Not wanting to wade into Canada’s federal election, I purposefully saved an interesting opinion piece from The Hamilton Spectator until after the dust settled.

In the article, McMaster University labour studies and political science prof, Don Wells opens our eyes to the following:

• The average pay of Canada’s 100 highest paid CEOs is over $9 million a year. That’s more than 170 times what the average worker makes.
• Incomes of the bottom half of Ontario families have been stagnant or declining. Five million Canadians are poor.
• In Hamilton, one in every five kids lives in poverty. In some neighbourhoods, it’s two in every five. Enough Hamilton kids are using food banks to fill 270 school classrooms.
• Over 1.3 million Canadians are unemployed. Hundreds of thousands more have given up looking for work or have taken part-time jobs when they can’t find full-time work.
• Three million Canadians struggle with unaffordable housing costs, spending over 30 per cent of their income on housing.

Don goes into a fair bit of detail about all of this and why it’s happening before concluding, that because “Canada is a very rich country…  it doesn’t need to be this way.“

Read more about what he has to say in this Hamilton Spectator article from October 8, 2015:  http://www.thespec.com/opinion-story/5949798-fall-of-the-middle-class/