Media Clipping — July 21, 2001, The Halifax Herald

Rethinking the wealth gap, Nova Scotia-style

By Ralph Surette

ONE OF THE ABIDING beliefs of our time is that when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, Marxism had been beaten once and for all.

Yet with global capitalism high in the saddle, the condition that underpins Marxism - the separation of the rich from the poor - has by all reports been growing like the plague.

In the last 10 years, with the world becoming one economic oyster and with wealth piling up like never before, the figures showing this growing gulf have been relentless.

The developed world gets richer and the rest get poorer. Regions within countries show the same drift. The low-income population loses ground relentlessly while millionaires and billionaires proliferate.

GPI Atlantic, which is constructing a "genuine progress index" for Nova Scotia to measure economic progress in a more complete way than standard methods, brought the subject home with a thud this week.

According to these measurements, drawn mostly from Statistics Canada data, Nova Scotia's poor are the poorest in the country - poorer even than in Newfoundland which has traditionally been on the bottom of the heap. For the very poorest, it's by quite a bit - 12 per cent poorer than in Newfoundland.

But it's not just the poor. The middle class has been losing ground, too, mostly everywhere, but faster and deeper in Nova Scotia. Only the top 20 per cent have been reaping income rewards. A full 80 per cent of Nova Scotians are worse off than they were 20 years ago, with the lower 60 per cent of households having an average income lower than that in any other province.

The poorest 20 per cent have seen their real income (wages, salaries, and income from self-employment and investments) drop by 50 per cent since 1990 - the sharpest drop in the country. It stands, as of the latest figures, at $8,205 after taxes.

Middle-income Nova Scotians have seen their incomes drop by 20 per cent. Meanwhile, the gap between rich and poor is among the highest in the country, there are more poor women and children . . . and so on.

What are we to make of this cold wash? In principle, it's not that startling since it's part of a worldwide phenomenon. What is jolting is that Nova Scotia is again dead last in a pile of brutal statistics.

If we're looking for explanations, we could point to the federal cuts in the mid-1990s that fell disproportionately on Nova Scotia and kept this province in recession several years later than other provinces. And continuous nips to provincial government spending, notably the fact that we have the lowest welfare rates in the country.

The private sector replaced all the jobs cut by government, and more, reducing the unemployment rate. But for the most part, they're minimum wage jobs, or the self-employed merely scratching out a living.

But isn't this a short-term phenomenon? Won't Nova Scotia, and for that matter, Nigeria and Uzbekistan, catch up, after which everything will be OK?

Besides, if you can believe the National Post, these poverty measurements are phoney anyway - the typical stuff of left-wing bureaucrats.

And, of course, "a rising tide lifts all boats," as the mantra goes.

But what if, like Nortel stock or the Nasdaq index, the tide is actually ebbing? As we know, an ebbing tide doesn't leave all boats equally stranded.

The fact is the time has now come to cool the hyperventilating rhetoric and take stock of the downside of what the frenzied growth of the last decade has brought along with more wealth at the top. This includes a culture of greed, a separation of the classes that can only bring increasing grief, a tearing of the social fabric, a worsening of the environment, a destruction of necessary public services, a poisoning of the mood of nurses and other vital workers, and have-nots everywhere being slagged as welfare bums by the likes of Ontario Premier Mike Harris.

This rethink must happen everywhere, but Nova Scotia is as good a place as any to start. In this latest of a series of reports, demonstrating that progress is not the same as mere economic growth, GPI Atlantic has already booted it up.

Copyright © Ralph Surette