Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland believes the government’s policies are playing a role in offsetting the economic forces driving increases in inequality.
“We’re leaning against it through very specific policies designed to support middle class Canadians — and people working hard to join the middle class,” Freeland said during a press event in Scarborough on Thursday.
The comments came in response to a report from Statistics Canada that revealed income inequality reached the highest level ever recorded since records began in 1999. As of the middle of 2024, the richest 20 per cent of Canadians owned 67 per cent of the nation’s total wealth while the poorest 40 per cent owned just 2.7 per cent of it.
The issue is something of a pet subject for the journalist-turned-cabinet minister. In 2012, while working as the editor of Thomson Reuters Digital, she wrote Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else. In it, she argued new technology and increased economic globalization were driving people out of the middle class and into poverty. “My view then, and my view now, is that this is a real problem,” Freeland said. “It is an economic problem, but it is also a social and political problem.”
She added that she felt Canadians want to live in a “middle class country” — one in which any hard-working person is able to join the middle classes. “For me, that is how we create a healthy economy and how we create the healthy society we all want to live in.”
Freeland went on to highlight three of her government’s policies she believed are working to reduce the divide between the richest and poorest Canadians. “[Our early learning and childcare program] has cut costs down [by] 50 per cent here in Ontario — that is a saving of about $8,000 per-child per-family,” she said. “We are working hard to drive those costs down to $10-per-day. . . . It makes it easier for women to have a child and to have a job.”
Freeland, who became Canada’s first female Minister of Finance in 2020, also noted that more than two million people had taken advantage of the Canadian Dental Care Plan since its launch in 2022. The CDHC provides dental coverage to otherwise uninsured Canadians with household incomes below $90,000 per annum. “We are seeing a real enthusiasm among Canadians to get their teeth [and] their dental care taken care of. . . . It’s making people healthier and helping pay cheques go farther.”
She also mentioned the Clean Technology Investment Tax Credit. First introduced in the 2022 Fall Economic Statement, the program provides tax credits for capital invested in adopting and operating new clean technologies on properties.
“[This] is really ensuring that we have the kind of economic growth that creates good paying middle-class jobs,” said Freeland. “For the first time in Canadian history [the tax credits] have a labour requirement. To take advantage of the full value of [the CT ITC], you have to be paying the prevailing union wage.”
Freeland also discussed several recent housing policies. One allows for first-time home owners to receive special insured mortgages with 30-year amortization periods and lower minimum down payment requirements. In December, the cap on these mortgages will be raised from $1 million to $1.5 million.
Another is meant to encourage Canadians to build more apartments on their properties. When it comes into effect in January, homeowners will be able to access 90 per cent of their homes value through in order to construct secondary suites in basements, attics or lane ways.
“Really, what we’re saying is that we want to encourage supply, supply, supply in the housing sector. . . . This is what I would describe as a middle class, supply-side measure.”
