In The Line, Howard Anglin offers some observations on how Canada’s class system developed and how it can be very roughly delineated:
This comfortably flat image of our social hierarchy, however, belies a more complicated series of gradations that, while clearly marked, are rarely observed and almost never described accurately. Peter C. Newman mapped some of the terrain in his three volumes on The Canadian Establishment, but his account was already dated when he began it in 1975 and it was a work of history rather than social commentary by the time he finished in 1998. [Line editor Jen] Gerson’s own description of the Canadian class system explains why it can be hard for outsiders, and even insiders, to see it: “[W]e manage the cognitive dissonance presented by the haves and have-nots of housing,” she says, “by requiring our rich people to keep quiet. They should wear clothes that are well-cut and well-designed, but not flash. Buy the multi-millionaires car, but paint it in a sedate hue.”
Social sorting is intrinsic to human nature, perhaps even necessary — as the Bard has Ulysses remind us: “Take but degree away … and, hark, what discord follows!” — and it’s here in Canada too, if you look for it. Like the United States, Canadians early on replaced a class system based on titles with one based on the more easily-acquired currency of, well, currency. And, as in America, this immediately created a new opportunity for class to subtly reassert itself.
I used to joke that the only meaningful class division in Canada is whether you use “summer” as a noun or as a verb; lately I’ve developed the Starbucks test. In this analogy, Starbucks is Canada’s middle class, with Tim Hortons and fast food franchise coffee below, and specialty cafes and boutique chains (Matchstick, Phil & Sebastian, Bridgehead) above.
Unlike the crude measure of income, coffee choice better replicates a traditional class system because it carries an implicit sense of social solidarity, cultural assumptions and biases. During the days of the Harper government, Tim Hortons became a symbol to a certain sort of conservative as iconic as the Greek fisherman’s cap is to aging Marxists. The Maple Leaf red cup represented the honest values of rural and suburban working families, in contrast to the globalist elites with their overpriced green Starbucks. Starbucks was sipped at dog parks and served in board rooms; Tim Hortons got the job done on a cold winter morning: it was Don Cherry in a mug.
The Starbucks test is a silly heuristic, but it reveals something about the complex nature of class: an aristocrat may be penniless, and a billionaire may love his Tims. It also puts the middle class back in its traditional place as the uneasy middle-child of the social order.
In the old British system, there was pride in being working class. There was a bond of mutual support that grew out of the shared experience of hard labour and was reinforced by institutions like working men’s clubs, the British Legion, and the trade union movement. The middle-class striver with his airs and pretensions, his flash new car and his evolving accent, was a figure of general mockery, even more to the working men he left behind than to the upper classes he aspired to join. Class was about more than money; it was an identity. And there was nothing that gave you away as middle class more than worrying about being middle class — an anxiety exploited by Nancy Mitford in her tongue-in-cheek guide to “U” and “Non-U” language and behaviour. The Starbucks test reveals something similar, something more reflective of Canada’s reality than the Liberal vision of one big happy middle-class family.
Tim Worstall explained that the British middle class is still despised by the upper class and hated by the lower class. Not a model for encouraging aspirational working class folks to “move up”.
