middle class.
He had slides. “This is what I call my Three-C Slide,” he said. “The first C is for ‘Middle Class’; the second C is for ‘Trust,’ and the third C is for ‘Growth.’” He was saying this in French, where the words actually do start with Cs.
On Duclos’s slide, inscrutable arrows connected boxes labelled Middle Class, Trust and Growth. They were labelled “Feed,” “Support,” “Inclusive,” “Engine” and so on. Well, I feel bad about saying “and so on,” because it sounds like I expect you to be able to extrapolate the labels on the other arrows. And believe me, I don’t expect you to be able to do that at all.
Later I spent some time puzzling over this slide and a transcript of Duclos’s remarks. As far as I can tell, the inclusion of “Trust” along with “Middle Class” and “Growth” is an attempt to capture elements of group psychology that aren’t easy to measure numerically. Canadians’ “confidence towards the future is enhanced when they feel that everyone has a real and fair chance to succeed over time as growth takes place,” he said.
This helps explain how the former chair of Laval economics could give a long presentation on the middle class without defining it. (“There are Canadians that feel that they belong to the middle class for perhaps reasons beyond their level of consumption and income.”) Or how he could show a slide labelled “Inflation-adjusted wages have stagnated since the 1970s,” while the curves on the slide showed wages dipped through the mid-90s and have recovered briskly since then.
Maybe there are Canadians that feel they are living in 1993 for perhaps reasons beyond their actual chronology.
But it doesn’t do to get too catty. Duclos had a point, and the government had a reason to book the press theatre for him. Recent elections have shown that a lot depends on how an electorate feels. Both the U.K.’s Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s election have something to do with voters’ belief they’ve been shafted.
If the Liberals don’t make the self-defined middle class feel good, they might be in trouble. Worse, so might all of us. Even though still another of Duclos’s slides showed that the share of total income controlled by Canada’s top 1 per cent has grown more slowly than in the U.K., Sweden and the U.S., the fact that it’s growing at all could drive resentment. So could the fact that costs for “what Canadians believe to be essentials,” as Duclos put it — higher education, child care, housing — have increased faster than the overall rate of inflation.
What are the feds going to do about it? For that matter, what have they done so far? Duclos was short on details.
https://www.thestar.com/news/canada...dle-class-seems-a-bit-muddled-paul-wells.html
He had slides. “This is what I call my Three-C Slide,” he said. “The first C is for ‘Middle Class’; the second C is for ‘Trust,’ and the third C is for ‘Growth.’” He was saying this in French, where the words actually do start with Cs.
On Duclos’s slide, inscrutable arrows connected boxes labelled Middle Class, Trust and Growth. They were labelled “Feed,” “Support,” “Inclusive,” “Engine” and so on. Well, I feel bad about saying “and so on,” because it sounds like I expect you to be able to extrapolate the labels on the other arrows. And believe me, I don’t expect you to be able to do that at all.
Later I spent some time puzzling over this slide and a transcript of Duclos’s remarks. As far as I can tell, the inclusion of “Trust” along with “Middle Class” and “Growth” is an attempt to capture elements of group psychology that aren’t easy to measure numerically. Canadians’ “confidence towards the future is enhanced when they feel that everyone has a real and fair chance to succeed over time as growth takes place,” he said.
This helps explain how the former chair of Laval economics could give a long presentation on the middle class without defining it. (“There are Canadians that feel that they belong to the middle class for perhaps reasons beyond their level of consumption and income.”) Or how he could show a slide labelled “Inflation-adjusted wages have stagnated since the 1970s,” while the curves on the slide showed wages dipped through the mid-90s and have recovered briskly since then.
Maybe there are Canadians that feel they are living in 1993 for perhaps reasons beyond their actual chronology.
But it doesn’t do to get too catty. Duclos had a point, and the government had a reason to book the press theatre for him. Recent elections have shown that a lot depends on how an electorate feels. Both the U.K.’s Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s election have something to do with voters’ belief they’ve been shafted.
If the Liberals don’t make the self-defined middle class feel good, they might be in trouble. Worse, so might all of us. Even though still another of Duclos’s slides showed that the share of total income controlled by Canada’s top 1 per cent has grown more slowly than in the U.K., Sweden and the U.S., the fact that it’s growing at all could drive resentment. So could the fact that costs for “what Canadians believe to be essentials,” as Duclos put it — higher education, child care, housing — have increased faster than the overall rate of inflation.
What are the feds going to do about it? For that matter, what have they done so far? Duclos was short on details.
https://www.thestar.com/news/canada...dle-class-seems-a-bit-muddled-paul-wells.html