© Blair Gable/Reuters Mona Fortier is sworn-in as Minister of Middle Class Prosperity and Associate Minister of Finance during the presentation of Trudeau's new cabinet, at Rideau Hall on Nov. 20, 2019. Editor’s note: The opinions in this article are the author’s, as published by our content partner, and do not necessarily represent the views of MSN or Microsoft.
Wednesday’s Cabinet shuffle featured the usual head-scratching reorganization of portfolios and outright invention of others, “bigger” being for some reason a stated goal. Joyce Murray, for example, becomes Minister of Digital Government. It has a very pre-Y2K ring to it, but then again the government in question accepts payment for access-to-information requests by cheque, and sometimes fulfills them (if at all) via CD-ROM, and it can’t manage a simple payroll system. So maybe it’s not such a bad thing to have someone on that job specifically.
Then there’s Ottawa-Vanier MP Mona Fortier’s new job. I literally assumed people were joking about the Liberals’ obsessive branding, but it’s true: No word of a lie, she is an Associate Minister of Finance and, specifically, the Minister of Middle Class Prosperity.
Should a government need a minister whose job is to ensure Canadians are prospering? One might reasonably hope that’s the goal of pretty much any minister when she rolls out of bed in the morning. But they sure don’t always act that way, so maybe a Minister for Making People Richer isn’t such a bad thing.
© NP Could these be next? But the “middle class” flourish is so ridiculously on-brand that it turns the very idea into a joke. Recalling Trudeau’s 2015 catchphrase, many wags asked: “Shouldn’t it be the Minister of the Middle Class and Those Working Hard to Join It?” And they have a point. After four years in government, the Liberals have a good story to tell on social mobility: Poverty rates are at an all-time low. And yet they remain officially obsessed with a middle class that was never as imperilled as they claimed.
It’s not all just in good fun. There are consequences to spreading misinformation about Canadians’ prosperity. A poll released Wednesday by Children First Canada asked respondents where they thought Canada ranked on UNICEF’s table of child development in wealthy countries. Turns out three-quarters of us think we’re at least in the top 10, and 36 per cent in the top five. Canada’s actual ranking, in the 2017 report, was 25.
These kinds of national rankings must always be taken with heaping doses of salt, and so must this poll. If people think Canada ranks among UNICEF’s top 10 countries for child development, perhaps that’s because it placed 10th as recently as the 2010 “report card.”
Things haven’t gone to hell since then; rather, every year’s report card uses different criteria to come up with its rankings — the better to generate headlines in various countries. The 2017 report includes a line graph showing Canada plummeting down the table to 25. A note below helpfully advises that “these indices and rankings are not directly comparable.” That’s not what line graphs are for.
As for the 25th-place ranking, you might not consider children’s ability to rattle off at least five environmental problems key to measuring their welfare. (Canada does well there.) You might think actual deprivation would be important criteria, but the 2017 report is concerned only with inequality. (Canada doesn’t do very well there.) Considerably poorer countries than Canada score better on equality measures, even as they score worse battling something as fundamental as food insecurity. Inequality matters a lot, but it doesn’t matter more than breakfast.
Furthermore, you might think the child homicide rate (where Canada does quite badly) is an odd criteria to give so much weight, given that it’s a relatively rare cause of death. If you’re going to use it, you can’t just pick a year at random, as the report does, because small numbers fluctuate significantly from year to year. It’s especially ridiculous to reward or punish a tiny country like Cyprus or Malta for having zero or one child homicide in a given year, respectively.
All that said, mouth full of salt, I suspect Canadians would be legitimately surprised to find how poorly we fare relative to other rich countries on measures everyone would agree are key to child development. Fifteen per cent of children between the ages of 11 and 15 reported being bullied at least twice a month. Based on my observations as an 11-year-old I’d call that extraordinary progress — but it’s three times higher than the rate in Sweden, Iceland, Italy and Spain. Canada’s childhood obesity rate is four times Denmark’s. Not many children are murdered in Canada, but 130 under 15 were between 2010 and 2017. That strikes me as an awful lot, and it’s a rate far higher than most other comparable nations. Canadians are likely aware of an epidemic of teenage suicides, but do they know the overall rate is fully five times that of Portugal’s? Do Canadians know infant mortality is four times higher than in Japan?
These problems are not unknown to the middle class. But the most severe of them — which is to say, Canada’s most severe problems — are not those of the middle class. They are those of the lower class, of the poorest, of the most desperate — and in far too many cases, that means Canada’s First Nations. Again, the Liberals have a perfectly defensible record when it comes to lifting people out of poverty. No one doubts the Liberals’ commitment to and obsession with the middle class. But any new associate finance minister should be focused on the very poorest Canadians, which is where the hardest and most essential work is.
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