Canada and Quebec like to see themselves as better places than the United States to live the “American dream”, that is, to be able to aspire to a better economic future than that of one’s parents. But this great social advancement is experiencing setbacks and the surest way for a young person from a disadvantaged background to access this “social mobility” in the region could be to simply be mobile and go to the big city.
Just before the COVID-19 pandemic, the World Economic Forum in Davos unveiled a new tool for measuring a poor child’s chances of moving up the social ladder over their lifetime or going the other way if they are coming, on the contrary, from a privileged socio-economic background. This tool was based on around fifty indicators, including education, health, working conditions, the social safety net, the functioning of institutions and even access to technologies.
As is often the case in this type of exercise, those who came to the top of this ranking of 82 countries based on their “global social mobility index” were Northern European countries, starting with Denmark, followed by Norway, Finland and Sweden. At 15e rank, Canada was the first country not from Europe and comfortably ahead of the United States, in 27e rank.
Three years earlier, the Institut du Québec (IdQ) carried out a similar exercise by calculating the share of a person’s income attributable to that of their parents. In Canada, this proportion was on average 19.4%, while in the United States, almost half (48%) of people’s income could essentially be linked to what their parents earned before them. Among Canadian provinces, Quebec (17.6%) came in the middle of the pack, doing better than Ontario (19.1%), but worse than Saskatchewan (13%), while displaying wealth gaps less pronounced than elsewhere in the country.
The “Quebec redistributive model further equalizes income by reducing income inequality, but it does not seem to promote intergenerational mobility beyond what is observed in the rest of Canada,” observed the authors of the ‘study.
This performance of Quebec, however, turned out to be strongly weighed down by Montreal (22%) and its difficulty, then, in promoting the economic advancement, particularly of populations from immigrant backgrounds. Indeed, “Quebec outside Montreal” (16%) did much better. Better even “than the Scandinavian countries as a whole”, while remaining behind British Columbia (14.3%) and “British Columbia excluding Vancouver” (12.8%), noted the IdQ.
The urban poor and the rural poor
Earlier this month, researchers affiliated with CIRANO published a study shedding new light on the effect of place of residence on social mobility. For their work, they had access to statistical data which allowed them to follow the trajectory of nearly 1.4 million young people from different cohorts born between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s.
Their first observation is that young people’s prospects for social mobility have diminished over time, particularly for the poorest, while at the same time income inequalities have widened. In the 1960s, the probability that a little Quebecer would be born into a family whose parents belonged to the fifth and last lowest income bracket and that he would still be there more than 30 years later was 25%. . For children born in the 1980s, the probability of still being stuck, as adults, in the bottom quintile had increased to 33%.
As has been said, the decline in social mobility is mainly due to young people from the most modest backgrounds, but particularly to those who were born in rural regions and who have remained there. Conversely, young people from modest backgrounds who were born in a rural region, or in a small town, and who were found, as adults, in a larger city, or even in one of the seven metropolitan regions of Quebec, were also the most likely to have moved up the socioeconomic ladder.
Generally speaking, the migration of young people to larger centers is linked to the pursuit of post-secondary studies or the search for employment, note the authors of the study. The latter are careful not to conclude that the mere fact of moving to a larger city is enough to improve their lot.
It may, in fact, be that those who make the decision to leave also have particular qualities that help them in life. It is also possible that the extra income one earns by moving to a larger city is wiped out by a higher cost of living.
Last week, a study by the Institute for Socioeconomic Research and Information (IRIS) reported, however, that it generally costs much more for families with modest incomes to live in the region, despite housing often being less expensive. expensive, notably due to the requirement to have a car and the higher cost of food.
Revitalize rather than devitalize
As the CIRANO study focused on children born in the mid-1980s, it does not make it possible to measure the effect that the introduction of certain important social policies, such as the establishment of a public network of childcare services and the increase in social transfers to families with children, we readily admit.
If we can understand that a young person makes the individual choice to leave for a big city in the hope of broadening their economic prospects, Quebec cannot, collectively, want its regions to be emptied even more of their youth, said in interview at Duty economics professor at the University of Quebec in Montreal Marie Connolly, co-author of the study with professors Yacine Boujija and Xavier St-Denis, from the National Institute of Scientific Research (INRS-Urbanization, culture and society) . “We should rather look at how to offer in these regions what migration brings to young people who leave. Whether in terms of education and training opportunities or in terms of job prospects. »