rolled across the country like an April thunderclap—loud, sudden, and impossible to ignore. Every morning brings a fresh volley of ads, polls, and

televised one-liners, yet one mystery keeps surfacing in talk-radio call-ins and column

headlines: what do younger voters really think?

To ground that question in real voices rather than trending hashtags, we sat with Julien Hodge, Associate at The Novas Group and RBC “21 Under 21” recipient, and with Anthony Valenti, Manager of Media Relations at the Canadian Construction Association and former Communications & Media Products Lead for the Liberal Party of Canada. Their perspectives differ in style, but together they sketch a remarkably consistent picture of how many under-30 voters are weighing the race.

Hodge approaches politics with the same calm curiosity he brings to client work. The first thing he does when a party releases new material is download the full text, scroll through it, and decide whether it earns a deeper read. Most don’t. “I think the reason nobody actually reads the policy is because they’re extremely hard to read,” he said, thumbing past page after page of dense prose on his phone.

To him, an effective plan should start with a headline goal, then spell out the sequence—budget line, timeline, measurable milestone—without burying essentials in fine print. “More than anything, I care about the through-line process.” Housing supply, credential recognition, and lasting healthcare support, remain his top filters: any promise on those fronts must show concrete steps, or it slides off his shortlist. Hodge is quick to note that this isn’t about rooting for or against any emblem; it is simply the homework he and his friends see as basic due diligence before marking a ballot.

Valenti, having spent several years inside the Liberal ecosystem, came to politics through long nights in campaign headquarters, yet his outlook today is less partisan strategy and more public-service ethic. “Being informed is the responsibility of every citizen in a democracy,” he said, recalling classroom debates where disengagement let the loudest slogan carry the day. That sense of duty feels sharper this cycle because, in his view, external economic shocks can slam into Canadian paycheques without warning. “The economy is the number-one question—and Donald Trump is the largest threat to our economy,” he argued, not to sensationalize U.S. headlines but to underline how tariffs or currency swings could hit mortgages and grocery bills before any newly elected MP even finds the cloakroom.

Valenti reads election material like a stress test: Can a housing promise survive higher lumber costs? Will a jobs plan hold up if interest rates climb again? Too often, he said, the fine print is missing. “No plan presented by any party really delivers concrete solutions for young people,” he concluded, though he gives credit whenever a proposal—say, removing degree barriers for federal jobs or the Liberals’ ambitious plan to reduce housing costs—addresses an obstacle he has watched his peers wrestle with in real life.

Listen long enough and a shared pattern emerges. Hodge and Valenti both reject the cliché that their generation is too distracted to care. They describe friends who trade links to full PDFs over Saturday coffee and colleagues who treat political promises like line items on a workback schedule. They are fully prepared to reward any leader who lays out a verifiable map and just asready to penalize rhetoric that skims the details. What they do not accept is the idea that clarity must be boring or inaccessible.

As they head to the polls, their final comment doubles as advice to every campaign chasing the youth vote: publish costs, fix dates, reveal the mechanism, and be ready for a generation that treats every promise like a spreadsheet waiting to be reconciled.