(Action Canada’s response to Budget 2025)
People in Canada deserve a country that measures success in wellbeing, where care is infrastructure, health is prosperity, and people are the project.
Across Canada, life feels increasingly precarious. Families are stretched thin and overextended. Young people are anxious about their futures. Too many are carrying record levels of personal debt, just one rent increase or job loss away from losing everything they have worked hard to build.
This year, the federal government called Budget 2025 a “generational budget.” It seeks to tackle Canada’s long-standing productivity slowdown, boosting investment, innovation, and competitiveness to lift wages and sustain growth in a period of high costs and strained public systems. The real test is whether it also strengthens the foundation that holds everything together: people.
A truly generational budget builds more than structures and capital. It builds stability, health, and equality, the conditions that make every other form of progress possible.
True prosperity comes from people who are healthy, housed, and free to plan their futures. When health, safety, and equality are treated as core infrastructure, we build a country that lasts.
Budgets reveal what and who we value.
This year’s plan funds hospitals, transit, and energy projects, all vital to Canada’s future. But it misses the opportunity to secure the foundations that make those investments succeed: the systems that help people live stable, healthy, and dignified lives.
A real generational budget would recognize that prosperity and well-being are inseparable. Strong communities and strong economies grow together.
The Generation We Must Build For: Young People
A generational budget should start with the people who will inherit its choices. Young people across Canada are ready to build good lives, contribute to their communities, work for a livable planet, and shape a fairer future. But they need the tools, security, and opportunity to do it.
This budget makes real and necessary investments that reflect an understanding of how urgently Canada must rebuild its economic foundations. These are vital commitments, and they will matter. But equal investment must be made in what makes it possible for people to experience the benefit of a stronger economy.
This budget misses that chance. It leaves affordability challenges unresolved and fails to build on key programs like childcare and Pharmacare, while young people face impossible choices: paying out of pocket for birth control, struggling to find or afford daycare, and trying to build families in an economy that makes both care and reproductive choice harder to access. It also overlooks how investing in climate justice and migrant justice would directly improve quality of life for young people, by securing good jobs in a sustainable economy, ensuring safe and fair pathways to work, health care, and study, and protecting what makes a hopeful future possible.
Canada cannot call this a “generational budget” while undermining the generations who will live with its consequences.
A generational vision cannot sideline the very movements that are fighting for the planet and for safety and dignity across borders.
Solidarity among movements is how we build a future that lasts.
This budget speaks the language of protection, not possibility. It guards what is “ours” instead of growing what we share. True leadership would start from imagination — the courage to build a Canada where everyone can thrive and where our leadership on the world stage expands that vision.
The government’s plan to address immigration will leave many behind. Many already live with insecure status and limited access to care, even as they sustain Canada’s food supply, care systems, and construction sectors. These workers are the invisible foundation of the economy. They grow our food, care for our elders, and build the infrastructure we all depend on, yet this budget treats them as a problem to manage rather than people who deserve rights, stability, and a path to status. Protecting their rights is not only a matter of justice,it is essential to the resilience of the systems that feed, house, and care for us all.
These gaps are especially stark in sexual and reproductive health. Action Canada’s Abortion Emergency Fund has seen demand rise sharply, with nearly 70 percent of requests for financial support coming from under-insured and undocumented people struggling to access abortion, contraception, or pregnancy and labour care. Limiting pathways to status and coverage will deepen these inequities, leaving more people without the basic health care and reproductive autonomy they need to live and work with dignity. Reproductive justice cannot exist without migrant justice: when people are denied care because of their status, their health and their futures are held hostage by policy choices.
At the same time, by scrapping Canada’s planned emissions cap and weakening rules against greenwashing, the budget abandons commitments that are essential for a livable planet. Climate justice and reproductive justice are inseparable; both are about the right to live, work, and raise families in safe, sustainable communities.
When we fight for climate, reproductive, and migrant justice together, we are fighting for the same thing: a world where every person and every generation haswhat they need to thrive.
To get there, the government must commit to meaningful civic engagement, learning from experts, advocates, and communities across the country who already know what works.
Canada’s strength depends on drawing from this collective intelligence to build policies that match people’s realities.
Action Canada’s Call to Action
At a time when affordability is eroding, public systems are under strain, and inequality is deepening, this government’s historic investment in gender equality marks an important recognition: the work of care, equity, and inclusion is what keeps communities strong. It’s a powerful step toward valuing the labour and leadership that sustain Canada’s social fabric.
Action Canada calls on the federal government to deepen its investment in people’s wellbeing as the foundation of national strength.
A generational budget must:
- Fund the systems that sustain life and dignity: programs like universal health care, Pharmacare, and childcare aren’t costs, they’re investments that pay for themselves. When people can get care, return to work, and raise families without falling into debt, the economy grows stronger, labour shortages ease, and communities thrive.
- Redefine safety: true safety doesn’t come from expanding police budgets or surveillance. It comes from prevention: from housing, education, harm reduction, mental health supports, and sexual and reproductive agency. When people are free and have what they need, safety follows at home and abroad.
- Practice meaningful civic engagement: draw on the lived experience and expertise of youth, human rights experts, civil society, academia, advocates, and communities across Canada. A generational budget cannot be designed from the top down. It must be built with the people shaping Canada’s future and informed by those with deep knowledge of the systems it seeks to change.
- Protect the people whose work sustains this country, including migrant and undocumented workers: If Canada benefits from people’s labour, we have a moral responsibility to defend their labour rights, including for those who feed our families, care for our loved ones, and build our communities, through permanent status for all, fair wages, access to health care and social protections.
Building the Future Together
Partners and colleagues across sectors can help carry this message locally by showing that health, equality, inclusion, climate justice, and migrant rights areintegral to building strong, vibrant neighborhoods and communities.
The public can join this call by demanding a generational budget that builds both people and places, opportunity and security.
Supporters can strengthen this work by investing in equality as a national asset, a source of resilience for our country and shared prosperity for generations to come. Gender equality and social programs are the bedrock of a robust and resilient democracy and core infrastructure for a thriving Canada for generations to come.