Once again, the advantaged professionals, knowledge workers and creative class are clustered around the urban core, especially on and around Mont-Royal, home to the Université de Montréal. There are also several clusters to the west of the city in the Westmount and Notre-Dame-De-Grâce communities, which are well served by transit and where Concordia University is located. Montreal’s largest concentration of the service class is far out in the suburban fringe, especially in the transit-poor former industrial communities of Montreal-Est, Pointe-aux-Trembles, Anjou and Montreal-Nord. Not a single predominantly working class neighborhood remains in the metro.

An interactive map allows you to zoom in on each of the three cities and pinpoint these class divides neighborhood-by-neighborhood.

Taken together, these maps present a troubling picture of a new kind of class divide and socioeconomic segregation. Across each of Canada’s largest cities and metros, the affluent and educated have colonized the most central, economically functional, well-served locations, in downtowns, but also out into the suburbs along transit routes, near universities and other knowledge institutions, and close to waterfronts and other natural amenities. Most of all, they want to – and do - cluster and concentrate around one another gaining additional economic leverage.

As housing costs in these highly desirable urban and suburban locations are driven up, the options of the service and working classes are limited to what’s left over. The large and growing service class is shunted into the most disadvantaged and least desirable areas of the central city and into the far-off peripheries of the most economically distressed and disconnected suburbs. As a result, the people who need transit the most are pushed the farthest away from it and from economic opportunity, and must endure the longest and most arduous commutes. Canada’s service class is even more geographically concentrated and isolated than it is in the United States. And it is striking and troubling how few blue-collar neighborhoods remain in Toronto’s major metro area.

The shape of this new divided city and metropolis is different — and more complex — than the old urban-suburban divides of the past. The new class geography does not conform to the old “hole in the donut” model of affluent suburbs surrounding poor cities. Nor does it follow the more recent idea of a “great inversion," in which the rich flow back to the city and the poor are displaced into the suburbs. What we are seeing is rather a patchwork of concentrated advantage and concentrated disadvantage that cuts across center cities and suburbs alike.

These new class divides are cause for deep concern. Canada’s once thriving middle-class neighborhoods are being hollowed out. Instead we are seeing enclaves of advantage juxtaposed against a growing sea of socio-economic disadvantage.

Tory’s victory signals a new and better day for Toronto. But the city’s underlying socio-economic fault lines remain. If left unaddressed, they will continue to deepen, with future backlash lurking somewhere down the road. Rob Ford cautioned as much on election night: “If you know anything about the Ford family, we never, ever, ever give up," he told supporters at his victory party."In four more years, you're going to see another example of the Ford family never ever giving up." Who knows when this backlash will rear its head in Canada’s other large cities?

Worse, the growing geographic separation of the classes threatens the very essence of the Canadian Dream. The intersection of class and geography shapes everything from where we go to school and how we vote to our opportunities for upward mobility.

Just as our cities and urban centers are reviving, their growing class divisions threaten their further development in new and even more vexing ways.