In Thursday’s federal election debate, NDP leader Thomas Mulcair successfully pushed the Conservatives’ Stephen Harper to concede that the Canadian economy has shrunk in each of the last five months. Mulcair triumphantly followed up, “you’re not denying we’re in a recession, that’s good.” It was a moment that he, Green party leader Elizabeth May and Liberal chief Justin Trudeau had all been angling for — an acknowledgement from Harper, who has led the country for nearly a decade, that economic times are tough.

While Harper’s contenders hammered him with the “R” word, they never once uttered the word “poverty,” the state people find themselves in when jobs are scarce, or when the jobs that exist don’t pay the bills. Trudeau and Mulcair are especially prone to speaking as if recession is a temporary problem, rather than a fixed and cyclical reality in our global economy. Like Harper, they speak as if they expect the best for our economy, and in their false optimism they are failing to prepare Canadians for the worst, to speak up for those who are worst off, including the many whose fates have become disconnected from the ebb and flow of the economy.

Canada is one of the wealthiest countries on earth, yet poverty and inequality are systemic and are increasing in many areas of life. According to the most recent National Household survey, about one quarter of Canadians live in housing that is overcrowded, unaffordable, substandard, or a combination of all three. Forty per cent of indigenous children in our country live in poverty. Ten per cent of Canadians cannot afford to fill their medical prescriptions. All this, in a country that, according to Harper, is the envy of the developed world.

Opposition parties are eager to connect these problems to the prime minister, but not to the economy itself. Trudeau has been preaching for months about “strengthening the middle class and those hoping to join it.” For the Liberal leader, this second group is a nameless, aspiring mass of humanity, a group that can achieve stability with a little help from caring politicians. He suggests he can elevate them from their current state of poverty, instead of promising to help them manage it.

The NDP’s Mulcair is promising to implement a $15-an-hour federal minimum wage by the end of his first term of office. This policy would only apply to a small percentage of those currently making minimum wage, but its true failing is that it is not indexed to inflation. A $15 minimum wage will be a lot less to celebrate in four years, and if it doesn’t increase with the cost of living, it will soon represent a new standard of poverty.

May goes further than her counterparts in acknowledging systemic poverty in Canada. “We can’t just sit back and think that the current stagnant economy is going to fix itself,” May said in Thursday’s debate. She wants to spend billions of tax dollars to upgrade energy inefficient homes, repair infrastructure, and build sources of renewable energy. What’s more the Greens are campaigning on a guaranteed minimum income, a safety net for all Canadians similar to what we currently provide seniors.

Yet May didn’t mention a guaranteed income during the debate, even though the Green party website labels poverty as “the single largest determinant of ill health” in Canada. She too is trapped in a conversation that labels the eradication of poverty as unrealistic. As May fights to be included in debates and election coverage, she faces pressure to sound more like her opponents, who are allergic to the language of structural suffering.

No one who has followed Harper’s career would expect him to flinch at the prospect of a recession. In keeping with his neo-liberal religion, the prime minister has spent the last 10 years cutting taxes for individuals and corporations. When those measures have failed to insulate Canada from a volatile global economy, Harper has insisted the public should be grateful that things are not even worse. He has never concerned himself with entrenched poverty, and he likely never will.

But we could hope for more from his potential successors, especially the two so-called progressive leaders most likely to replace him on Oct. 19. Mulcair and Trudeau need to present long-term plans that don’t take an economic resurgence for granted. We are poised for a second recession in the last seven years — Canadians who continue to struggle cannot live on the false optimism of our politicians.

Desmond Cole is a Toronto-based freelance journalist.

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