The problem is income inadequacy, not affordability

Posted on by Dr. Trevor Hancock

The bottom half of the population has seen its share of national income dropping, while the top one per cent’s share has grown dramatically.

Dr. Trevor Hancock

22 September 2025

702 words

Food Banks Canada just released its annual report on poverty in Canada. Key findings are that one in ten Canadians are living in poverty, over 40 percent are paying more than 30 percent of their income on housing (which is the Statistics Canada definition of unaffordable housing), and 40 percent are feeling worse off compared to last year.

Of course the core business of food banks is hunger and food insecurity. The latter is defined by Statistics Canada as being unable to or uncertain of the ability to acquire or consume an adequate diet or sufficient food in socially acceptable ways. A May 2025 report from Statistics Canada stated that in 2023 one in four people in Canada – and almost half of people in one-parent families – reported they were living in food insecure households.

That was a roughly 15 percent increase over 2022, and the third annual increase in a row. Moreover, most of that increase was among those -19 out of 25 percent – who experienced moderate to severe food insecurity. This situation has led a number of cities in Ontario to declare food insecurity emergencies. The CEO of Toronto’s Daily Bread Food Bank noted in a CBC interview that “we need to feed more than one in 10 Torontonians.”

This is happening, we should remind ourselves, in one of the richest countries in the world.

Often, this situation is presented as an issue of affordability; food, housing and other basic needs are just too expensive. But while that is true, there is another way to look at it, as Valerie Tarasuk – a prominent Canadian food researcher at the University of Toronto – notes in that same CBC interview: “I think we have a fundamental problem with income that needs to be addressed.”

That fundamental problem with income is not new. In its 2022 report the World Inequality Lab noted: “Income and wealth inequalities have been on the rise nearly everywhere since the 1980s, following a series of deregulation and liberalization programs which took different forms in different countries.”

What they mean, of course, is the adoption by Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the USA of neoliberal economic policies that were then adopted more widely. That is true of Canada too, as the Lab’s report on Canadamakes clear: “Income inequality in Canada increased significantly from 1982 until the mid-2000s.”

Between the Second World War and the mid-1980s the bottom half of the Canadian population had around 20 – 22 percent of Canada’s pre-tax income, while the top ten percent had a bit under 30 percent and the top one percent had between 6 and 7 percent. By 2005 that was dramatically different: The bottom half of the population received just 17 percent of pre-tax income, the top ten percent had reached 38 percent and the top one percent got 14 percent.

In other words, the bottom half of the population – half, note – saw their share of national income decline nearly one fifth, while the top one percent more than doubled their share. Since then, the report notes, “income inequality has decreased slightly although it remains far above the levels observed in the early 1980s.”

This inequality was worsened because while pretty much everyone paid between 40 and 44 percent of their income in taxes overall in 2022, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives reported last year, the 90-95th percentile paid only 37 percent and the 95-99th percentile paid just 34 percent – less than the lowest ten percent, who paid 35 percent. Shockingly the top one percent paid a mere 24 percent of their income in total taxes.

The 2022 World Inequality Report made a vitally important point about this situation. Noting there are significant differences in the extent of the growth of inequality between different countries they concluded “inequality is not inevitable, it is a political choice.”

So it is up to us. Do we want to perpetuate the poverty, hunger and unaffordable housing situation for low-income Candians? Or do we want to go back to the decades after the Second World War when the rich paid their share and the bottom half took a larger share of the income?

© Trevor Hancock, 2025

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

Let’s have a conversation about the future we want for this region

Posted on by Dr. Trevor Hancock

We have a tendency to both defer to and blame government, to expect it to solve all our problems

Dr. Trevor Hancock

25 August 2025

701 words

Last week I suggested we need a national People’s Wellbeing Commission to craft a new vision for Canada, one focused on how we become a society committed to equitable health now and for future generations while living within planetary boundaries.

As I noted in an article in July, we need a similar process to answer the same question locally: How do we govern this region to maximise the wellbeing of all who live here – and all who will live here in future generations – while reducing our overall ecological footprint and protecting and enhancing the bioregion and all our relations?

I am now in the process of developing a proposal to do just that. At the core of that proposal is a simple idea: We have to talk with one another, we need conversations everywhere we can, involving as many people as we can – and particularly young people, whose future we are creating – about the future we want.

Key to this idea is the difference between government and governance. We have a tendency to both defer to and blame government, to expect it to solve all our problems while we get on with our lives. Too often our default mode is to see ourselves simply as taxpayers, looking to get the most we can for the fewest dollars – and when we don’t get it, being grumpy! In that respect, we are not acting differently from our role as consumers.

But governance is different. I have always liked the definition put forth more than two decades ago by UN Habitat, the UN’s Human Settlements Programme. “Governance”, UN Habitat stated, is “the sum of the many ways individuals and institutions, public and private, plan and manage the common affairs of the city.”

As a public institution – and not the only one – government is just one of the ways in which we do that. But decisions made by citizens, First Nations, businesses, civil society organisations, land-owners and developers, faith communities and many others also shape and manage the city. We are all in it together.

As Saul Klein and Arti Freeman (Times Colonist, July 11th) wrote: “To build a better future, it’s not enough to bridge divides, we must also re-imagine the systems themselves. That takes more than policy reform. It takes collective imagination as a strategy to envision new ways of organizing our economies, our democracies, and our relationships with one another and the planet.”

So the people, organisations and institutions of the Greater Victoria Region (GVR) must come together both to understand the challenges we face and engage in an act of collective imagination leading to a better future. Such an approach has been called ‘anticipatory democracy’, a concept proposed by Alvin Toffler in his 1970 book Future Shockand expanded on by my good friend and colleague Clem Bezold, who founded the Institute for Alternative Futures. There are good examples of anticipatory democracy projects from which we can learn from communities in Germany, Japan and elsewhere.

I suggest the creation of a GVR Futures Council that will bring together leaders from key sectors across the GVR. The Council would be responsible for providing overall strategic direction to a multi-year process of extensive public engagement to consider the challenges we face and potential responses. While some of that engagement can be virtual, the vast majority of it must be in-person, face-to-face conversation.

There are many ways in which such conversations can be organised, from a program of Kitchen Table Conversations – a well-established social technology – to citizens’ assemblies; from creating shared stories of place to neighbourhood vision workshops, from a computer model/video game of the region (think SimCity); from ‘idea and practice incubators’ to a web-based platform to identify, map and make available the people, businesses and organisations in this region that are creating the future we need.

In short, we need to shift from being mere taxpayers – grumpy or otherwise – to being engaged citizens, helping to co-design the future we want for our children and grandchildren, one in which we maximise the wellbeing of all who live here – and all who will live here in future generations – while living within planetary boundaries.

© Trevor Hancock, 2025

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the                                            University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy