So how are we doing? A few years back all you'd hear was: the rich are getting richer, the poor poorer, and the middle class are spinning their wheels. Rising inequality, stagnant incomes. It wasn't true then, as some of us tried to show. But what about now? Some charts...
Poverty, first. By any measure, by any standard, poverty in Canada has fallen to *historic* lows. It's been falling since the late 90s, but in the last few years, thanks to the Canada Child Benefit, it's dropped like a stone (slight rebound in '21 most likely due to pandemic)...
Yeah, but what about at the top end? The notorious 1 per cent. Making out like bandits, aren't they? Taking a larger and larger share of the pie? Nope. Top 1 per cent share in Canada has been falling since 2006...
Same picture if you look at quintiles. Share going to top fifth falling, the rest stable or slightly rising.
What about those stagnant incomes? The struggling middle class? Here's median after-tax income, all households: after accounting for inflation, it's up 40 per cent since 1997 (as of 2021, the last year for which Stats Can has figures).
Real wages, likewise, are rising, up about 25 per cent.
One more: the Gini coefficient, a measure of inequality. Rising until the mid 2000s, has been falling since (lower Gini score = lower inequality). As of 2020, lower than at any time since 1976 (the year time began, according to StatsCan)...
Of course, the question is how long any of this can last, if productivity and output per capita continue to stall or fall. But we’ve been getting by until now...
What’s impressive is how we’ve been able to get inflation back down w/out — knock on wood — having to endure a recession/high unemployment. Why did real household incomes fall from late 70s to early 1990s? Because of 2 awful recessions: the price of stifling the Great Inflation.
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So, there are traitors in Parliament but not in any of the party caucuses. It’s a miracle.
Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly insists there are no "traitors" in the Liberal caucus ctvnews.ca/politics/forei…
There can’t be be any Liberal caucus members who participated because “if that was the case, they would be out of the Liberal caucus” and nobody has been pushed out of caucus — well, Han Dong but he left of his own accord — so QED.
On the other hand…
Speaking to reporters at the end of the G7 summit in Italy on Saturday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau did not go as far as Joly, and would not answer repeated questions about whether any current Liberal MPs were named in the NSICOP report.
“The issue of foreign interference is one that this government has taken extremely seriously…”
This NSICOP report is absolutely stunning. In any other country it would cause the most extraordinary uproar. Politics would come to a halt. Heads would roll. The police would be called in. Here? The response, or non-response from the political class is revealing.
It’s not even a foreign interference story any more, or not only that. It’s a domestic collaboration story.
The question now is: who are/were these MPs and senators who are/were working for China and India? And who knew that they were — if CSIS knew, so presumably did others — and did nothing about it?
My latest, on the ongoing travesty at the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board: Eighteen years and $46-billion later, the CPP admits it could have earned more just by buying index funds theglobeandmail.com/opinion/articl…
This is truly a watershed moment. For a few years the fund was modestly beating its own self-assigned benchmark. But reversion to the mean is a bitch, and now it has actually fallen behind (net of expenses).
All of that money, all of that empire-building, all of those new hires, and the CPP has earned a little less in the last 18 years than it would have had it just literally tracked the market.
Which is pretty much what it has been doing, in spite of itself.
“Since the end of 2015, total compensation per hour (adjusted for inflation) has grown by only 1.9 percent. That’s 1.9 percent over the entire period from 2015 (Q1) to 2023 (Q4), which works out to 0.2 percent per year..”
“Labour productivity has grown by 0.2 percent annually, on average, between early 2015 and the end of 2023. That’s the slowest growth over an eight-year period ever recorded. (At least since comparable data started in 1946.)”
“While working for Canada and surreptitiously transferring lethal virus samples to China, Xiangguo Qiu was enlisted to lead Wuhan Institute of Virology’s synthetic bat filovirus project…
… with the institute’s Vice-Director, a senior Chinese scientist that worked in 2015 on a controversial United States ‘hybrid version of a bat coronavirus.’”
“This explosive evidence — yet to be reported from hundreds of redacted documents released this week by Canada’s government — suggests that Xiangguo Qiu was likely working directly with the Chinese virologist at the centre of the Covid-19 Wuhan lab-leak theory, Dr. Shi Zhengli.”
“A source with direct knowledge of the material said the information when uncovered would show that scientists Xiangguo Qiu and her husband Keding Cheng provided confidential scientific information to China.”
“One high-profile Chinese researcher, Feihu Yan of the People’s Liberation Army’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences, worked for a period at the Winnipeg lab. Dr Qiu also collaborated on Ebola research w/Maj-Gen Chen Wei, the Chinese military’s top epidemiologist & virologist.”