Good middle-class jobs can come from anywhere. Around the world, whether you're talking about IT, high-technology information jobs or resource-based industries, we see that it depends on how you treat the environment for labour relations. Canada has been pursuing a low-wage strategy for several decades now. We have an unusually high proportion of low-wage jobs.
Income inequality doesn't fall from the sky. We look at one another and we value each other's work. We say it's normal that that guy gets that much and that person gets that much, so there's a kind of social and cultural consensus around the value of different forms of work, which is why I have pointed out the importance of unions in many of the jurisdictions in which growing inequality has not occurred and in fact has been reversed. There has been a strong union component because that's actually the countervailing voice to the growing strength of employers everywhere around the world, especially in the wake of the recession—there's been growing corporate concentration.
If you cannot negotiate on an equal playing field and have some kind of collective strength, more of the rents from this process will flow to the employers and to the property owners.
You also asked a question about what these nations are doing that prevent the middle class from stagnating. Let me run a thought experiment on you. What if we had no reduction in income inequality at all but we improved people's access, whether they're low, high, or middle income households, to transit, to more affordable and accessible, high-quality child care that prepares kids for learning readiness, to better public school education and high school completion, and to more affordable housing? All of those things will improve our quality of life and create a richer middle class. I think we can do this.