Almost exactly one year ago, Richard Wilkinson visited Canada. This is an edited version of a news report:
Call it Unequal Canada – the national tour. British professor and epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson has packed his first visit to Canada with public meetings, and private sessions with senior government officials and community leaders. His message is powerful, yet simple: greater equality is better for everyone.
“It’s not just the poor, but everyone is worse off in unequal societies,” said Canadian statesman Ed Broadbent as he introduced Wilkinson for his sold-out Toronto presentation on December 10, [2010]. “More equality, not more growth, matters.”
Wilkinson delivers the equality message in a quiet manner, filling the screen with slides that track the relationship between equality and health and social issues in dozens of countries around the world, including Canada.
He doesn’t just theorize about issues. Along with his co-author, Kate Pickett, he has created the Equality Trust, which maintains an active on-line campaigning presence.
While he has the air of an unassuming academic, Wilkinson has been the target of a concerted campaign by a handful of right-wing interests who are seeking to blunt his work. Britain is one of the most unequal countries in his international survey (the United States is consistently the worst), and the current coalition government’s attacks on community and social programs is sure to make a bad situation worse.
Canada ranks roughly in the middle of Wilkinson’s global ranking, but he delivers an important warning: much of his data was collected several years ago as he was preparing his manuscript, and more recent numbers show that Canada is moving quickly towards greater inequality. Other international surveys, including the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s 2008 report called “Growing Unequal” confirm growing inequality in Canada.
Source: Michael Shapcott in Rabble.ca, December 14, 2010
Wilkinson’s presentation on YouTube
Eric Koch’s book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
More logical ineptitude.
Equality is an absolute; the comparative is meaningless. Only in Animal Farm (and other situations similarly governed by manipulative propaganda) are some animals more equal than others.
Less inequality may be more equitable (or not) but it is certainly not more equal.
Two issues need to be looked at with respect to the degree of financial equity within society: the distribution of income and the distribution of wealth. Evidence for the inequitable distribution of the former comes from Wilkinson’s important work. In Canada, this aspect has been studied extensively and the results also show that income disparities in this country are both wide and growing.
With respect to the distribution of wealth, Canadians accomplish this primarily via gifts (while alive) and bequests (after death) but note that Canada does not have inheritance taxes (unlike the US, for example).
Historically countries declined when there was great inequality in a country. While a fair distribution of wealth is more socially just, more importantly gross income disparity leads to economic destruction and is unsustainable. The mechanism of destruction is simple:
Money in the hands of the rich does little to stimulate the economy.
The Republicans and the right in the USA like to characterize the rich as “job creators”. However, the opposite is true. The extremely rich hoard their wealth in securities and financial derivative investments and other secondary markets. Little of this wealth finds its way to companies that create jobs. Most of it buys paper wealth, traded from one rich person to another, representing nothing. The middle class and the poor, on the other hand, spend what they have locally and stimulate the economy. But when the majority has less and less to spend and the rich get richer more of the nation’s wealth becomes mired in the phantom economy created by Wall Street. The economy deprived of fuel sputters and stalls.
With the decline of the domestic economy the tax base declines which further aggravate the problem.
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No Canadian inheritance tax per se; but I hear transfer of assets upon a Canadian’s death is taxed as a disposition, with capital gains taxable from the estate to society, before the rest of the wealth is passed along. So there’s a policy stage set for social redistribution of wealth at inheritance, and many play our ragamuffin parts on it. On the other hand, a whole legal-financial industry, naturally concentrated on benefits to people who already have more to bequeath, offers to minimize or eliminate this prima facie redistribution of wealth. So maybe for some Canadians it is like not having inheritance taxes in either name or result.
Be it resolved: “Fortunately, Canada is free of manipulative propaganda, and has accurate long-form, I mean, long-term statistics to give a reliable picture that both respects privacy and enables sound policy guidance for equitable wealth distribution.”
Note: A Canadian’s principal residence, if her wealth includes its ownership, is an exception, not taxed on death before inheritance by another. In the US, on the income side, wealth in the form of an owned home nets its owner more income while living, thanks to deduction of mortgage interest payments from their income before it’s taxed.
Caveat lector: All I know about economics I learned in 5 min from “Principles of Economics: Choices Are Bad and People Are Stupid” http://t.co/ogDvGHeO
Despite Alan’s learned statements, I think people have no difficulty understanding ‘more equality’ as ‘a greater degree of equality’, i.e. a state of being closer to equality than a state of ‘less equality’. One could speak accurately of degrees of inequality, but that has a negative feel to it that the more optimistic and goal-oriented ‘equality’ does not have.
Tim is right that Canada taxes capital property on death (and on other disposition, but all capital property is deemed disposed of on death and gains on it from the time of acquisition are taxed – or at least are taxed when the spouse of the original owner dies). When capital gains tax was established in 1971, our inheritance taxes – called succession duties here – were abolished. While there are some legal ways to reduce capital gains taxes, they existed for succession duties too. But the existence of tax reduction strategies does not mean that we don’t tax property (wealth) on death. We do.
Neither point invalidates Professor Wilkinson’s observations.
“Canadian statesman Ed Broadbent …”
If I wrote that for one of the foreign publications I worked for over the years— The Economist New York Times, Christian Science Monitor– I would have been fired. Only in Canada. Most of the papers mentioned would call him the ex leader of the mildly socialist NDP.