Being in your twenties is both exhilarating and stressful. We finish our studies, we start our career, we look for a roof and we think about the future… But it’s not easy when the cost of living explodes, the price of houses flies away and the climate is unsettled. , like right now. Was it easier to be the same age in the early 1980s? Viewpoints of today’s young people and those of yesterday on the torments of early adulthood, when economic gloom strikes. Second text in a series of five.
Odile Diotte had already been living in an apartment for three years when she moved last summer from Sherbrooke to Montreal to undertake professional training in urban horticulture. “It’s getting worse and worse. I’m getting tighter and tighter on my grocery budget, and the rents are super expensive. If I didn’t have the help of my parents, I don’t think I would be able to do it,” says the young woman, who has just turned 21 and who also works part-time in an Archambault store.
Sol’Abraham Castaneda Ouellet, 23 and a student, has also been struggling to make ends meet lately because of inflation. The bills are piling up, he notes. “We have so many! We must have about twenty or thirty monthly payments. And the fact that these invoices are digital makes it all dematerialized, so we leave them lying around and it catches up with us. It represents management and it causes stress. »
I’m getting tighter and tighter on my grocery budget, and the rents are super expensive. If I didn’t have the help of my parents, I don’t think I would be able to do this.
Odile Diotte suspects that the finances of young adults still in school, like her, have probably always been difficult, but she believes that they were just as difficult in the early 1980s. always had to eat Kraft Dinner, but still! I’m no expert in economics, but I have the impression that it should have been less hard for our parents’ generation. »
Inflation higher than today
While it is true that the cost of living has climbed at a breakneck pace since the pandemic to reach levels not seen in several decades, its growth is however far from comparing to that which was observed in the early 1980s — a period also marked by very high inflation.
In December 1981, the annual variation in consumer prices exceeded 13% in Quebec, compared to 8% at the peak of June this year.
Ann-Marie Gagné, originally from Victoriaville and young in her twenties at the time, remembers her youth as a rather difficult period. “Before speaking to you, I must tell you that I did a little survey among some of my friends, so that we could tell each other about our memories of our twenties,” she says straight away.
“The common denominator in what my friends told me and what I also felt was that there was a very, very great financial insecurity, she summarizes. It probably hasn’t changed much. I cannot comment on what young people are going through today, but I have the impression that it is not easier today. »
But young people seem to be affording a car earlier than in her day, she believes. “At least, if I trust my six nephews and nieces, they all had their own car before they were 18,” she observes. And young people — “Montrealers, at least” — seem to go out more often: “Never in our time could we have thought of spending so much on restaurants! »
Meet basic needs
In 1981, slightly more than half (52%) of the total household budget went to essential expenses such as housing (20%), food (17%) and transport (15%). The share of discretionary spending would increase slightly thereafter, with housing (22%), food (11%) and transportation (14%) accounting for just 47% of household budgets in 2021, the last full year. for which data is available.
Of course, that was before consumer prices soared even more this year, especially in grocery stores, observes Eve-Lyne Couturier, researcher at the Institute for Socioeconomic Research and Information (IRIS), who compiled these statistics.
It also ignores the fact that the contents of the grocery basket have changed over time and that households are probably consuming less meat and more vegetables than, for example, 40 years ago, continues- she.
And then, if we accept that health, education, clothing and communication costs are also essential expenses, we see that households’ room for maneuver has not really changed since the beginning of the 1990s. 1980, some form of essential expenditure amounting to about 60% of their total budget at both times.
Another way to compare the purchasing power of Quebecers between the two periods is to look at the evolution of their average weekly salary. This figure had been steadily increasing for a long time when it reached $1023 per week in 2022 dollars in 1977. Then the trend reversed. In 1982, the average weekly wage had thus fallen to $986, but had not yet finished its slide, since it fell to just under $934 in 2001, notably under the effect of inflation , successive economic crises and labor market practices.
Fortunately, the situation took another turn thereafter, with the real weekly wage beginning a gradual recovery to a new high of $1,149 in 2020, after which the average will dip a little, under the effect of the inflation. Today, at $1,115 a week, the average wage is 13% higher than it was 40 years ago.
This increase in the real wage is the result of an economy that is richer and more productive thanks to the major educational reforms at the turn of the 1970s, explains Pierre Fortin, economist emeritus at the Université du Québec à Montréal. But it is also, to a large extent, a reflection of the “stratospheric” progress made by women in the labor market, thanks in particular to the establishment of the public network of daycare services and other family policies in the second half of the 1990s.
Nevertheless, despite the progress made in recent decades, inflation has weighed on Quebecers’ purchasing power in recent months. And many suffer, especially young people. “Everything is expensive. Budgets are already super tight. So I can’t even imagine what it would be like if I bought a property,” laments Sol’Abraham.
To be continued, in the third part of our series: Finding a home for yourself