Canada: A Workers’ Paradise?

Poverty, it turns out, is a problem that can be solved by throwing money at it. When collective action and labour unions are strong enough to increase wages and to push governments to enact appropriate social policy, such as health insurance, community planning, transit, welfare, unemployment insurance and environmental controls, the lives of the majority of citizens improve drastically. The dinning by corporate leaders, the think-tanks they fund and the policy makers they influence obscure that simple fact. Constantly told that only “the market” can be trusted to distribute wealth, we tend to forget that “the market” exists to distribute wealth in only one direction—from working people to bosses. Dan Zuberi, in a rigorous comparison in Differences That Matter: Social Policy and the Working Poor in the United States and Canada, demonstrates that without the countervailing power of collective action, labour unions and government intervention, the rich get richer and...