America’s middle-class defeat: How Canada shamed the wealthiest nation on earth

http://www.salon.com/2014/05/31/americas_middle_class_defeat_how_canada_shamed_the_wealthiest_nation_on_earth/


Toyota automaker employee moves an engine at the Toyota engine assembly line in Huntsville, Alabama. (Credit: Reuters/Carlos Barria)


A few summers ago, I spent six weeks in Canada, as part of a 10,000-mile Great Lakes Circle tour. From Pigeon River on Lake Superior to Kingston on Lake Ontario, I drove and camped my way across Ontario. On Manitoulin Island, I went on a fishing charter captained by a retired nickel miner named Tom Power. The Nickel Belt is a stronghold of Canada’s most socialistic party, the New Democrats. When the conversation turned to politics (as it often did with Canadians during the George W. Bush years), Tom made a statement that would have tabbed him as a Marxist crank on the other side of the lakes.

“I don’t understand why anyone has to earn more than $200,000 a year,” he said. “I mean, honestly, what are you going to do with all that money?”

Right then, my rod bent toward the water, so I had to abandon our discussion of economics to land a six-pound salmon. But I thought about it again in Toronto, when I visited Jane and Finch, an immigrant neighborhood that was reputedly the most dangerous turf in the Greater Toronto Area. I expected to see Johnny Too Bads in beehive rasta caps, and dingy apartment blocks with smoke burns around broken windows. To my disappointment, it didn’t look like a slum at all. It looked like my grandparents’ civil-service ghetto in a suburb of Washington, D.C. The housing projects were clean white monuments. Ranch houses looked out on barbered greensward parks.

“There have been some shootings lately,” a Guyanese-Canadian bureaucrat told me at the Community Information Center inside the local shopping mall. “But we don’t have ghettoes here like you would think of in the United States. We have scatter housing. We try not to concentrate poverty in one place.”