The phrase has taken on almost an Alice in Wonderland quality for Justin Trudeau and his recently created “Minister of Middle Class Prosperity”:
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”
It could be addressed, says Chris Selley … and really should be:
In the meantime, the Liberals have another problem. It is far less important than Iran or China, but it’s also far more embarrassing than either, because it is entirely of their own making and so easily fixed. It is as follows: Trudeau has given Ottawa MP Mona Fortier the new cabinet title of “Minister of Middle Class Prosperity,” but no one in the government has yet bothered to define “middle class.” And everyone is laughing at them.
Mona Fortier, Minister of Middle Class Prosperity and Associate Minister of Finance.
© HOC-CDC. Photo by Christian Diotte, House of Commons Photo Services, November 2019.Fortier has tried to explain herself. “We have to make sure we represent the realities in a rural, remote or even urban setting, (and) regional differences,” she told CTV upon her appointment. “The income required to attain a middle-class lifestyle can vary greatly based on Canadians’ specific situation,” she told the same network this week.
She’s right! Pack up your middle-class lifestyle in Small Town A, and you might well not recognize it when you unpack in Big City B. The thing is, though, statisticians — including scores of them in the federal government’s employ — are across this. They know very well that a Canadian dollar does not purchase the same quantity of goods and services in every part of the country, and they have all sorts of ingenious ways to compensate.
If it were true that “middle class” can’t be defined because it connotes different things in different places, then the same would go for “poverty.” But Canada has never had any problem defining poverty on a relative basis. And in 2018, this very Liberal government adopted an absolute measure of poverty as well: the Market Basket Measure, which estimates the cost of “a modest standard of living” in any given place, and calculates how many of us can’t afford it.
So the “poverty line” in Small Town A is not the same as it is in Big City B, and … sorry, this very simple concept doesn’t need to be explained to National Post readers any further. The point is, defining poverty was a good thing. Defining the middle class obviously doesn’t matter as much, but since this government seems utterly obsessed with it — and with evidence-based policy! — there is no good reason for it not to do likewise.
