The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and those stuck in the middle are going nowhere. So, what else is new?

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So, the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and those stuck in the middle are going nowhere fast. Gee, you don't say. Here's another shocker: It tends to snow in January.

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In fact, the only thing amazing about Statistics Canada's recent report from the 2006 census on income disparities over the past 25 years is the amazement with which its findings are being received by the so-called chattering classes.

Says Armine Yalnizyan, a senior economist at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives: "In 2005, we were at the end of a decade of strong growth, and people were worse off than they were in the 1980s and 1990s, which were recession plagued decades. You'd think that with a tight labour market the opportunities would increase for people under 35 and for newcomers. But that just doesn't seem to be the case." Adds Tony Frost of the University of Western Ontario's Richard Ivey School of Business: "I had thought that the middle are not getting richer as fast [as the wealthy], but this data shows that the middle are not getting richer at all. That's stunning to me."

Come on folks! Haven't you been paying attention? Or have your six-figure salaries, tenured positions and comfortable homes blunted your powers of observation?

On this continent, the middle class has been running scared since the good, old "morning in America" days of Ronald Reagan. And you don't have to be an economist to know why: The wholesale dismantling of once-reliable manufacturing industries; the rise of contract and part-time services, supplanting their more secure (and costly) full-time counterparts; the prevalence of offshore and "nearshore" labour pools serving domestic producers; and a patently inequitable tax regime which favours the wealthy minority at the expense of the poor saps who comprise the vast, unhappy majority.

The Stats Can survey merely, and not-surprisingly, attaches numbers to this sorry tale. Between 1980 and 2005, the median earnings of full-time Canadian workers increased by a whopping $53 (from $41,348 to $41,401). Meanwhile, the incomes of the nation's richest people rose by 16.4 per cent, as those of its poorest fell by 20.6 per cent.

Of course, there have been many moments over the past 25 years when governments could have stepped forward with enlightened policies designed to redress the more egregious imbalances. But those moments passed, as they inevitably do when political considerations undermine economic ones and ideology trumps common sense.

When public servants should have been shoring up economic capacity, for example, they were occupied in pandering exercises, gesticulating before their electoral bases. When they should have been helping businesses diversify, expand, develop and acquire new, productivity-enhancing technologies, and train and educate employees, they were consumed with gun registries and "age of consent" and foreign military adventures and Christian "rights" and Muslim "rights" and any other sort of "rights" which might yield them votes at the 11th hour of their feckless mandates.

And where was corporate Canada? Was it investing wisely and prudently to secure a future for innovation and sustainable growth? Was it analyzing the enormous potential in cutting-edge R&D, environmental industries, and emerging, high-value export markets? Or was it hording its boom-time windfalls, and speculating on tech bubbles and real estate bubbles and inadequately collateralized credit markets?

Still, let's dare to imagine a day, not very far away, when the state of our interlaced economies float to the top of the public and private sector agendas where they belong. On that day, collaboration, ingenuity and utility replace self-aggrandizement, venality, and cynicism as principles of effective governance.

The poor begin to achieve that to which they aspire: dignity, respect, opportunity. The middle class gets its mojo back and begins to grow. The rich consume the fruits of their colossal success without complaint or coercion. And everyone is as content as any hard-working, imperfect democracy can make possible.

Now that really would be amazing.

Alec Bruce is a Moncton based writer. He can be reache via thebrucereport.com