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Yesterday morning, my dad sent me the above chart from Apollo and said, "frightening, do you have one for Canada?" In 2010, the median age (not mean) of all US homebuyers was 39 years old. Today, it is 59 years old. And it has jumped significantly since the start of the pandemic.
The obvious explanation, and long-term trend line, is that housing continues to become more expensive relative to incomes, so it is taking longer for people to save up and afford to buy.
But "first-time buyers waiting longer" can't be the only reason, because homeownership is typically a life-cycle behavior. If you're in your 60s and you still haven't made the decision to buy a home, the probability is low that you will then become a first-time buyer.
As of this month, the share of first-time homebuyers in the US dropped to a record low of 21% and the median age was 40. What this suggests is that the above chart must also be the result of a compositional change in buyers.
Wealthy older people must be buying vacation homes, retirement homes, and/or relocating (maybe for better weather and maybe for lower taxes). Combine this with fewer first-time buyers (and I'm sure some other factors), and you get the above chart.
So what about Canada?
I couldn't find an exact equivalent chart, but I did find this Bank of Canada note from 2022.
As of 2021, first-time buyers still accounted for roughly half of all home purchases in Canada. The rest were repeat buyers, and the smallest percentage were investors, which includes people buying a property as an investment or buying a property to live in while at the same time converting an existing residence into an investment property.
The median age for a first-time buyer was 36 years and the average age for all other buyers was 50 years. If we assume that this split is roughly 50/50, based on the above chart, then we get to an average homebuyer age somewhere around 43 years old. Intuitively, this seems at least directionally right.
(Note, this data is from 2021, which misses most of the pandemic period.)
Canada has a much higher percentage of first-time buyers driving the market. Canada does not have the same wealth inequality as the US. The 55+ age group in the US owns somewhere around 71% of all housing wealth and 69% of all stocks/equity funds.
And, Canadians tend to be less mobile than the US population within the country. Canada doesn't have warm, low-tax provinces attracting older rich people (though I would support us having one or two somehow).
In summary: You're right, dad, it is a frightening trend line.
Cover photo by Valeriia Neganova on Unsplash
The silver lining to the US starting a trade war with Canada and regularly threatening annexation is that it has forced this country out of complacency. Indeed, I'm hard pressed to think of a time, at least in my lifetime, when patriotism and nationalism has united so much of Canada.
According to a recent survey by Angus Reid, the percentage of Canadians expressing a "deep emotional attachment" to the country jumped from 49% in December 2024 to 59% in February 2025. And as further evidence of just how unifying this moment in time is, the province with the biggest increase in attachment to country was Québec.
What it means to be a Canadian is sometimes lazily defined according to who or what we are not. But this precarious moment in time is seemingly reminding us who we are. Of course, it also begs the questions: Where do we want to go from here? And do we have the leadership to take us there?
Let's start by looking at some, but of course not all, of the things that we have going for us as a country:
Second-largest country in the world by land mass.
World's longest coastline, with access to both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, and increasingly the Arctic Ocean.
Third-largest proven oil reserves in the world (estimated at close to 300 billion barrels), behind Saudi Arabia.
World's largest producer and exporter of potash (which is a key component in fertilizers).
Energy independent and broadly rich in resources (see below diagram).
A fifth of the planet's surface freshwater.
Here's a timely article talking about the difference between 7-Eleven stores in North America versus Japan, and why the Canadian company, Alimentation Couche-Tard, wants to buy the Japanese company for $47 billion:
So far, owner Seven & i Holdings Co. hasn’t been able to replicate that success at its 13,000 US and Canadian stores, better known for their constantly rolling hot dogs and 30-ounce soft drinks than their fresh food or their ability to inspire effusive posts from social media influencers. The Tokyo-based company, which has been closing underperforming North American stores faster than it’s been opening new ones, is now the target of a $47 billion takeover bid by a Canadian rival that says it can do a better job translating that overseas magic to the market.
I have no idea if this will happen, but Couche-Tard has been trying to buy the company since 2005. If successful, this will create the largest convenience store operator in the world. It will also go down as one of the largest foreign takeovers in Japan. (On a related note, Couche-Tard tried to buy French grocery chain Carrefour SA in 2021, but that was blocked by the French Finance Minister.)
What is clear, though, is that there's an obvious user-experience gap between the stores in Japan and the stores in Canada and the US. As we talked about here, convenience stores in Japan serve solid food and act very much as community hubs. I didn't know this until right now, but in Japan, people also use these stores to do things like send parcels and pay utility bills, and top chefs regularly judge the food.
However, this is based on a supply-chain network that is, at least right now,
Multi-cultural country — over 20% of Canadians are foreign-born.
Robust immigration system that attracts top talent from around the world.
Highly-educated workforce with some of the world's best universities — over 60% of Canadian adults have a post-secondary education which is one of the highest rates globally.
Average life expectancy of 82.3 years (2023 data), which is about 5 years higher than that of the US.
