From left: Renée Merrifield, Shreya Saxena, moderator Nathan Skolski, Dr. Paul Kershaw and Mario Canseco at UBC Okanagan Debates on Wednesday at Kelowna Community Theatre. (Photo credit: Darren Hull)
Shreya Saxena wore red so the audience could see red.
She told a full house at Kelowna Community Theatre on Wednesday night during UBC Okanagan Debates that red isn’t just the colour of chaos.
Wildfires, warnings, emergencies, alarms, headlines, yes, but then she pointed out who else wears it—the firefighters who drive toward the smoke.
“I’m asking you to see red differently,” she said, “not as a warning light, but rather as a torch, the one that every generation lights, carries through its own crisis and passes on.”
At 22, Saxena is the youngest person to participate in UBC Okanagan Debates. A UBCO computer science alumni who came to Kelowna from Delhi in 2021, she now builds AI systems for legal aid organizations. It’s a job, she noted, that did not exist when she started university.
She and Troika founder and CEO Renée Merrifield argued the yes side of the evening’s question: are we leaving a better world for the next generation? Opposing them were Dr. Paul Kershaw of UBC’s School of Population and Public Health and Research Co. president Mario Canseco.
Better, measured
Shreya Saxena participates in UBC Okanagan Debates.
Saxena’s case was that better is something you can count rather than something you feel. Extreme poverty fell from nearly four in 10 people worldwide in 1990 to one in 10 today. Child deaths dropped by more than 60 per cent over the same period. A vaccine for a new virus arrived in 11 months.
“None of this was gifted,” she said. “All of it was fought for by people who looked at red and saw not a warning, but rather a calling.”
Merrifield made a version of the same argument and conceded ground her opponents expected her to defend.
“My generation has made housing more expensive than it should be,” said Merrifield, a former MLA for Kelowna-Mission with 27 years in construction and development. “But we’re fixing that too.”
Not yet
Dr. Paul Kershaw and Mario Canseco take part in UBC Okanagan Debates.
Dr. Kershaw, founder of Generation Squeeze, argued the country’s central fault line has shifted.
“The big divide in Canada is no longer between left and right, so much as it is a divide in hope between older and younger generations,” he said.
He put numbers to it. Fifty years ago, a typical young person needed about five years of full-time work to save a 20 per cent down payment on an average home. Today, it takes 13 years nationally, 15 in Kelowna and 23 in Metro Vancouver.
“When one’s ability to build a good life increasingly depends on what one’s family already owns, Canada’s never-perfect meritocracy increasingly edges toward a landed aristocracy,” Kershaw said.
Canseco brought two decades of polling to the same side. In 2006, he said, Canadians aged 18 to 34 named the environment as their leading concern above everything else.
Today it sits in the low single digits for that group, while housing and the economy together occupy roughly two-thirds of responses.
“You have a group that really needs to be listened to, that’s not asking for more than what their parents have,” Canseco said. “They just want to continue to feel that there is light at the end of the tunnel.”
Focus on housing
Troika founder and CEO Renée Merrifield speaks during UBC Okanagan Debates.
Housing was the subject on which all four agreed something is broken. The disagreement was about direction, not diagnosis.
It also produced the evening’s sharpest moment, when Kershaw closed a segment on intergenerational tension by reaching for his opponent’s own image.
“It is code red, those alarm signs, notwithstanding that red can also be a torch,” he said, “so let’s pick up that torch.”
Merrifield closed by asking the audience to choose any year in the past worth handing down instead of this one, and then to send a daughter back to live in it. “I’ve been asking people this question for months,” she said, “and not one person has actually taken the trade.”
Kershaw’s answer was narrower.
“Not yet,” he said. “We are not yet building a better Canada for younger generations, but we still can and we must.”
Saxena had the first word of the night and, in effect, the last.
“This was never your generation against mine,” she said. “It is all of us against the problems.”
About the series
The next debate, hosted by UBC Vancouver, takes up Aboriginal title and private ownership on November 16 at UBC Robson Square.
