Chrystia Freeland has a great new job as Canada’s top diplomat, but in case anyone has forgotten, it’s not the job she was expected to do when she left journalism for politics a few years ago.

On the heels of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s big cabinet shuffle last week, Oxfam has delivered a report that reminds us of the burning issue that brought Freeland into public life: income inequality and the wealth gap.

“Soaring income inequality has become an undeniable political fact,” Freeland wrote in her 2013 best-seller, Plutocrats. According to Oxfam, that gap has been growing since Freeland’s book came out. Here in Canada, the wealth of just two billionaires — David Thomson and Galen Weston Sr. — is equal to that of about 11 million Canadians.

Canadian billionaires aren’t Freeland’s problem these days; a single American billionaire, president-elect Donald Trump, is going to be taking up most of the minister’s time. The irony hasn’t been lost on observers: The author of Plutocrats now has a full-time job managing one of them.

Which points to another yawning gap in public life: the one between governments reacting to events and shaping them. Trudeau’s cabinet shuffle — especially Freeland’s promotion — was about reacting to Trump’s administration and the shakeup it’s going to deliver to the world order. Will the new Global Affairs minister have the time, or the power, to think about bridging the divide between Canada’s rich and poor while Trump is in power?

We’ll see. I did a search for the phrase “income inequality” on the openparliament.ca website and found only three examples of Freeland using the phrase since the Liberals came to power about 14 months ago.

Granted, the issue may come up when Freeland attends the World Economic Forum at Davos this week, which she described in her book like this:

“The real community life of the twenty-first century plutocracy occurs on the international conference circuit … The best known of these events is the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, invitation to which marks an aspiring plutocrat’s arrival on the international scene.”

Oxfam timed the release of this week’s report to coincide with the Davos meeting and the Forum itself, to its credit, has been trying to put income inequality at the centre of its deliberations this year — sensible, given last year’s Brexit and Trump surprises.

It’s not just the gap itself that’s infuriating people — it’s the rigidity of it, the growing suspicion many have that they can no longer aspire to be middle class, let alone rich. It’s not just the gap itself that’s infuriating people — it’s the rigidity of it, the growing suspicion many have that they can no longer aspire to be middle class, let alone rich.

The Forum’s newest ‘Global Risks’ report offers a warning: “The combination of economic inequality and political polarization threatens to amplify global risks, fraying the social solidarity on which the legitimacy of our economic and political systems rests.”

That’s a bleak forecast. How a gathering of the world’s plutocrats might solve that problem, though, remains a mystery.

As many — including the authors of the Oxfam study — have pointed out, Trump probably owes his election victory to populist frustration with rampant wealth inequality in the United States. It’s not just the gap itself that’s infuriating people — it’s the rigidity of it, the growing suspicion many have that they can no longer aspire to be middle class, let alone rich.

Wealth, in the eyes of people who don’t have it, is a private club with restricted access. Canada is not immune to that feeling. That’s where Trudeau, with all the media focus on private-island vacations and fundraising events with deep-pocketed donors, runs the risk of inflaming citizens’ frustrations over income inequality, despite his own promises to deal with the problem, before and after he was elected.

In one of his town-hall sessions on Monday, Trudeau was asked about the increasing hopelessness felt by Canadian students about their employment prospects. Almost musing aloud, Trudeau talked about how an education in creative or liberal arts could be the best protection in an economy filled with disruptive forces.

He may need a better answer than that. Education isn’t the ticket to class mobility it once was, as any parents with well-educated kids still living at home can tell you.

Trudeau may want to re-read a section of Freeland’s Plutocrats on that same theme — particularly this bit, told with a nice turn of phrase at the end: “Statistics have shown that graduating from college is more closely linked to having wealthy parents than it is to high test scores in high school: class matters more than going to class.”

Rightly or wrongly, the progressive left’s solutions for solving income inequality — better education or free trade — have been judged inadequate by populist forces in Britain and the United States. Citizens are turning to politicians such as Trump out of frustration, even desperation.

The experts who are staring down the real problem of income inequality are also talking about radical measures. The Global Risks report talks about nothing less than a total reform of market capitalism, and Oxfam flatly warns that “our economy must stop excessively rewarding those at the top and start working for all people. Accountable and visionary governments, businesses that work in the interests of workers and producers, a valued environment, women’s rights and a strong system of fair taxation, are central to this more human economy.”

Those would be ambitious goals for any government. They’re especially hard to pull off when the politicians fall into the familiar trap of reacting to developments than trying to get ahead of them.

Freeland is going to be busy at the Davos meeting, which got underway today. She’ll be facing pressure to stay connected to her new job back at home, while also taking part in the sessions.

It might be a good idea for her to use the occasion to remind herself why she got into politics in the first place. It wasn’t to worry about the whims of one billionaire in the White House. The biggest problem for Trudeau and Freeland isn’t Trump. It’s the rage that made him president.

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