interpellate

On May 1st Statistics Canada will release yet another analysis of the 2006 Census data, this one drawing firm connections between the increasing income disparity in this country, the devaluation of educated and immigrant workers in the labor market and the outrageous costs of housing in this country.

The final 2006 census data will portray the richest 5 per cent of Canadians as dramatically accumulating more wealth, the incomes of most residents showing perhaps the greatest stagnancy in the developed world and the nation’s poorest falling further and further behind.

Immigrants and Canada’s native-born youngest male adults will be identified as the prime victims of a 25-year trend in widening income inequality – an inequality some economists believe reflects systemic long-term changes to the labour market rather than transitional bumps in demographics and swings in the business cycle…

The census numbers are expected to show that the rich are driving up shelter prices beyond reach of increasing numbers of people whose earnings are inert, a situation impacting heavily on immigrants arriving in major cities where the housing markets are already stressed.

All this rosy news apparently spells doom for me and my future (which perhaps makes my musings about a possible career change this weekend especially fun!). Oh, and in other news on the “Ed Stelmach is a liar” front: experts (i.e. people with training in economics, not people who come into Pier 1 and proclaim that it doesn’t make sense that Canadian and US prices are different when our dollars are at par) are already claiming that the increasingly unattainable costs of shelter will ultimately lead to the ruination of our economy:

Accommodation is the biggest bite out of the basket, and it goes straight to the heart of how income inequality is not about poverty, it’s about affordability.

And affordability is key. You know our macro-economic policy . . . the portion of the population that consumes the most is lower income people who don’t save, they spend. Anyone in the bottom half is spending more of their income than they’re saving. You want to keep them spending. So don’t keep chewing up their disposable income with housing costs, which is what growing inequality does. It just grinds down the wheels of commerce.