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“The results are extremely encouraging, especially when we’re bombarded with myths of stagnating Canadian incomes or that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer,” he said, adding that more than a third of top earners in 1990 slipped to a lower income category by 2009. “This study blows those myths out of the water.”

The American dream, it seems, is alive in Canada — and that, he said, should turn the income inequality debate on its head, challenging the underlying assumption that Canada’s poor and rich are the same people, year in and year out. Last year’s Occupy movement, for example, called for higher taxes on higher-income earners, but those very protesters — many young and still in university — might well become those wealthier taxpayers in the not-so-distant future.

“Maybe the Occupy movement needs to be careful what it wishes for,” said Gregory Thomas, a director at the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. “People making tax policy need to be looking at the life cycles of the taxpayers. … We don’t have a permanent underclass.”

I’m not hearing anybody in the public debate say that those at the bottom never get out of the bottom or increase their income

“The natural conclusion for some folks is to tax the rich more,” echoed Mr. Lammam. “But if you understand that the people at the bottom gradually transition from low to high income over time, then you realize that you’re actually doing people at the lower end of the scale a disservice because they’re going to get there in due time.”

NDP finance critic Peggy Nash called that a “convoluted argument,” saying income mobility and income inequality are two separate issues that should not be intertwined.