William Watson: ‘One fogey, one vote’ is seniors’ hill to die on

A voter walks away from an advanced polling station located at Campbell Collegiate before the Canadian Federal Election on Monday, April 21, 2025 in Regina. Photo by KAYLE NEIS/Regina Leader-Post

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I wrote last week about how, as they get older, Conservative party voters supposedly are becoming more fond of government, especially its pensions and health care. This has persuaded some strategists that the party needs to reconsider its antipathy to big government — though recent Conservative governments haven’t actually been very anti-government. 

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The argument for succumbing to this supposed switch to socialist sentiment is purely expedient: if Conservatives don’t give older Canadians what they want, older Canadians won’t vote Conservative and the Tories will never see power. 

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There is another way around the growing socialism of older folk, however: reduce their political power. Seniors vote more than young people do and, in the U.S., at least, give more money to political parties. Because money and votes talk, seniors get the policies they want — and would continue to even if there were term or age limits for politicians, so there wouldn’t be six senators in their eighties, one in his nineties, and an 80-year-old president (though the president does have the verbal energy of someone half his age, not to mention emotional stability way younger than that). 

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According to Yale law professor Samuel Moyn’s new book — “Gerontocracy in America: How the Old are Hoarding Power and Wealth — and What to Do About It” — elder power is a big problem in the U.S. As Moyn told an interviewer, “I don’t think we can choose between taking oligarchy seriously and taking age seriously because the oligarchy is old … Oligarchy and patriarchy go together and always have. Gerontocracy is a new phenomenon, but it explains the kind of oligarchy we have, which is older.” 

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Oligarchy. Patriarchy. You get a taste of where he’s coming from. 

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“First, we (ahem) all the lawyers,” Shakespeare had a character say. Well, he didn’t actually say “ahem.” It was a more direct and brutal word that modern editorial standards say we can’t use in relation to a class of living persons. But if Shakespeare were alive today, he’d probably amend his advice to “First, we (ahem) all the law profs.” Law professors seem to be the source of many of today’s crazier policies. 

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One of Moyn’s proposals — which he doesn’t necessarily endorse but says he merely raises in toting up all the things you might do — is to reduce seniors’ voting power directly by “correlating our votes with our stake in the election … which is greater when you have a longer time to live under the policies being chosen.” For instance, as he argues, older folks care less about climate change than young people because they won’t actually live to experience its consequences. That’s a statement about averages, of course. Yes, David Suzuki is 90 and he still seems to care a lot about climate change — though not so much about the living standards his descendants will enjoy, if “enjoy” is the right word for life in the austere Suzukian future.