Are We Becoming Two Societies?: Income Polarization and the Myth of the Declining Middle Class in Canada

David Robinson, an economics professor, is dean of the Faculty of Social
Sciences at Laurentian University.

Question: Where can you find something new about income distribution in
Canada? Answer: Read this book. Beach and Slotsve provide the best
analysis available of the trends of the last 20 years. They tell us that
Canada is not becoming as polarized as the United States. (“If the
unemployment rate can be brought down, the middle class will increase
significantly.”) They also tell us that the young are doing worse,
that women are doing better, and that the welfare state has succeeded in
buffering the impact of two long recessions.

The authors build their analysis in layers. Successive chapters look at
earning, income, family income, middle-class family income, and post-tax
family income. Each layer is filled with full-page tables showing a
variety of polarization measures for every second year between 1972 and
1992. Men and women, rich and poor, young and old, and the more and less
educated are compared. The layers are held together by clear prose. Bill
Watson’s 19-page executive summary presents and explains the main
points. Commentary by Chris Sarlo, of Nipissing University, and Allan
Harrison, of McMaster, is included as well.

There are weaknesses. For most people, “class” means a tangible
collective entity, a style of life, a set of values, an ethos; for Beach
and Slotsve, it means little more than “having an income between
certain numbers.” As a result they provide a valuable, but crude,
numerical approach to the state of the middle class. Their attempt to
provide a numerical estimate of economic insecurity is less successful,
however. The data simply aren’t available—a gap that limits this
book. Statistics Canada may be the best statistical agency in the world,
but even researchers like Beach and Slotsve can’t tell us what we need
to know unless the agency has the money to collect and distribute the
data.