Canada's Spreading Income Inequality

The gap, it appears, is not closing as it ideally should, in incomes between the poor and the wealthy. There is no much-vaunted trickle-down effect. As Canada's economy continues to gain strength, and the future still looks rosy, the rich are getting richer and the poor are still poor. Is this fair, I ask you? Mind, the government keeps taking an ever-greater sum of total earnings so that even when low wages increase incrementally, they still don't keep pace with the rise of taxation at every level.

That's sustainable if you've got a comfortable income, but not so much so when your income is a tad on the light side. Even for those well-off, we tend to live up to our incomes, whatever they may be, while those living in poverty tend to live up to and beyond their incomes, needing all the help they can get. The rise of food banks, the popularity of thrift shops (the latter being popular even among some segments of the middle class) a growing awareness of thrift count for some of this help. But there's something else about being poor, besides the social stigma.

It's a personal affront to one's expectations of life. There's also an inner defiance. It has been demonstrated time and again that the poor and the uneducated (not all those living on low incomes are without academic credentials) will opt name brand, while those with a comfortable disposable income see nothing amiss in selecting off-brand items, realizing that for the most part the constituents are the same, likely manufactured by the name-brand companies under contract to the no-name distributors.

Those without adequate financial means are resentful that they cannot have all the wonderful things so readily available to those with means. Everyone who isn't wealthy and who from time to time succumbs to the desire to acquire items that we feel will somehow enhance our lives knows what it feels like to realize that the cost of such items are often beyond our means. So you dream of an inheritance, or of winning a lottery, of being swept up in someone's wealthy embrace.

There's a certain strata of social and economic entitlement, in that those of modest incomes are constrained at a certain level of want, while those further up the chain with more disposable income can attain to a higher level of acquisition, still looking longingly at consumer items beyond their grasp, and on it goes, the income limiting the extent of potential acquisition, and everything becomes relative, and quite simply irrelevant.

You'd think, in a resource-wealthy, entrepreneurial country like Canada that wealth would gradually assume a more liberal spread, that greater numbers of Canadians would join the middle and upper-middle class. But then there is the ongoing closing of publicly-funded institutions to house the challenged in our society who it has always been assumed, were incapable of living unassisted. Suddenly, in the last decades, it has been decided they can, and will.

And many of them clog the downtown streets of our cities now as defiantly confused street people. There is the aboriginal and low-income progeny representing early school departures leaving them unprepared to take their place in a workforce of steady paying jobs, denying them the classic societal success story. Immigration with all the hurdles placed before newcomers to a strange society adds to the underclass of low income families.

The rise of the single-parent family, usually headed by a female traditionally earning less in a workforce still dominated by higher-paid males, struggling to provide for their families. There are regional industrial collapses, where factory jobs slip away to traditionally lower paying and un-unionized countries. Older workers suddenly face to face with their perceived unemployability.

Yet Andrew Heisz of Statistics Canada speaks about his new study on income inequality. One reason it is rising, according to Mr. Heisz, is that 'successful' people tend to couple with other successful people. The ensuing combination of two high-end incomes makes for a wealthy family. And this is a cause for rising inequality. Kind of superficial, isn't it?

Has it not always been that society levels out in that way, that like meets like, through friendly intervention or deliberate planning, or even inadvertent encounters in like social circles? After all, the traditionally wealthy move in circles that tend by their very nature to exclude those from the lower social (and economic classes) and it was ever thus.

People moving in literary, artistic, social, academic, professional, industrial- and inherited-wealth circles tend to cross socially with members of the opposite gender who also move in those same circles. Or have invitations to social events where these people will be met. Or have family members arrange introductions to others of their ilk. In the past, wealthy and/or titled families tended to arrange marriages that would result in an increase of familial wealth.

It's all of a piece. When you put the marriage of two professionals in the context of high-income double earnings for a family, a circumstance that quite simply did not obtain until late in the 20th century you have an altered demographic through the alteration of social mores.

Poverty in and of itself is measured on quite a different scale of observable and practical need and the attainability of the basic requirements to sustain life - and beyond, toward creature comfort. What is viewed as poverty in a country like Canada bears no resemblance whatever to the kind of life-destroying poverty that exists in developing countries.

Which does nothing at all to excuse the fact that so many Canadian children live in a state that can even be remotely deserving of that nomenclature. It is, quite simply, a national disgrace.