At the start of 2022, it took four days – and only one working day – for the 100 highest paid business leaders in Canada to earn the average salary, recently pointed out the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives. As we know, it is now commonplace, the pandemic years have been good times for the ultra-rich.
This week, Oxfam-Québec added a layer to the fresco of indecency of pandemic capitalism by recalling in a new report that the fortunes of the ten richest men on the planet have doubled since March 2020, while the world has generally impoverished. In Canada, the wealth of billionaires increased by 57% during the same period.
Gender data no longer surprises anyone. We mention them from time to time, we are indignant at their constant progress, we match each time the figures of calls for political action. The speech is well constructed, ready to serve, it is obvious. Taxation should be used more. Redistributive mechanisms must be strengthened, both within Northern societies and to address inequalities on a global scale. We must act now, because the elastic of inequalities is already stretched to the maximum, and the climate crisis makes us fear the worst. Beneath the appearance of consensus, however, hides a perversion: the more the imbalance between those who possess and those who slowly die of all the deprivations becomes grotesque, spectacular, the more the figures tend towards abstraction.
However, the consequences of pandemic capitalism are very tangible, and they are also being felt at home. The spectacle of ordinary distress does not arouse indignation as easily as the data mentioned above – and this is what allows the population to look the other way. However, despite everything, since March 2020, life has indeed always become a little more difficult, especially for households and people who occupy the lowest rungs of the income scale.
Precisely, at this beginning of the year, the parade of data on the gains of the billionaires is superimposed on the headlines on inflation. We repeated it this week: annual inflation in Canada has reached a peak not seen since 1991. In December, we were already worried about the increase in the cost of living, noting that the Consumer Price Index rose 4.8%.
Anxiety first materialized at the grocery store. Much has been said about this, as food prices have seen their biggest increase in a decade. We have already heard all the stories: the food banks that no longer supply, the quality of the food that ends up in the grocery cart that is constantly wasting away, the fear of hunger that sets in. Except that the links do not always seem to be drawn in such a clear and concrete way between the figures and the daily reality that they underlie.
Take the cost of housing: Along with groceries and transportation, housing is the top expense that will be most affected by inflation in the coming year. However, although the real estate frenzy has already caused rents to explode and affordable housing is almost impossible to find in several municipalities in Quebec, we still manage to deny the existence of a crisis.
Since the specter of inflation has loomed, experts have been regularly called in to explain the phenomenon and make predictions as to the causes and likely duration of rising prices for just about everything. We try to be reassuring, by mentioning in particular the increase in wages, the astonishing increase in the net assets of Canadians during the pandemic, or the advantages that the labor shortage brings to workers. After all, isn’t there an opportunity for the workers to increase the balance of power they enjoy with regard to the employers? As if it were, quite naturally, the other side of the general increase in the cost of living.
This compensation is in fact very meager when we notice the growing number of poor workers, or when we look at the fate of people who exercise a profession that has been severely affected by the pandemic. The so-called leverage that the scarcity of labor confers on workers changes little when you work at the bottom of the wage scale, or when you have to change careers in a hurry.
Nor is there much talk about the fact that salaries have not all increased at the same rate in recent years. In Quebec, according to data from the Statistical Institute, households belonging to the poorest quintile experienced a slower increase in their income than the wealthiest households. So much so that it is above all the poorest households who have borne the brunt of the rise in the cost of living, and seen an increase in the proportion of their income devoted to subsistence expenditure.
This is obviously not as striking, not as patently indecent as the data on the greediness of the ultra-rich. The fact remains that these signs, and the relative indifference with which they are interpreted, do indicate that the “new normal” forged by the pandemic is one where a growing number of people are forced to always a little more concessions on their dignity.