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Middle class earners have fared very well over the Harper years according to one guy in this article, and another guy says it has never been worse. It all comes down to how you want to spin the numbers I suppose, but these are some facts that interest me the most when talking about who is best at shepherding the economy.

But we can compare countries to similar developed countries—in the same era. We can compare Canada to the United States, Germany, France or Italy in the period from, say, 2006-14, during Harper’s time in office, as each country has dealt with similar macroeconomic, trade and technological environments

When we examine the job creation record—in the current era—of Canada compared to its peer group, the G7, we discover that Canada has outperformed them all (on an indexed or relative scale), with 1.3 million jobs created since the Great Recession.

We then turn to the second major issue, which concerns incomes. Some critics and opposition parties allege the Canadian middle class is stagnating or declining or disappearing (or possibly all three).

Yet in 2014, a major 35-year study by the Luxemburg Income Study group and the New York Times of the largest economies in the OECD, found that Canada’s middle class was more prosperous than any other large economy, including the United States and Germany.

Now consider wealth. The most recent analysis by Statistics Canada concerning the 10-year change in household assets found that between 1999 and 2012, the average net worth of Canadian families jumped 73 per cent (from $319,800 to $554,100) even after adjusting for inflation.

Finally, let’s turn to GDP per capita (measured in U.S. dollars). According to the OECD, Canada’s GDP per capita, at US$44,000, is significantly above the EU-28 average of US$36,237. We’re significantly above the eurozone countries (US$38,619) as well as the overall OECD average of US$38,914. It must be noted that the EU countries are classed as high-income countries by the World Bank.

Given all this, Canadians should challenge critics to explain the following:
How could Canada have created more jobs relative to the size of our economy since 2008 than any of the other G7 nation, if the employment picture is so terrible?

How can we have the wealthiest middle class of large OECD economies, if the middle class is supposedly collapsing?


How can the net worth of households have increased so much over the last 10 years, if our standard of living has declined?

How can Canada’s economic output be so much higher than the averages of the OECD, EU and the eurozone, if the economy is in such bad shape?

But there is also this...

Despite repeated favours, business capital spending has been sluggish (under Harper, growing the second-slowest of any postwar administration). Tax cuts just reinforced corporate cash hoarding, not capital spending. Meanwhile, Canada’s exports performed abysmally: growing just 0.3 per cent per year since 2006, by far the slowest in postwar history, and the worst of any major industrial country. We need to do much more than cut taxes, sign trade deals, and slash red tape to truly nurture the industries and companies we need to invest, innovate, and sell to world markets.

Interesting stuff where its pointed out how poorly the Harper administration has performed in various indicators, yet in some of the bigger ones they have done better than anyone else in comparison.