First in a three-part series on the growth of income disparity in Peel Region.

Thirty years ago, the Region of Peel, that sprawling expanse stretching from Mississauga to Caledon, was the definition of middle-class suburbia, an escape from the bustle and grit of Toronto.

The communities that sit in the western shadow of the city have since undergone a dramatic transformation, as an influx of immigrants fuelled a population explosion and made Peel one of the most diverse regions in Canada.

Yet as the region has grown, the economic status of many of its residents has significantly deteriorated, according to new research from the University of Toronto.

Four decades of income data demonstrate that Peel has become a poster child for Canada’s shrinking middle class — a suburb with socio-economic disparities on par with many major cities.

In 1980, 86 per cent of Peel’s neighbourhoods were middle-income, which means that most individuals earned close to the average Toronto-area annual income that year of $14,384, the data show.

But by 2010, when the average GTA income was $44,271 annually, only 50 per cent of Peel neighbourhoods fell into the middle-income category.

Meanwhile, pools of poverty have become rivers. In 1980, Peel had just two low-income neighbourhoods. Three decades later, 45 per cent of neighbourhoods were considered low-income or very low-income, nearly the same proportion as in the city of Toronto.

While Peel’s population has nearly tripled to almost 1.3 million, it has become increasingly polarized, with lower-income neighbourhoods clustered in Brampton and areas of Mississauga — by far the biggest growth centres. The few high and very high-income tracts, meanwhile, are grouped in the town of Caledon and on the south end of Mississauga, with a narrow band of middle-income neighbourhoods in-between.

“We have this image of suburbs as middle-income, but Brampton and Mississauga a long time ago stopped being a suburb. They are diverse municipalities on their own,” said David Hulchanski, the U of T professor at the helm of the Neighbourhood Change Research Partnership, a long-term project exploring income patterns across Canada.

“They have all the trends, sadly, of big cities in terms of the polarization that’s happening,” said Hulchanski, whose pioneering 2010 report, The Three Cities Within Toronto, highlighted deepening income inequality in Canada’s largest city.

“We should care because we know from looking at other countries, the more unequal a society is, the greater the social divisions. It creates an us-and-them society,” he said. “Some of that will be ethnocultural or racial. But some of that will be income-related.”

The stunning transformation of Peel is in many ways a testament to the reach of the broad economic trends that have gnawed away at Canada’s once robust middle-income group.

When Erin Keay-Smith, 48, was growing up in Brampton, there were an abundance of well-paid jobs at nearby auto assembly plants and other major factories, which then included the now-shuttered Northern Telecom (Nortel) and Kodak.

“There wereall kinds of high-school dropouts, because you could go over there and make $25 an hour,” she said.

Her subdivision, one of the first to be built on former farmland in what was then Bramalea, was occupied primarily by young families. A single income was enough to buy one of the tidy, three-bedroom bungalows on her street.

Today, however, Keay-Smith, who bought her childhood home from her parents in 2005, says her neighbourhood has become “transient,” with renters living in many of the homes, which now cost upwards of $300,000.

After being unemployed for several months, she recently found part-time, seasonal work in a garden centre, making minimum wage.

“Brampton holds little to no opportunity for me,” said Keay-Smith, who was not surprised to hear that her neighbourhood has slipped into the low-income category.

The outsized cost of housing, rise of precarious employment and erosion of manufacturing jobs — 160,000 of which have been lost in the GTA in the last decade — are not unique to Peel.

But in many cases, the impact of these forces is compounded for recent immigrants who, despite the region’s large multicultural population, still face linguistic and cultural barriers to employment.

“Unfortunately, most of them settle in low kind of jobs,” said Rajinder Saini, who hosts a popular Punjabi radio show in Brampton and runs Parvasi Media Group.

“All the professionals that are coming here, they don’t find jobs in their professions,” said Saini, 47, who gave up on his career as a civil engineer after arriving in Canada in 2000. “Ultimately, they don’t have a choice. They think, ‘We are done with that, and now we have to take care of our kids — the future of our kids.’ ”

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From 2001 to 2006 (the most recent census data available), immigrants accounted for 80 per cent of the population growth in Peel, which welcomes 34,000 residents each year. One-third of new immigrants in the region live in poverty, according to the Peel Newcomer Strategy Group.

As SohailSaeed, Brampton’s director of economic development, sees it, the city “has come a long way to address the needs of a growing population,” which ballooned by 20 per cent between 2006 and 2011.

“The process to bring in large companies takes time, and that’s where the gap comes in,” said Saeed, who counts Air Canada and Canon among the firms that recently announced plans to expand in Brampton.

The rapidly changing demographics have also left a gap in the region’s ability to deliver social services. Community workers and advocates say provincial funding has not kept pace with escalating demand, leaving Peel’s booming municipalities ill-equipped to function like the dynamic cities they have become.

Peel District School Board, too, has complained for years about the gap in per pupil provincial funding it receives relative to other boards.

“We’re still being treated like suburbs,” said Darryl Wolk, a strategist for the Fair Share for Peel Task Force, which estimates the provincial funding shortfall for social services at $350 million per year.

“We have our own urban issues that need to be addressed independently, and simply sending our problems, such as homelessness or addictions, to Toronto is simply not acceptable and it’s not feasible,” he said.

New Canadians often report feeling welcomed upon their arrival in Peel, which is one of the most ethnically diverse regions in the country.

But the recent pushback against the legalization of basement suites in Brampton and increasing density in downtown Mississauga — both driven in part by Peel’s affordable-housing crisis — hint at growing pains that may be associated with deepening divisions.

Shelley White, CEO of United Way, Peel Region, describes the region as “the tale of two cities.”

“We’ve got families that are really high-income and families that are . . . living in poverty,” she said. “It’s not because they’re not working. They’re actually working two to three jobs at minimum wage, just to make ends meet.”

As Hulchanski points out, municipalities have a limited ability to address the root causes of growing income inequality — a complex trend that stems in part from policies determined by higher levels of government, such as taxation and social housing.

But he hopes his findings provide ammunition for local politicians in Peel, which is not yet as polarized in Toronto, to push to preserve the shrinking middle.

“There are so many individual things that can be done in fast-growing places,” he said. “(Local politicians and civil servants) are at the front lines of understanding and documenting these trends in their municipality. They should do better at making these things known.”

The income data in this series was compiled as part of the Neighbourhood Change Research Partnership. Due to the elimination of the random sample with the long-form in the 2011 census, the researchers relied on individual tax filer data for 2010 incomes. Neighbourhoods were defined using census tracts. Based at U of T’s Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, the research partnership is a 7-year project funded through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

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