Maybe Justin Trudeau would do better in the Democratic primaries than he will at home

On a scale of 1 to 10, which is more important to the Canadian dream: being a member of the middle class? Or being free to say or do what you want?

You might think of the former as the Liberal vision of Canada. You can’t open a document from Ottawa these days without reading that the government’s purpose is to help Canada’s middle class and those working hard to join it. Agreeing with that goal doesn’t necessarily mean you think of yourself, or your ambition in life, as middle class, however. Rosedale Liberals are way above middle class but want to help those below them on the income scale. Much of the federal cabinet seems into benevolent paternalism of that sort.

Distroscale

On the other hand, freedom to say or do what you want can be thought of as the conservative vision of Canada, maybe even the Conservative vision of Canada, since most Conservatives at least pay lip service to freedom, except where supply management is concerned.

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As we move toward the fall federal election, how Canadians feel about these two visions may well be key. So it’s surprising that, a while back, a Pew Charitable Trust/EKOS Research survey found we were way more into freedom than being middle class. The percentage of respondents who rated each as eight out of 10 or higher in terms of importance to the Canadian dream was just over 40 per cent for being middle class but almost 80 per cent for being free to say or do what you want. Freedom won 2 to 1, which is not what you’d expect if you listen to the CBC. In fact, freedom got the highest percentage among all possible alternatives, including owning a house, becoming rich, getting a college degree and several other standard markers of middle-class life.

Another shocker: when Americans were asked the same questions they actually put slightly more weight than we did on being middle class and slightly less on freedom. Canadians more freedom-loving than Americans! Maybe Justin Trudeau would do better in the Democratic primaries than he will at home this fall.

I ran across this survey in a new research paper on income inequality in Canada and the U.S. by Miles Corak of the City University of New York and Marie Connolly and Catherine Haeck of the Université du Québec à Montréal. They refer to it mainly to persuade American readers that because Canadians and Americans have similar values on social issues Canada’s experience of inequality should interest American policy-makers (hello, Senator Elizabeth Warren!) in ways European experience usually doesn’t, Americans being from Mars on values and Europeans from Venus.

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What interests Corak, Connolly and Haeck is “intergenerational income mobility,” which is defined as how closely related your income is to what your parents’ income was when you were growing up. If the correlation is high — perfect correlation being 1 on a scale of 0 to 1 — then there’s not much intergenerational mobility. If your parents had high income, you have high income. On the other hand, if the correlation is low — in the limit, zero — the kids of poor parents have just as much chance to end up rich as the kids of rich parents, and vice versa.

Miles Corak, a Canadian, is a pioneer in this field and thanks to his and others’ work we know that income mobility is generally higher in Canada than the U.S., which is to say the correlation between parents’ and kids’ income is lower here — about 0.2 versus more than twice that in the U.S. That’s good. Not having people’s success foreordained by their parents’ income is what we want in a society, even if, as Corak, Connolly and Haeck note, “intergenerational mobility may actually contribute to middle-class anxiety, parents not being able to greatly influence their child’s station in life.” After working hard to get into that Liberal middle class, you want to know your kids will stay there. We all favour mobility, but up not down.

This study’s innovation is to compare income mobility at the micro level, in 288 Canadian census divisions and 741 U.S. “commuting zones.” It turns out the main dividing line is not the Canada-U.S. border. The U.S. plains and our prairies, for instance, are both areas of high income mobility, with the border having no effect. That’s not quite true of eastern Canada and the U.S. northeast: we show more income mobility than they do. But the U.S.’s main problem is the South, where kids’ incomes are more determined by their parents’ incomes than in most other parts of the country. We have the same problem in our North, although with a lesser impact since it’s a relatively smaller area population-wise.

If our two countries really are more alike than we’re accustomed to think, that will have implications far beyond the coming elections.