Before you chow down on your next doughnut, take a good hard look. That's Ontario's economy you're eating. Look at the middle. What do you see? Nothing, right? That's where the middle class used to be.
Those jobs - nearly 300,000 in Ontario alone - disappeared in the Great Recession. Gone like the bits from the middle of your doughnut.
Now look at the glaze on top. That's the one per cent. They've done OK. Better than OK. Theirs is the only income that has actually gone up.
The rest of the doughnut is us. We might have jobs, but more than 50 per cent of them are low -wage and part-time. The kind of job the person who sold you the doughnut has.
Maybe she's your daughter or your nephew or your next-door neighbour, who can't afford to pay the Hydro or buy a new used car. Heck, they can't even afford the pay taxes - if they even make enough to be taxed.
Now then, throw 100,000 more people with middle class incomes out of work. What do you get? A bigger hole.
Call this sort of economics Doh!conomics-after Homer Simpson's love for doughnuts and his own precarious job.
Doh!conomics is why we have one of the fasted-rising levels of inequality in the OECD. It's why we also have the third-highest rate of working-age poverty.
Doh!conomics is Tim Hudak's way of creating jobs . low wage, part time jobs that hollow out the economy.
Just call him Timbit Hudak.
David McLaren
Neyaashiinigmiing ON