Commentary
I have lived and worked in Toronto for most of my adult life. During the economic downturns of the early 1980s and early 1990s, I don’t recall seeing food bank lineups stretching down the block or people waiting outside churches for a meal. That was not the landscape of those years. It is the landscape now. Something has changed structurally, and the data shows exactly what.
Across four distinct economic eras since 1983—each representing a recovery and expansion phase when the system was supposedly functioning as intended—every key indicator of ordinary Canadian economic life has moved in the wrong direction.
