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The increased concentration of income among a small group of high earners — the one per cent — over the past 30 years is a legitimate concern. What to do about it remains an open question: there’s still no clear consensus as to how or why this happened, so we don’t have a good handle on what governments can or should do about the surge in incomes at the top. The Liberals’ proposal of a new tax bracket for taxable incomes above $200,000 is, at least on the surface, a plausible response, although its effectiveness is debatable. Our lack of understanding of the problem doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t discuss the matter; just the opposite. But we should at least get the facts straight.

This brings us to a new TV ad being run by Engage Canada, a newly formed interest group that earnestly, if implausibly, describes itself as a “non-partisan, independent project.” Its creation appears to be a response to the formation of the anti-union Working Canadians interest group whose claims to non-partisanship seem equally implausible. As such, Engage Canada’s ads are sharply critical of the Conservatives. Unhappily for a project that has “a mandate to increase democracy and democratic participation,” its take on top-end income inequality is unlikely to improve voters’ understanding.

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Here is the opening sentence of their TV ad: “Under the Harper Conservatives, inequality is skyrocketing. Income for the wealthiest five per cent has increased 12 times faster than for the rest of Canadians.”