When contemplating the scale of the Tories’ expected drubbing in the coming general election, some commentators reach for the example of Canada’s Progressive Conservatives. The 1993 federal election saw the governing centre-right party, which had been in power since 1984, lose all but two of its seats in the House of Commons. It never recovered and became defunct within a decade. The comparison is particularly tempting given one of the factors behind the Progressive Conservatives’ demise was the emergence of a rival right-wing party called Reform.

If the fate of the Progressive Conservatives is an object lesson in how even major political parties can die when they lose their way, their successors, the Conservative Party of Canada, offer a more positive example to their British counterparts. Out of power since 2015, and riven by internal divisions, the Canadian Tories finally did something smart in 2022: they made Pierre Poilievre their leader. Where British Conservative politicians pander to baby boomers and Nimbys, taxing the young to pay for triple-locked pensions and opposing planning permission to placate existing homeowners, 44-year-old Poilievre recognises that this is a dead end both for Canada and the Conservative Party. He has declared war on Nimbys and transformed the Tories into the party that promises to make home ownership an achievable dream for young Canadians.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: idiot. Young people vote for the left, so he’s on a hiding to nothing. Au contraire. The latest polling, from Abacus, gives the Tories a 17-point lead over Justin Trudeau’s Liberals, but while that advantage is only 14 points among voters aged 60 and older, it is 15 points among 18-to-29 year olds and 20 among those between 30 and 44. You read that right: the Canadian Liberals less popular with millennials and Gen-Z than with baby boomers. Compare this to the latest Redfield and Wilton poll of UK voting intentions. With a 20-point lead over the Tories among all voters, Labour enjoys a 22-point lead among 35 to 44 year olds, a 26-point lead among 25 to 34 year olds, and a 42-point lead among 18 to 24 year olds. Of course, the British Tories are going to be behind because they have been in office for 14 years and are on the brink of being chucked out, but it is notable how uninterested the party appears to be in appealing to younger voters. They have thrown in their lot with the boomers and have no strategy for a post-boomer electorate.

While rightwards shifts among younger voters on the continent can be chalked up to some European millennials and Gen-Z holding less progressive views on race, immigration and national identity than their parents and grandparents, this doesn’t seem to be a factor in Canada. Younger Canadians express progressive views on ‘culture war’ issues like trigger warnings, transgender children and the legacy of colonialism. By rights, they should be solidly behind Trudeau and his progressive identitarian agenda. But they are not because identity politics is not their priority. The cost of living, housing availability and health care are their priorities. Home ownership in particular has dropped among 25- to 29-year-olds, 44 per cent of whom owned a house in 2011 but which had receded to 36.5 per cent by 2021. For comparison, among 45- to 49-year-olds the ownership rate is 71 per cent. According to the National Bank of Canada’s 2023 housing affordability estimates, it now takes 25 years for people on median income to save the downpayment for a mortgage in Toronto.

Poilievre’s answer to this is the Building Homes, Not Bureaucracy Act, a terrible name for legislation that could transform young Canadians’ opportunities to own their own house. The law would require big cities to build 15 per cent more homes year on year or lose a percentage of federal funding. Cities that exceed this target would be eligible for a bonus payment. Transit and infrastructure funding would be linked to housebuilding, with money withheld until sufficient housing is constructed around the transportation estate. Canadians would be given the right to file ‘complaints about Nimbyism’ with the federal government and municipalities would face a ‘Nimby penalty’ when complaints were upheld. Housing developments intended for below-market rental would be exempted from the federal goods and services tax. Federal land and 15 per cent of government-owned buildings would be made available for homebuilding.

This kind of federal interference in municipal government, to say nothing of the market, is not natural conservative territory but it reflects the urgency of the housing problem. In Noel Skelton’s vision for a ‘property-owning democracy’, home ownership was ‘an essential vehicle for the moral and economic progress of the individual’ and the striving for it was ‘largely responsible for the instinctive sympathy between the mass of the people and conservatism’. Robert Menzies considered the home ‘the foundation of sanity and sobriety’ and ‘the indispensable condition of continuity’. Pierre Poilievre is in the Skelton-Menzies tradition. That tradition can make a stronger claim to the principles of conservatism than the British Conservative party in its present incarnation. That party has lost all interest in expanding property ownership and so those who harbour that most conservative of ambitions have lost all interest in the Conservative party.