Justin Trudeau celebrates with his wife Sophie Gregoire and their children Xavier and Ella-Grace after winning the Liberal leadership. Trudeau loves to talk about the plight of the “middle class” — but does the term even describe the average Canadian anymore? THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick

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Every one of our political parties pledges fealty to the interests, hopes and aspirations of the middle class — perhaps none more than Justin Trudeau’s Liberals.

But who is middle class, anyway?

Canadians are accustomed to political differences based on regions, language and ethnicity. But unlike in Europe, where class has always been the source of fundamental political divisions, here in Canada politicians talk about just one class — the middle class — and they talk about it as if it were a soothing balm.

After the Second World War, Canadians enjoyed an amazing burst of prosperity. Even the worker on an assembly line could reasonably hope to own a home, a car, maybe even a boat.

Meanwhile, the rising cost of labour meant that many of the well-to-do could no longer afford domestic servants. Their lifestyles too became distinctly middle class.

As income equality increased, so did social mobility. If you weren’t middle class already, you could sensibly aspire to be — and certainly with hard work, discipline and just a little luck you could lift your children into the middle class.

There were still rich and there were still poor, but the middle class sprawled to dominate our society and our politics.

It was an environment in which the Liberal party thrived. Economic growth was the central pillar. But the universal social programs the Liberals adopted, such as medicare and pensions, also worked politically by bringing greater financial security to the burgeoning middle class.

It makes sense that the Liberals under Justin Trudeau would want to invoke that cozy world as he strives to revive his party. It makes sense too that the Conservatives and the NDP also would grapple for elements of that legacy.

But let’s be clear: the middle class of the second half of the twentieth century no longer exists except in our imaginations.

In recent decades, inequality has been rising in most western countries, including Canada, though not as dramatically here as in the United States and Britain. Rather than converging into a dominant middle class, we are again separating out.

Just as important, as inequality rises, social mobility generally also falls — and it has done so in Canada, as economist Miles Corak has forcefully argued.

Most Canadians — about four-fifths of us — have reason to expect that our children will have trouble sustaining the middle class circumstance that so recently seemed like a Canadian birthright.

What this means as a practical matter is that the children of the genuinely wealthy — the four or five per cent of the population who can expect to inherit life-changing wealth — are also likely to inherit their parents’ place in the social hierarchy.

Another group of people — perhaps 15 per cent of the total population — also have the resources, including access to high quality education, to make sure their children will remain among the haves and not fall into the have-nots. These people, who consider themselves middle class, include (for example) families in which you have two professional incomes — a doctor married to a lawyer, perhaps — and relatively few children.

But most Canadians — about four-fifths of us — have reason to expect that our children will have trouble sustaining the middle class circumstance that so recently seemed like a Canadian birthright.

As part of a remarkable survey on social, economic and political attitudes earlier this year. Frank Graves at EKOS found that just under half of us still consider ourselves middle class — down from about two-thirds just a decade earlier.

Even more striking, those who call themselves “working class” jumped from about a quarter of the population to about a third in just two years.

This certainly does not reflect a surge in class consciousness led by the beleaguered union movement. And it certainly has not been engendered by the NDP, who long ago dropped any pretensions about being the vanguard of the working class. For decades now, the NDP have tried to broaden their base by talking about “ordinary people” and more recently simply about the “middle class”.

The likeliest explanation for this jump in working class self-identification is simply that more and more people in blue-collar and pink-collar jobs who once aspired to the middle class, for themselves or their children, have given up that hope.

At the same time, not surprisingly, those describing themselves as poor have doubled in the last decade.

What this means is that the language the political parties use to talk about class is less and less true — even aspirationally. It is calculated to disguise rather than articulate the emerging economic differences in our society.

Among people who consider themselves middle class, there is a group which has benefitted from the rise in inequality. They may be frightened that their gains could be eroded. But they are in an objectively different circumstance from the much larger group of self-described middle class who are experiencing decline — in some cases a dizzying decline.

And even they are different from those who have had the courage to look at their circumstances and acknowledge that they are not sensibly categorized with the middle class, and neither are their children likely to be.

All this implies a very different politics than what we have been accustomed to — or what we are being offered.

Follow Paul Adams on Twitter @padams29

Paul Adams is a veteran of the CBC, the Globe and Mail and EKOS Research. He has taught political science at the University of Manitoba and journalism at Carleton, where he is an associate professor. His new book Power Trap, on the dilemma of Canada’s opposition parties, was published in September.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.