By: Jeffrey Simpson - Globe and Mail - July 20, 2011

The poor, it is said, will always be with us. Yes, but how many poor must there be?

In Canada, there are too many poor people. The country that often likes to congratulate itself can’t take comfort from an inescapable fact: We’re becoming a more unequal society.

Legislative committees and think tanks sometimes work on poverty, but, for the general public, income inequalities are consigned to the dead-letter box in this apparently conservative age. Even the NDP, which takes poverty more seriously than the other parties, has taken to talking incessantly about the “middle class,” figuring that’s where the voters are and where the poor would rather be if they could.

The Conference Board of Canada, hardly a bastion of far-left thinking, just reminded Canadians about the growing income inequalities in their society.

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