Memo To Mark Carney: Incentivize Community

On How To Help The Youth

One of this site’s preoccupations in 2025 is and will continue to be the rightward trend of young voters, especially young men. It’s something that I care about as a progressive who would like to see my party win votes, but also I’m still fairly young and subjectively would rather win governmental power with a broad coalition than with the Boomers’ last stand. It’s a tricky problem, one that has no easy answer.

I have said before but have no problem saying again - a lot of this is our fault. The combination of a housing market that has utterly failed my generation and the generation coming up behind me and the willingness to indulge idiocy in the name of social justice has done a lot of damage. The casual way that we have talked about straight white men as the source of all evil, dismissing people on the basis of innate traits and not their character or their humanity, has done damage. It was true for at least a decade that if white people said about minorities what was routinely said about them they’d be cancelled immediately, and that was wrong.

It’s also the case that the progressive movement utterly defaults to minority status as a shield when it shouldn’t, as I’ve written before. The idea that minorities cannot be criticized in the manner white men can is offensive, and the fact that people feel the need to caveat legitimate criticism of people who happen to be minorities when the basis of the critique is about the work is frustrating. And many of the symbolic decisions - changing the anthem, instituting land acknowledgements, the entirety of corporate diversity trainings that everyone sleeps through - are useless at best and counterproductive at worst. A progressive movement that cannot redefine social liberalism away from dumb and bad virtue signaling to tolerance of minorities, support for a women’s right to choose, gay marriage, and general decency towards all is one that will fail.

The reason I am prefacing this column with all of this is it that if I don’t the argument I’m about to make will be ignored. I’ve been asking people about this for weeks now, and the thing that keeps coming back - other than the housing failures and the excesses of social liberalism in the last decade - is the lack of community. People don’t have a sense of community in person as much, so they’ve found it online. In theory that’s admirable, and in many ways it can be so - Lord knows the online friends I’ve made that I’d be utterly fucked without - but it’s not enough. We crave community, and we need to foster it. So, here’s a modest proposal - make finding that community cheaper.

The tweet length version of this pitch was a tax credit for gym memberships, but it’s not just gym memberships we should be making it easier for people to afford. Beer league hockey or softball league fees, golf memberships, anything physical that forces you out of the house should be cheaper, because it’s a societal good to have them. And if government cannot help us achieve some form of societal good, then we might as well give up.

The argument for it is twofold - encouraging these sorts of physical activities will have decent impacts on reducing bad health outcomes. It would be very good at reducing both bad outcomes and also health care costs in the medium term if we were collectively in better health. Some form of incentive for physical activity would help on that front.

But the much bigger benefit is the fight for mental health and against loneliness. We say all the time we care about mental health and we understand the importance of treating its causes, but politicians often talk about solving the crisis of declining mental health the way American politicians do about gun deaths - talking about how to solve the consequences of it (more funding for acute mental health care) and a barely less offensive platitudes about mental health being health. It’s our version of Thoughts And Prayers.

Is a tax credit a potentially imperfect means of achieving this end? Yes, of course. If we had any decent city governments in this country I’d love to see a strengthening of Rec Centre resources and more infrastructure for people. But I have zero faith that anybody will do anything, because well look at everything else our cities are fucking up. But this matters.

Will this suddenly make the Liberals win the young again? No, but that’s not really the point. If it moves them from 24% to 26% or whatever with the young, great. But at some point we have to worry what we’re doing if we abandon a generation - or even just a mini generation - of kids to the right. Not for our politics, not for our partisanship, but for our country. If we can signal, in whatever way, that we view those people who are suffering from isolation and a lack of community as important, it’s a start.

One of the complaints I’ve often heard about how we got here is that there would be targeted policies for various groups - there’s efforts to illuminate policies for women or gay people or whoever else, and those efforts are legitimate. But it’s fair to see a list of policies targeted at everybody else and be pissed you’re forgotten about. Whether it’s “correct” is irrelevant - just as it is understood to be unreasonable for minority communities to vote for the betterment of others with only a vague promise that eventually the benefits will flow to them, it’s not shocking that young, white voters feel the same way.

We need to lead with a sense of empathy for the future, a sense of optimism, and a carrot-based approach to meeting people where they are. The solutions to the very real problems of racism, homophobia, and misogyny run through positive actions, not through shaming all men or all white people. It’s a tonal shift we need, and we need to lead that acknowledgement with an admission we fucked it up.

It’s time to help people build community. I think it’s unreasonable to try and force people to build that community in a specific way, which is why the right approach is to help. If we can achieve a public health benefit at the same time, it’s worth it. But more than that, if this helps even one university student, it’s worth doing.

We need to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. The advantage of a well crafted boutique tax credit is it’s either more popular than expected, which means you got higher uptake of the good thing you’re trying to incentivize, or it fails to be an incentive and it’s relatively cheap. Either way we have to try.

If there are different, better ideas of how to incentivize the sort of community we need I’m all for it, because we need it. Because that’s the fundamental truth - we are dying slow deaths of isolation and loneliness, and we need to reverse it now, or we’re completely fucked.