Are you old enough to remember when being middle class was the place to be? That was back when you had a detached house in the suburbs with a two-car garage (full of bicycles), two kids and three televisions. You lived from paycheque to paycheque but you could still go to the Caribbean or Europe for a couple weeks at the right time of year. Well, now you are a senior, you are finding out how the poor people live.
And it is not just the upset of being called ‘Dearie’ by middle-aged cashiers but the fact that half your purchases are from the ‘Reduced to Clear’ table. Never mind that gas is cheaper, that old sedan has only so many trips to Walmart left in it. And the government is talking of reprocessing your driver’s license anyway.
The real problem is as a senior you have been forgotten by all the political parties. The Conservatives are only coming up with benefits for rich people with kids. It was like Ontario PC Leader Timmy Hudak who used “hard-working families” in every second line of his stump speeches in the last Ontario election.
If you were still middle class, even Tommy Mulcair’s New Democrats would still love you. No longer interested in the poor, Mulcair outlined his plan to go after middle class voters to his party last week. He wants to keep the Conservatives’ bribes for middle class child care benefits while establishing a $15 per day child care service. He intends to use the same funds as the Conservatives would have used for income splitting—and if that does not help, he will increase corporate taxes.
The blame for all of this middle class pandering rests with Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau. He has been travelling across Canada as he says, from sea to sea to sea, taking selfies with as many middle class Canadians as he can find.
The only problem all the parties are finding is that the middle class is a quickly disappearing breed. The stretch today from poverty to comfortable in economic terms is a wide and mainly empty gulf. Back in the middle of the 20th Century, a cocky middle class had just won a world war and nothing could stop us. We were defining the politics of the day and feeling empowered. The unions were strong and were bringing the labouring class into prominence and political heft as part of the middle class of the day.
We had the power and yet we were beaten back from the gates of true democracy. The one per cent had no use for Pierre Trudeau’s Just Society and we were the ones who paid the price for the inflationary times and then the alternating slide into recession. Unions were discredited, a degree was no guarantee of a job and the middle class became a myth. It only exists today in the rhetoric of political speak.
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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry
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