Policy professor, pollster say hard work stopped paying off, they have the data to prove it. Dr. Paul Kershaw: “The data really are beyond contestation. Hard work doesn’t pay off for a young adult today.”

Dr. Paul Kershaw isn’t worried about losing.

“This is going to be an easy debate for me to win,” he says. “The data really are beyond contestation. Hard work doesn’t pay off for a young adult today.”

Dr. Kershaw is teamed with Research Co. president Mario Canseco for UBC Okanagan Debates on September 16 at Kelowna Community Theatre. They’ll be arguing “no” to the question: Are we leaving a better world for the next generation?

Kershaw has spent 20 years building his arguments.

He’s an associate professor at UBC’s School of Population and Public Health and founded Generation Squeeze, a think tank dedicated to what he calls “generational fairness.”

His certainty traces back to his family, and to the Okanagan itself. He grew up in Vernon before eventually landing at UBC. His paternal grandmother lived to nearly 103, and he was her primary caregiver into his 40s. She was born in 1915, before women were legally recognized as persons in Canada.

“She was like my time-travelling device,” Dr. Kershaw says.

His maternal grandfather arrived from Ireland with nothing.

“It wasn’t that long until he owned his own insurance company and had a very successful life,” Dr. Kershaw says. “But I can say with certainty that the kind of hard work my grandfather put in wouldn’t pay off in nearly the same way today.”

That gap between what hard work once bought and what it buys now is the spine of his argument. And the reform he keeps returning to.

Dr. Kershaw wants to ask the wealthiest 20 per cent of retirees to accept a smaller Old Age Security benefit, which would free up billions to lift seniors out of poverty, cut rents for young people and expand student grants.

“What grandparent can sit by and say, ‘you’re asking my kids and grandchildren to tighten their belts when you’re sending me a subsidy that helps me travel to Japan?’” he says.

He’s careful, though, to frame it as arithmetic, not resentment.

“It’s not a generation that’s the villain in the story,” he says. “The villain in the story is governments in decades past that saw the population aging and chose not to plan for it.”

Canseco reaches a similar conclusion from a different discipline. As president of the polling firm Research Co., he’s spent more than two decades asking Canadians what they think.

Housing has overtaken the environment as the top concern among Canadians aged 18 to 34, a shift Canseco doesn’t read as apathy. “It’s not that they don’t care,” he says. “Right now, they’re more worried about where they’re going to live.”

His polling also shows voter turnout tracking more closely with property ownership than with age, which he argues leaves city councils hearing from an increasingly narrow slice of residents.

Canseco’s own path ran through Tampico and Mexico City, where his father was elected to Mexico’s Senate, before landing in Vancouver in 2000 for a master’s in journalism at UBC.

Dr. Kershaw and Canseco will face Troika Developments CEO Renee Merrifield and UBCO alumna Shreya Saxena, who are arguing the “yes” side of the debate.

Despite his confidence, Dr. Kershaw says the case isn’t about winning an argument on stage, but about what happens after.

“I have intergenerational love working on my side,” he says. “That’s a beautiful starting point for making change.”

UBC Okanagan Debates is Wednesday, September 16, 6:30 to 8 p.m., at Kelowna Community Theatre.