It only takes about 30 minutes to walk one stretch of the income gap in Canada.

Setting out southward from Rosedale, one of the country’s wealthiest neighbourhoods, a brisk, half-hour walk will take you to Regent Park, a low-income community in the heart of downtown Toronto.

These days, anyone taking that walk will find it lined with brightly coloured signs for the Nov. 25 federal byelection in Toronto Centre, a riding that serves as a textbook example of the gap between the richest and poorest in Canada.

As coincidence has it, two of the candidates in this race are former journalists who have written books on that very same gap. Chrystia Freeland, author of Plutocrats, is running for the Liberals, and Linda McQuaig, author of The Trouble with Billionaires, is the New Democratic Party candidate.

“It’s too bad both of you are running in the same riding,” one Toronto Centre resident tells McQuaig on a chilly Friday morning at the Wellesley Street Subway station, which sits roughly halfway between Rosedale and Regent Park.

McQuaig quickly sets the voter straight on yet another gap — the one between her own views on income disparity and those of her Liberal rival.

“We’ve both written about income inequality, but we have very different takes on it,” McQuaig tells this voter. “Let’s put it this way: much of her research consists of interviewing the super rich, so it’s sort of plutocrats from the view of plutocrats. She does identify income inequality, that’s true, but she doesn’t really see it as a problem. She argues it’s part of the creative destruction of capitalism.”

Freeland, who moved to the riding this summer from New York so she could take the plunge into politics in her native Canada, has spent the past few months in hands-on immersion into the income-inequality reality of Toronto Centre, knocking on doors from Rosedale to Regent Park.

Contrary to what McQuaig alleges, Freeland says she does indeed see inequality as a problem — a complicated one. The most worrying aspect of the income gap in Toronto, and Canada, she says, is what’s going missing — namely, the middle class. If Canadians are increasingly divided between polar extremes of wealth, either very rich or very poor, Freeland wants to know what’s happening to that huge middle class that fed the economy and the hopes of past generations. No coincidence, her leader, Justin Trudeau, has said he’s fighting the next election on the issue of the middle class, too.

“It’s crucial to see this issue as about the hollowed-out middle class and growing the economy from the middle out,” says Freeland. Without making direct reference to McQuaig or the NDP, the Liberal candidate says that too many people believe that outdated, 30-year-old solutions — or simple take-from-the-rich, give-to-the-poor rhetoric — will fix this modern problem.

Though it doesn’t take long to walk the income gap in Toronto Centre, you can only really understand it by sitting still and taking a hard look at the numbers.

The yawning income inequality in this riding showed up in the National Household Survey data released by StatsCan a few months ago.

The survey sorts Canadians into ten income groups of roughly equal size. But in Toronto Centre, according to the NHS, people aren’t scattered over the income groups equally: about 20 per cent of residents are in the richest income group in Canada and another 20 per cent are in the very lowest category.

That means that four out of every 10 people are either very rich or very poor in Toronto Centre, according to the NHS data.

“That’s pretty unique across the country,” says Doug Norris, a census expert who works with Environics Analytics.

“Usually, most of the ridings, they can be wealthy, but they don’t have the poor, or some of them are poor, but don’t have the wealthy. What’s unique about Toronto Centre . . . is they have both.”

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The University of Toronto’s Cities Centre

has compiled figures from the Canada Revenue Agency and its 2010 tax-filer data from 26 census divisions within the riding, or “tracts.”

Those calculations show that more than half of Toronto Centre is made up of high-income earners, who pull in 71 per cent of the total annual income in the riding. At the other end of the income scale are the 21 per cent who are low income, earning just 7 per cent of the total income in Toronto Centre each year.

And where is that middle class? Hardly booming: the tax-filing analysis shows that only a bit more than one-third of Toronto Centre residents earn something close to the $69,800 average annual income, and they only account for 22 per cent of all the money earned in the riding each year.

“The riding is within itself an example of the income polarization within the country,” says David Hulchanski, one of the leading income-inequality researchers at the Cities Centre. Moreover, though, while the income gap usually results in more low-income areas than high-income ones, the opposite is true in Toronto Centre, Hulchanski notes.

That wide income gap makes it tempting to see Toronto Centre as two solitudes, divided by Bloor St.

But McQuaig and Freeland say they have been heartened to see few signs of class warfare or resentment on either side of the Bloor St. divide. “Downtown Toronto is still a community,” says McQuaig. She says that when she does encounter resentment, it’s directed toward government and what it has done — or failed to do — in an economy that seems to be helping the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

“I have found that concern about the hollowed-out middle class is as much a concern in Rosedale as it is Regent Park,” Freeland says.

Jennifer Wootton Regan, a workplace human-rights lawyer and Rosedale resident, helps serve free meals to the homeless and other disadvantaged people in Regent Park every Friday.

When asked what she’d tell the politicians in Ottawa about Toronto Centre’s income gap, Wooton Regan says: “Don’t underestimate the fact that citizens across this city, this country — regardless of their income level — care about income disparity.”

It’s not clear what McQuaig or Freeland or any individual could do on his or her own to narrow the income gap, no matter who wins on Nov. 25. McQuaig talks more in terms of wealth redistribution and reversing the kind of policies that prized tax and program cuts over social cohesion; Freeland talks more about economic growth and partnerships with business, government and citizens.

All the candidates in Toronto Centre, including the Greens’ John Deverell (also a former journalist) and the Conservatives’ Geoff Pollock, are talking about access to housing as a top-line concern, because that’s a big issue at the doorsteps.

McQuaig and Freeland say that when Toronto Centre voters are listing their concerns, they rarely use the words “income inequality.” Instead, they’re more likely to talk about the symptoms of it — diminished hopes for their jobs, their retirement or their children’s futures.

In a riding with such a huge gap between the rich and poor, income inequality isn’t something people talk about — it’s something they live, especially when they make that short trek from one side of Bloor to the other.





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