When you think about the financial prospects of young Canadians, it tends to be framed as a bleak picture - housing unaffordability, cost-of-living pressures, elevated youth unemployment, the narrative of AI displacing entry-level jobs. A recent Bank of Canada survey backs up the mood: Canadians of all ages rated their financial well-being as worse than a year prior in every quarter of 2025. But bleakness masks the fact that there’s more to the story, and it’s not all doom and gloom.

Today’s Twenty-Four digs into what’s actually driving young Canadians’ wealth-building decisions.

Stocking up

I was recently posed the question: Are young Canadians turning to financial assets like stocks rather than real estate to build wealth? My gut said yes, but a hunch wasn’t enough, so I turned to Statistics Canada’s Household Economic Accounts for a granular breakdown of Canadian household wealth.

The findings were striking. Households where the major income earner is under 35 saw their average net worth grow the fastest of any age group in Q3 2025 at 7.4% year-over-year (y/y) compared to 5.5% for all age groups. The engine of this growth was financial assets, which grew by 13.2% for the youngest households, also outpacing the average of 9.6% across all age groups. Moreover, the share of financial assets as a proportion of total wealth is growing faster for under-35s than any other cohort.

If you were looking for more data to establish this trend, take the CFA Institute’s 2023 study: approximately 74% of Canadians aged 18-25 report owning at least one investment and invest a median of $9,000—well above any country in the study, including our southern neighbours.

Also found in the study is a generational shift in the priorities of young Canadians. The study reports that the top financial goals for Canadian Gen Z investors are: 1) being able to pay monthly bills (55%); and 2) having enough money to travel/vacation (55%).

What about housing?

On the real estate side, Q3 2025 was the first quarter since 2022 in which the youngest households recorded a y/y increase in mortgage debt—and even then, at just 1.9%, it was the lowest of any age group. That multi-year retreat tracked with the Bank of Canada’s rate-hiking cycle: from near-zero in early 2022 to 5.0% by mid-2023, compressing affordability. Meanwhile, the national benchmark composite home price peaked at around $827,600 in February 2022 before pulling back to roughly $665,000 today—still about 28% above pre-pandemic levels.

For young Canadians watching those numbers, the math simply didn’t work, and the Bank of Canada’s Survey of Consumer Expectations shows it. The share of renters planning to buy a home in the next 12 months fell from nearly 20% in Q4 2024 to just 14.5% by Q4 2025.

Not abandoning ownership, but adapting

It would be a mistake to read this shift as giving up on homeownership. When the door to real estate seemingly closed, the door to equities was flung wide open. For those who walked through that door, the timing has been rewarding.

The S&P/TSX Composite index has returned approximately 88% on a total return basis (~13% on an annualized basis) over the past five years. Young Canadians today are flipping the typical wealth-building sequence, and so far, the market has rewarded them for it.

What’s been playing out in Alberta?

Albertan youth are a part of this generational shift, but unlike the rest of the country, Alberta has been a destination of choice for younger Canadians priced out of more expensive provinces as we have recently shown. In 2023, the province posted a net interprovincial gain that was the largest on record since at least 1972, when the current data series began, and has led the country in interprovincial migration since. People aged 25 to 29 have been the single largest cohort of arrivals, followed closely by those aged 30 to 34.

The province was simultaneously absorbing record international migration, and the combined population surge outpaced what the housing stock and labour market could absorb.

Meanwhile, rents and home prices were pushed up by the supply gap, delivering some of the same affordability pressures young Albertans had moved to escape. Despite this, affordability metrics like housing costs to income are holding up better than in provinces like Ontario and B.C..

The Alberta story, in short, is one of a province that absorbed a generational wave of young, ambitious Canadians looking for a more accessible on-ramp to stability—and is now working through the growing pains that came with it. We are in a period of adjustment for now, but it’s an advantage in the long-term to have a large pool of young, skilled workers.

It seems that the “bleak picture” of the future is being redrawn by young Canadians who have stopped anticipating that the traditional financial playbook will work for them. Instead, they’re pivoting towards a more liquid definition of security, swapping immediate home ownership goals for equity growth and geographic mobility.

Answer to the previous trivia question: The next leap year is 2028.

Today’s trivia question: When did the Alberta Stock Exchange close?