Social cohesion is not just the absence of conflict.  It is the ability to move forward in the same direction with shared purpose.    It is a mandatory requisite for a smaller, trading country like Canada.    We can only exercise our full strength through some essential level of agreement.

Canada must have continuous nation building by furthering a genuine consensus across provinces, cultures and languages. We require much more than passive tolerance of one another to advance on our common problems.

At the core of the Canadian idea has been a broad definition of success as shared progress for all its citizens, measured in terms of income, opportunity, well-being and enjoyment of social rights and freedoms.   It has been coupled with a special responsibility to ensure those who are vulnerable are not left behind.   The assumption of common advancement has reached across political party lines, governments and generations.  This Canadian aspiration gave expression to underlying individual values of hard work, fairness, merit, and shared responsibility taking. 

Decades of accomplishments in support of shared advancement have been followed by a period of stagnation where outcomes have become stalled and begun to be reversed, for a variety of reasons.   Consider:

• We are running the very real risk is that our children will be the first “reverse generation” in Canadian history, one that is less well off than the one before. 
• Growing income inequality is becoming entrenched. 
•  Middle class families are working more but not getting ahead except by borrowing much more and saving much less. 
• Health care universality is threatened by a loss of faith in its affordability.  
• Poverty has become a bog that entraps people contending with life challenges or transitions, caused in part  by ineffective government policy.  
• Our collective failure to grasp sustainable development puts us on the other side of our values and international expectations.

In part, this is the result of loss of will and focus.  

In recent years, almost imperceptibly, Canadians have been cajoled by a variety of voices on the right to reduce expectations; to accept the lowest common denominator of what we can accomplish together.   Individuals and families are being encouraged to look after their own interests.   Economic problems are portrayed the results of “international” and “global” conditions beyond our reach.   Our policy choices are reduced to growth in GDP, (our so-called “standard of living”) regardless of benefits delivered for the well-being of average Canadians.  Social needs and government responses are vilified as complex, costly and muddled jurisdictionally.

There is tremendous opportunity today to forge a new consensus for Canada.   Canadians are a fundamentally generous and optimistic people.   The paper explores how income inequality, is not a product of forces out of our control but a product designed overyears of focus on the wrong goals, framed to control and divide and used to disengage and disempower an entire generation. It focuses what the data tells us and how to rebuild a collective call to action as a nation and a global village.