Times are tough for the middle class which sees, with exorbitant housing prices, the explosion in the cost of living and the environmental crisis, its dreams a little further away each day.
Élyse Gamache-Bélisle would like to be able to buy a small duplex, where she would live with her two children in the Villeray district of Montreal, where she has always lived. But even though she earns more than $80,000 a year, she doesn’t have the means to realize this dream. So she launched a crowdfunding campaign, in which she invites her neighbors to help her, in particular to collect returnable aluminum bottles and cans. Two hundred thousand cans later, along with donations and other items sold on Marketplace, she has raised $40,000 in two years, which still leaves her far from the down payment she would need.
This sometimes gives him the impression of chasing one of those mirages that appear in the deserts and which always move away when you try to approach them. When it’s not the price of houses that is constantly rising, it’s a pandemic that puts us into forced unemployment, a return to school that increases our debt, or the cost of living that shoots up. “I’m tired of picking up cans!” she exclaims, one of the rare times we see her lose her smile.
Élyse and her small family are among the fifteen people – in addition to a handful of experts – presented in the documentary middle class means, which will be broadcast on March 15 on Télé-Québec. Alongside director Guillaume Sylvestre (The most beautiful province, DYP, Steak house…), the producer, screenwriter and journalist Isabelle Maréchal wanted to meet “our middle class, to us, and to give it a voice” at a time when we feel rising in it a feeling of frustration.
One in two Quebecers
In Quebec, almost one in two workers is part of the middle class, the documentary recalls, with an income of $39,800 to $62,000 per year after tax for a single person, and $62,000 to $123,000. $ for a family of four. “The middle class is the silent majority. The one that politicians talk about during the elections and that they claim to defend afterwards. »
It is a socioeconomic status to which more and more Quebecers from different types of households have had access in recent decades thanks to the famous Quebec social and economic model, explains the economist of the University of Sherbrooke François Delorme, to the point that it would be more accurate, according to him, to speak of “the middle classes” than of “the middle class”. But “it’s changing,” says the expert. Due in particular to the rise in the cost of living – starting with that of housing – which is financially strangling more and more households, to the point that “we are witnessing a downgrading of the middle class”.
“Housing, like food, water or natural resources, are not goods like any other,” insisted Isabelle Maréchal in an interview with the Duty. They can’t just go to the highest bidder. »
The middle class is the silent majority. The one that politicians talk about during the elections and that they claim to defend afterwards.
For the young couple formed by Mélanie and Franz, the solution was to leave Montreal for a small community “in the suburbs” of Montmagny, 70 km east of Quebec City. For Jean-François and Mélissa and their 7 children, the change was even more radical. They traded the businesses and lifestyle that made them miserable and sick in the city for a house surrounded by a large garden and chickens near Warwick, in central Quebec, where they live happily on a single salary of 70 000 $ and a logic of self-sufficiency.
The documentary also introduces us to four university graduates who have chosen to launch an agricultural cooperative in Mauricie and to live with an individual income of less than $35,000 per year.
All the personal stories told by the documentary of just under an hour are both symptoms of serious problems and examples of solutions that people have found, notes Isabelle Maréchal. “These situations are not exceptional. They show how people are finding it increasingly difficult to arrive and, in particular, how the city [avec le prix exorbitant de ses logements] constantly pushes its citizens further. Not only in Montreal, but also in Quebec, Trois-Rivières, Mascouche, everywhere. »
They also correspond to the necessary awareness that there must be limits to the race for enrichment and consumption, in the name of one’s own financial and mental health, but also of the future of the planet, say the film’s producer and the experts we hear from.
Breaking point
Isabelle Maréchal has no lesson to give to people who have the impression that the dream of the middle class is slipping away from them, otherwise, like the accountant and economic columnist Pierre-Yves McSween, remind them that there is a part of individual choices in their career paths, their real or perceived financial needs and their degree of satisfaction.
But there is also an element of collective action, reminds the sociologist and researcher at the Institute for Socioeconomic Research and Information (IRIS) Julia Posca, indicating that the spectacular rise of the middle class in the aftermath of the Second World War was obtained through strong political, social and working-class struggle.
“The middle class has a lot more power than it thinks,” says Jacques Nantel, professor emeritus at HEC Montréal. The problem is that she is not aware of it. So unaware that we brought her in gradually [à accepter] things for financial, economic, and market reasons that weren’t always to her advantage simply because she didn’t rebel. »
The documentary opens and ends with footage of violent protests, including Yellow Vests in France and rioters on January 6, 2021 at the Capitol in Washington. Although she feels a growing exasperation in Quebec, Isabelle Maréchal does not believe that we will reach such extremes. “We have more peaceful revolutions than elsewhere. And that’s good. But, as Jacques Nantel says in the documentary, it could get uglier. »