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If there’s any struggling going on, it’s the Liberals’ struggle to keep the stagnation thesis aloft in the face of the facts.

Median household incomes have risen fully 25 per cent after inflation since the early 1990s. The poverty rate, as measured by Statistics Canada’s Low Income Cut Off, is now at the lowest level since the agency began keeping statistics. The share of income going to the richest one per cent has been declining since 2006, and is now back to where it was in 1998.

All three of these indicators, it is true, showed very different trends in the 1980s and early 1990s — not coincidentally, a period bracketed by two of the deepest recessions in our history.

The question is why the public should be menaced with these long-ago events as if they were part of present reality. If the situation were the reverse — if things had been getting better then, but now were getting worse — would anyone be telling the public, “never mind how badly off you are, think how great things were in your parents’ time”?

It’s easy enough to gin up a poll in support of just about anything, of course, depending on how you ask the question.

If the minister had any new evidence to rebut this, he did not produce it. What he did have was survey data. One chart lamented that “many Canadians feel the next generation’s standard of living will be lower,” based on a Nanos poll taken last month. Another, based on an Ekos poll last year, showed a declining percentage of Canadians identify themselves as middle class. The label: “Canadians are increasingly feeling left out of the middle class.”