Canadians are concerned about the future of their middle class

Canadians are concerned about the future of the middle class in their country, according to recent polling from Pollara Strategic Insights, which found few were optimistic about the prospects of the socioeconomic class. 

Pollara Strategic Insights has been tracking class identity in Canada since 2014, and the latest polling in the group’s ongoing series has found that Canadians don’t think there is a future for the middle class in the country. 

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“There has been a huge drop in middle-class optimism in recent years,” wrote pollsters in a report on their findings. Fewer than 31% of the 3,000 adults polled noted they were optimistic about the future of the middle class.

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That might seem worrying, but it gets worse when paired with findings from 2020 which show that the number of Canadians optimistic about the future of the middle class in the country was down significantly from 53% just a few years ago. 

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Half of the people who said they were parents (52%) reported that they were confident that their children would be able to reach the middle class or higher through hard work, a figure that was down from 79% back in 2020. 

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The figures were quite shocking, and analysis from CTV News can put the numbers in perspective since the news organization noted that optimism about the middle class was on the upswing in Canada from 2014 to 2020. 

“Prior to this year, and with the exception of a minor dip from 2017 to 2018, the level of optimism had generally increased over time from 45 percent in 2014 to 53 percent in 2020,” explained Megan DeLaire of CTV News. 

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Most of the individuals surveyed said that they thought the middle class in the country was shrinking, and the percentage of those who identified as being in the middle class was found to be 78% of the individuals polled.  

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Over half of those polled (67%) reported that they believed the middle class meant that they earned an average income. However, 39% of those making under $50,000 a year said they considered themselves middle class. 

On the other end of the income spectrum, 92% of individuals surveyed who made over $150,000 annually said that they considered themselves to be middle class—showing a wide discrepancy in the definition for people. 

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Interestingly, those earning under $50,000 were equally as likely to see themselves as part of the middle class as much as the working class, the lower class, and the poor. This dynamic seemed to reveal the complexity of the term. 

One respondent described the middle class as being “able to live comfortably. Have a home and food on the table without too much worry,” while another said: “Not rich, not poor. Live comfortably without too much worry about making ends meet.”

While defining the middle class proved to yield interesting results, analysis of the survey from data from Pollara Strategic Insights didn’t attempt to answer the question of why a lot of Canadians were worried about the middle class. 

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Megan DeLaire pointed out that many of the definitions of the middle class provided to the pollsters focused on describing a comfortable lifestyle, which was a concern that most of the survey’s respondents were dealing with. 

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A little less than half of respondents who identified themselves as being members of the middle class (43%) also reported that they were just getting by in their lives with little or no savings. 15% had fallen behind on their monthly expenses. 

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“Currently, 43% of middle class Canadians feel they are financially secure or getting ahead financially. This is down from the 65% of middle class Canadians who felt this way in 2020,” the Pollara Strategic Insights report read. 

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