Good morning, everyone. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Mr. Chair, for seating me beside Madame Smarty-pants here, because I get to take a different tack, knowing that Armine would bring forward a lot of great solutions and also help us dissect the numbers.
I'm the head of the Canadian Council on Social Development, the oldest organization of its kind in Canada, founded in 1920. We came up with the concept of EI, disability pension, and old age pension, to name a few important policies.
I want to talk about inequality from the perspective of, “Why bother?” Armine is right, this is a defining issue, and it's important that you are exploring it in the way you are today. But why bother? Is it just a buzz? Is it something that came out of the Occupy movement, or is it something much more substantial than that?
Fundamentally, if inequality is left to fester, it will tear apart the very fabric of Canadian society. Equality connects us. It binds us together and it builds cohesion, and social cohesion is critical. It's not just the absence of conflict, it's the ability to move forward in the same direction with shared purpose. It is a requisite for a smaller trading country like Canada. We can only exercise our full strength through some essential level of agreement as a country. Canada must have a continuous nation-building process by furthering a genuine consensus across provinces, cultures, and languages. We require more than a passive tolerance of one another for us to advance our common problems and our common purpose.
At the core of our Canadian idea there has been a broad definition of success as shared progress for all citizens, measured in terms of income, opportunity, well-being, and the enjoyment of social rights and freedoms. It has been coupled with a special responsibility to ensure that those who are vulnerable are not left behind. In Canada the assumption of common advancement has reached across political perspectives, governments, and generations. This Canadian aspiration gave expression to an underlying individual value of hard work, fairness, merit, and shared responsibility. But we are at a crossroads. We are faced with a choice of shared prosperity or increased polarity. Decades of accomplishment in support of our shared advancement have been followed by a period of stagnation, as Armine and others have indicated today. It's stalling progress, and now that progress is beginning to unravel.
Consider the following. We are running the very real risk that our children will be the first reverse generation in Canadian history: one that is less well off than any one before it—less well off in employment opportunity, health outcome, the environment they inherit, income attainment, and the list goes on. Growing income inequality is becoming entrenched. Middle-class families are working more but not getting ahead, except by borrowing more than they have to spend. Poverty is becoming a bog that entraps people contending with life challenges or transitions caused in part by ineffective government policy. Our collective failure to grasp sustainable development and deal with our environmental concerns puts us on the other side of our values and our international expectations. In part, is this because we have lost the will and the focus? It's a question for all of us to answer.
In recent years, almost imperceptibly, Canadians have been cajoled to reduce their expectations, to accept a lower common denominator of what we can accomplish together. Individuals and families are being encouraged to look after their own interests. Economic problems are now portrayed as the result of international or global conditions well beyond our reach.