Armine Yalnizyan: What's actually happening to the Canadian standard of living?

The Herle Burly was created by Air Quotes Media with support from our presenting sponsor TELUS, as well as CN Rail.Greetings, you curiouser and curiouser Herle Burly-ites! Today's episode takes on one big, hairy question: what's actually happening to the Canadian standard of living? To help sort it out, we have one of our all-time favourite economists – or as Maclean's calls her – "the caring person's economist." Armine Yalnizyan is here! She's a brilliant policy thinker, one of the leading voices on Canada's economy who coined the term "she-cession" to describe the pandemic's toll on women, and she's currently an Atkinson Fellow on the Future of Workers, deep into a report on private equity's growing footprint in Canadian care services.Armine walks us through why GDP per capita is a lousy way to measure how Canadians are actually doing, why the wealth gap between the top 40% and bottom 40% is now the widest Statistics Canada has ever recorded, and why she thinks the care economy (childcare, eldercare, healthcare) is the biggest lever Canada isn't pulling. She has a warning for Canada that private equity moving into care services could mean Canadians paying more and getting less, the same way it's played out in veterinary clinics, and lays out some zero-cost policy fixes the Carney government could adopt tomorrow if it wanted to protect the sector. And Armine has some pointed words for Shopify's Tobi Lütke, who mused online recently in support of idea to give the wealthy more votes than the poor. She’s not exactly convinced society's richest are the deep thinkers they're sometimes made out to be. A sharp, wide-ranging conversation about who's actually benefiting from the growth in the Canadian economy right now, and who's being left behind. Stay with us for the hour. Thank you for joining us on #TheHerleBurly podcast. Please take a moment to give us a rating and review on iTunes, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app.Watch episodes of The Herle Burly via Air Quotes Media on YouTube.The sponsored ads contained in the podcast are the expressed views of the sponsor and not those of the publisher.