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Actual, living, Canadians with median earnings could fairly ask the Liberals how giving a tax cut to someone with incomes two times as high as theirs was supposed to make them less anxious about their situations. Happily for the Liberals, Nathalie is not a real person, so they could get away with suddenly pretending that she never existed in the first place. Liberals are nothing if not masters at messaging; a narrative based on real-life middle-class Canadians would have more difficult to control.

This raises the question of how and why the Liberals could have developed a plausible story about the need to address middle-class anxieties and then decided that reducing taxes for those at the 90th percentile of the income distribution would help alleviate those middle-class anxieties. Did the Liberals simply aim their tax cut at the middle class and … miss somehow? Was it a game of bait-and switch for the benefit of the upper-middle class? (As I’ve written earlier, a good working definition for the upper-middle class is those between the 80th and 99th percentiles of the income distribution, earning between $70,000 and $225,000 a year; the maximum benefit from the Liberals’ tax cut is for those earning $90,000 a year.) I’ve been wrestling with this question for almost three years now.

But no more: the Liberals have clearly moved on with last week’s “supercluster” announcement: a billion dollars thrown at the usual gang of well-connected consultants and professional sitters-on-boards-of-directors. Perhaps the most startling aspect of the Liberals’ supercluster messaging is what it did not say: the announcement was not accompanied with the usual boilerplate verbiage about how this spending would help the middle class. It would seem that even the Liberals have recognized that there are limits past which that particular talking point cannot be pushed.