If the New York Times only knew of the trouble it has caused Justin Trudeau.



The paper’s detailed breakdown of global middle-class income data published this week revealed that America’s middle-class is no longer the most affluent in the world. Rather, the Times found, “median income in Canada pulled into a tie” with that of the US in 2010 “and has most likely surpassed it since then.”

It should have been good news to Canadians. It certainly was to the Conservative government. Cabinet ministers trumpeted the findings on Twitter, and the party even slapped the news on its website. For the Liberal leader, however, the story might have been just annoying. Why? Because Trudeau’s been telling everyone essentially the opposite – that middle-class Canadians are doing poorly. It’s a message he’s spread for months as he’s lead his third-placed party into a relative tie in the polls with Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, and to a real chance at unseating them in 2015. Now, thanks to the Times, Trudeau faces the accusation that he’s been wrong all along.

Is he?

A Justin Trudeau campaign video

After the initial furor over the story died down, Liberal MP and former finance minister, Ralph Goodale, defended the team on his blog. In a post, he pointed to the “hard arithmetic” that showed median after-tax income has gone from $59,600 in 1980 to just $68,000 in 2011. “That’s a gain of just 14% – 14% spread over 30 years!” he sputtered, before explaining (in all caps) that income growth has been perhaps as little as half a percentage point each year – basically nothing. Which sounds outrageous, but it doesn’t really undermine the Times story. The trend overall is still upward in recent years, even for single-parent families led by women. “The specific claim that ‘Canadian median family incomes are stagnating (or falling)’ was known to be wrong some time ago,” Stephen Gordon, a professor of economics at Laval University, wrote in an email Thursday.

But so what if Canada’s median middle-class incomes are going up? “The cost of essentials – food, shelter, transportation – are increasing faster than the average Canadian household income,” Liberal MP Chrystia Freeland states on her website. Is that true? Those specific costs have risen. But other costs have also gone down – such as clothing, for instance. And even as housing costs have risen, costs of furniture and electrical appliances have fallen since the early 2000s.

So, the truth of what’s going may lie somewhere between the talking points, in the middle of the Times’s assessment and Trudeau’s.

“There have been real gains over the past … and those should be celebrated,” Mike Moffatt, an assistant professor for business, economics and public policy at the Richard Ivey School of Business, said. However, “large portions of the middle-class are struggling.” Moffatt points to south-western Ontario, an area once rich with manufacturing jobs, as an example. The region has shed 78,500 jobs in that sector in the last 10 years, Moffatt said, which has caused “high levels of structural unemployment for the (mostly) men who worked in that industry.”

And there lies the key to why Trudeau may carry on, no matter what the Times says.

For many Canadians, what matters is how it feels. And in some parts of Canada, things don’t feel very middle-class anymore. People are unemployed, and they’re often staying that way. According to the OECD, the number of Canadians unemployed for 53 weeks or longer was around 40,000 in 2008-09. In 2013, it was between 92,000 and 112,000. Places like Ontario, Quebec, and the Atlantic provinces in particular are feeling the pressure.

It just so happens those are the exact areas the Liberals will need to win in order to form government.

