Friday, January 19, 2007
Rich - poor gap becomes a chasm
Churning out cogent new studies on poverty wouldn't work, the research team decided. Canadians already knew how bad the problem was.
Making the case for fair wages, affordable housing, decent welfare rates and universal child care wouldn't turn the tide, they agreed. Dozens of advocacy groups were doing that with negligible success.
What was needed was a catalyst to turn awareness into action.
It was the summer of 2006. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives had just received a generous donation to wake people up to the alarming rise of inequality in Canada.
The three lead researchers – Armine Yalnizyan, Hugh Mackenzie and Trish Hennessy – were brainstorming about how to get the message out, how to make it relevant to Canadians and how to get governments to move.
"We had to take it beyond poverty," Yalnizyan recalled. "We had to give everybody a stake in the issue.
"We had to show what's happening to us as a society. We had to get people talking about how disconnected the winners have become from the rest of us. This is the central economic and social issue of our day."
On Nov. 20, the centre launched its "Growing Gap" project. Its aim is to convert people's unease about the concentration of wealth into an active conviction that something is wrong when the economy is doing better than most of the population; when families are working longer and harder to stay in the same place; and when governments sanction this arrangement.
To kick off the initiative, the think-tank sent out pollsters to find out how Canadians are doing after a decade of strong economic growth. After interviewing 2,021 randomly selected adults, the pollsters came back with sobering – but not surprising – news:
- Fifty-one per cent said their standard of living had either dropped or stayed the same.
- Forty-nine per cent said they were one or two missed paycheques away from being poor.
- Sixty-five per cent said the benefits of economic growth had gone to the richest Canadians.
- Seventy-six per cent said the gap between rich and poor had widened.
"What's clear in this poll is that Canadians are worried about their personal future and equally worried about the direction their country might be going," the think-tank said.
Next, it backed up these perceptions with facts. It released a series of statistical sketches of inequality.
The research team was hampered by a scarcity of up-to-date figures (the census, the best source of information on wealth and income, is now 6 years old), but sifted through earnings reports, employment numbers, housing data, consumer debt, economic trends and the 2001 census.
What emerged was a picture of widening disparity. The top 20 per cent of families held 75 per cent of the nation's wealth and were rapidly accumulating more. The bottom 20 per cent had no net wealth (their debts exceeded their assets) and were sinking deeper into poverty. The middle 60 per cent were struggling to hold their ground.
"Economic insecurity is now a fact of life for most workers, regardless of where they fit into the income spectrum," the think-tank pointed out.
Shortly before Christmas, the research team issued a year-end review suggesting – hopefully rather than confidently – that the growing gap would be the "sleeper issue" of 2007.
"This is a problem looking for political leadership. Will 2007 be the year our political leaders take it on?"
To usher in the New Year, Mackenzie did a bit of number crunching and came up with an attention-grabbing comparison.
He showed that by 9:46 a.m. on Jan. 2, the country's 100 highest paid chief corporate executives would make $38,010 – the same amount the average Canadian worker could expect to earn in the entire year.
In the coming months, the think-tank will explore what happens to a society when its privileged minority gets so far ahead of the rest of the population that there is no shared experience to draw on, no common set of goals and no basis for democratic dialogue.
The debate has already begun in Toronto, partly because of an alarming spike in gun violence in the summer of 2005 and partly because of the leadership of Frances Lankin, president of the United Way. She has been warning for three years that Toronto is developing enclaves of extreme poverty, social tension and urban decay.
The timing of the Growing Gap project could be auspicious. Neo-conservatism seems to be on the wane. Canadians are rethinking the trade-off between big tax cuts and threadbare social safety nets.
On the other hand, fate could play a cruel trick. Just as the initiative takes hold, it could be swamped by the environmental wave coming down the pike.
Yalnizyan and her colleagues are ready for either scenario.
They'll fight as long and hard as it takes to convince Canadians that a strong society is one in which everybody moves ahead together.
(More information is available at www.growinggap.ca).
