In fact, the rising cost of education is quickly becoming one of the biggest barriers between the poor and the middle class. It can make earning a professional degree nearly impossible for the working poor. Even for the middle class, it can be a challenge. The yearly tuition fees for medical school are now more than $15,000, triple what they were just a decade ago. Even the cost of a basic undergraduate degree has skyrocketed. Twenty years ago, sending a child to university for a year would have cost roughly $5,000 (with tuition and living expenses). Today, it’s upwards of $12,000, says Mackenzie. Meanwhile, financial aid for students is getting increasingly scarce. The cut-off level for university loans and bursaries is now “well below what people would consider to be a middle-income level,” Mackenzie says.
In countries like Canada, the government has historically played an important role keeping the hopes of many middle-class families afloat. But as social programs have been cut back, many middle-class families have been left in the cold. Employment insurance programs, for instance, are harder to get, last for less time and pay less, says Lars Osberg, an economist at Dalhousie University in Halifax who studies income inequalities. “So there isn’t anything like the safety net that existed in the last two really big recessions.” Canada, in fact, now spends less cash on unemployment and family benefits than most developed countries, according to the OECD.
Chiasson is seeing all of this first hand, but he’s stoic about his situation. Even before he was laid off, he had been feeling the squeeze growing tighter for years. Now he doesn’t hold any illusions that a return to the good old days is right around the corner. When he first started working for AGS 23 years ago, life was good. With overtime and other incentives, “you could write your own paycheque,” he says. But for much of the last decade, his pay has been frozen at about $20 an hour. “It’s been a slow wind-down for the last six years or so,” he says.
Like millions of others, he’s slowly realizing that the things he used to take for granted—the house, the cars, the little front lawn—are now only promised to a smaller group of educated professionals that he’s not part of. Certainly, he’s not banking on ever making a good living in the auto sector again. “I would think those days are gone.”
