OTTAWA—The great Canadian dream of a sprawling middle class, awash in home ownership and healthy incomes, has been hit with a jolt of reality — in the form of StatsCan’s National Household Survey.

The newly released numbers from the 2011 census reveal a wide, demographic chasm between the nation’s poor — those whose annual income falls well below the $27,000 median figure for an individual— and the richest in Canada.

The numbers also give Canadians a better picture of the famed “1 per cent,” whose wealth turned into a protest chant during the widespread “Occupy” demonstrations a couple of years ago.

The richest 10 per cent of Canadians make more than $80,400 in individual income, the survey shows. But the wealthiest 1 per cent — about 272,600 people in total — make more than $191,100. These one percenters, according to the census, are mainly white, married men between the ages of 45 and 54, born in the shadow of the postwar boom years that spawned the great Canadian dream.

Home ownership, at the centre of those decades-old aspirations, has also taken its toll on Canadian households, the NHS shows. While 69 per cent of households in Canada own their home, their mortgage debts are high — sometimes crippling.

More than 25.2 per cent of households are spending more than 30 per cent of their income on shelter, surpassing the standard measure for having an affordable home. That’s up slightly from 24.9 per cent in 2006.

And of those living in an unaffordable home, 83 per cent of them were saddled with a mortgage.

Overall, 58.6 per cent of homeowners were still paying off their mortgages according to the 2011 survey. That’s up from 57.9 per cent in 2006 and 55.2 in 2001. In 1991, it was 51.5 per cent.

Toronto was the most costly city to maintain a home, at $1,366 a month, while Trois-Rivières, Que., was the cheapest at $697.

Toronto is also home to huge disparity in wealth, as well as many of the people in the lowest brackets, who rely on government more than middle- or top- earners do for their income. Employment is the major source of income, for instance, for the top half of the population, representing between 55 to 84 per cent of the money coming into the house. For people in the lower brackets, employment only accounts for 40 per cent of their total income.

Leanne Abdulla, 27, has two college diplomas in social work and several university credits under her belt, but can’t seem to land the elusive full-time job in her field.

As a result, the Toronto resident is among some 14.9 per cent of Canadians living in low income. (The Toronto-area low-income rate mirrors the national percentage, while province-wide the prevalence of people living in low income is 13.9 per cent.) About 41 per cent of those living in low-income neighbourhoods nation-wide belong to a visible minority the StatsCan survey found.

Abdulla’s income was just over $14,000 last year, including about $2,500 in social assistance. That falls below Statistics Canada’s low-income measure of $19,460 for a single person, after taxes. It is $38,970 for a couple with two children.

“It’s difficult finding a permanent full-time position. Everything seems to be contract,” she says.

Abdulla finished her last contract two weeks ago two weeks ago working for Toronto’s Housing Connections, a social housing placement agency. She is now relying on Employment Insurance while she waits for word on another contract with another social agency.

She hasn’t even begun to think about being able to pay back her student loans of more than $23,000.

“I’m lucky I live in subsidized housing,” she said of her downtown Toronto bachelor apartment. “Otherwise, I don’t know what I’d do.”

At the other end of the spectrum are Canadians like Dan Balaban, the founder, president and chief operating officer of Greengate Power Corporation, a Calgary-based company that develops wind energy.

The married Alberta resident wouldn’t disclose his salary, but says it is in the “hundreds of thousands” of dollars, meaning he’d be one of the 272,600 individuals that make up Canada’s one per cent.

Balaban, 39, said he got to where he was partly in thanks to his entrepreneur father, Jack, who founded businesses in the oil and gas industry. The elder Balaban instilled an interest in entrepreneurship and also a curiosity about alternative energy sources to his son.

The National Household Survey is the result of the new, non-compulsory, long-form census and StatsCan warned that because of the change in methodology, it was unwise to compare to previous surveys. This made it almost impossible to use for identifying trends or long-term shifts in Canadians’ relative prosperity.

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Still, the picture it presents promises to be additional fodder in the national political debate over the middle class in Canada — which every party will be vying to represent in the next election. Liberal leader Justin Trudeau, for instance, who wasn’t available to comment on Wednesday about the NHS, has said it will be the centerpiece of his next election platform.

“The middle class is under more pressure than ever before. The buying power, the upward mobility, the optimism of the middle class is what has traditionally driven the economy and the democracy,” Liberal MP Ralph Goodale, a former finance minister, said after looking at the NHS numbers Wednesday. “And when the middle class feels under threat, as they clearly do today, that is a very bad omen to the future of the country.”

NDP Leader Tom Mulcair, in Saskatoon for his caucus’s retreat, was also speaking in strong terms on Tuesday about the income gap in Canada.

“Canadian families are struggling like never before. Our country faces levels of income inequality not seen since the Great Depression,” Mulcair said.

With files from Kamila Hinkson and The Canadian Press

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