Leader in AI, quantum computing, green tech, and space robotics — Canada produces more AI research papers per capita than almost any other country and the Stanford AI Index (2023) ranked Canada 4th behind only the US, China, and the UK.
Here's some of our bounty (via the Financial Times):
And yet, we are not a global superpower.
Worse, we are lagging behind our G7 peers in GDP growth, we are plagued by declining productivity levels, we are not investing enough in new business creation and entrepreneurship, and we have one of the worst affordable housing shortages in the developed world, among other things. We have been complacent for far too long, and a big part of this is because we have, or at least had, the world's largest economy next door demanding our goods.
As of 2024, 61% of all imported oil to the US came from Canada. And US refineries are specifically setup to refine our crude and viscous varietal. This is good for them. They buy our goopy oil at a discount, refine it, and then sell it for a profit. But now the US is clearly saying there's nothing they need or want from Canada. They've also demonstrated through their actions that, under the current administration, they can no longer be trusted as an ally and trading partner. So it behooves us to evolve. It behooves us to take matters into our own hands.
Here are some ideas:
Firstly, Canada should become a republic. For me, this is less about the monarchy being outdated (though it is) and more about the fact that a sovereign superpower like Canada should have its own head of state, and not a foreign King.
Canada needs to increase defense spending and exert much stronger sovereignty over its Arctic lands. For fiscal year 2024-2025, defense spending is projected to reach 1.37% of GDP. This obviously falls short of NATO's 2% target.
Remove red tape and unleash the Canadian economy. Last year, Canada exported more to the US than between its own provinces and territories. Huh? By some estimates, our economy could grow by up to $5,100 per capita simply by eliminating internal trade barriers.
Barriers also need to be removed from the delivery of new housing. Canadians have been over-indexing on housing because of eroding affordability. Our current market environment is an ideal time for market reforms. Here's just one recent post that offers a few concrete suggestions for how to do this.
Grow the Canadian population to 100 million people by 2100. Obviously there are two main ways to do this: We can help Canadians have more babies (more affordable housing certainly assists with this) and we can continue to attract the smartest and most ambitious people from around the world. As of 2022, Canada's fertility rate sat at 1.33, which is below the OECD average of 1.5 births per woman. (The above population target is the focus of a charitable organization called the "Century Initiative.")
Create a sovereign wealth fund akin to what Norway did. Today, Norway has the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world (based on assets under management) and it translates to over US$325,000 per Norwegian citizen and one of the highest GDPs per capita on the planet. Canada also has abundant natural resources as we know. The revenues generated from these resources should (1) accrue to the Canadian population and future generations and (2) steer the global economy toward a more sustainable future.
Invest heavily in new infrastructure. This includes everything from high-speed rail to oil pipelines. In 2020, Canada exported 82% of the crude oil it produced, with most of it going to the US via pipeline from western provinces. If the US no longer wants this, then we ought to find some new customers.
At the same time, we cannot let our abundant natural resources become a curse (see "the paradox of plenty"). We need to be a leader in the new economy. As I've written about before, I find it shocking, for example, that Canada is not stepping up more when it comes to new technologies like crypto. Vitalik Buterin, who is one of the founders of Ethereum and its most prominent figurehead, grew up in Toronto. He went to the University of Waterloo. We should be leveraging this homegrown talent to become a capital of crypto. And this is just one specific example.
Do everything we can to spur more innovation, more risk-taking, and more private investment. It's one thing to have great Universities that publish a lot of research, but ultimately we need to turn this into thriving companies that employ Canadians and generate wealth for Canadians. Here's a post I published in 2023 called, "Canada has an existential productivity problem."
This is obviously not a comprehensive list of all the things that Canada should be doing as a country. And invariably, some or many of you will disagree with some or most of what I have put forward here. But hopefully we can all agree that now, more than ever, we need a strong Canada. We need to start thinking of ourselves as an emerging global superpower.
Cover photo by Juan Rojas on Unsplash
In Japan, which is much smaller, the chain relies on a robust supplier network, where inventory and food preparation take place at more than 150 factories churning out breakfast, lunch and dinner. Product lineups and displays change quickly based on consumer tastes, with each store responsible for analyzing the sales of every product and adjusting orders to reduce waste and control inventory. It’s a management method known as tanpin kanri, which was even taken up as a Harvard Business School case study. “Japan’s convenience stores’ food preparation central kitchens and logistics infrastructure would be more challenging to establish and operate efficiently over vast areas in the US,” Boston says.
There appears to be universal consensus that the key to unlocking additional value is more fresh food and overall better offerings. And presumably Couche-Tard is of the opinion that it will be a better operator and that it can figure out whatever supply chain is needed. Time will tell. But I find it interesting that all of this is arguably about creating a kind of "local corner store" that better serves people's needs.
Cities used to have these in spades. But then we zoned them away, scaled everything up, and optimized around rolling hot dog cookers and big gulps. So in many ways, this story is about a return to fundamentals. It's about figuring out a way to serve quality products to local neighborhoods, in a globalized world. That sounds simple enough, but it's clearly not easy.
Cover photo by Lisanto 李奕良 on Unsplash
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