For years, inequality has been widening in Canada. Millions of people work hard to provide a good life for themselves and their families. They are the ones who keep our society running and who pay a large share of the taxes. Instead of receiving the respect and security they deserve, their lives have grown more precarious. Many barely make ends meet despite working full-time — and it shows in the food bank lines, where nearly one in five clients is now employed, up from roughly one in ten in 2019.

The promise of upward mobility — that if you go to school, work hard, and play by the rules, you will be fine — no longer holds. That promise is now broken. Personal prosperity once again depends primarily on the income of one’s parents: Statistics Canada’s own data show that intergenerational mobility has steadily declined, with children born into the bottom fifth of the income distribution becoming less and less likely to escape it or to climb into the middle class. A child raised in the poorest fifth of families now has roughly a one-in-three chance of remaining stuck there as an adult, up sharply from earlier generations.

Meanwhile, wealth has concentrated to a degree not seen in living memory. The richest 1% of Canadian families now control close to a quarter of all net wealth, while the bottom 40% of households hold barely 3%. The wealthiest fifth of households command more than two-thirds of the country’s net worth. While corporations pay out record dividends even in difficult times, the lines at food banks grow ever longer: in a single month in 2024, Canadians made more than two million visits to food banks — nearly double the figure of five years earlier — and almost a third of food banks reported running out of food.

The hardship falls hardest on those least able to bear it. Children in lone-parent families suffer a poverty rate of 45.2%, compared with 10.1% for those in couple families, and child poverty has now risen for three consecutive years. Many elderly Canadians cannot enjoy a dignified retirement after a lifetime of work, because their pensions are humiliatingly low; roughly one in seven seniors lives in poverty and more than a quarter of seniors below the poverty line receive nothing at all from the Canada or Quebec Pension Plans. Homes, hospitals, and care facilities have been sold off to for-profit operators, and ever since, costs have risen while the quality of service for the majority has declined.

We want to halt the erosion of social cohesion and realign politics with the common good. Our goal is a fair, meritocratic society with genuine equality of opportunity and a high level of social security. A highly productive economy needs qualified, motivated, and secure workers — and that requires fair wages, stable jobs, and decent working conditions. This applies just as much to those in service and care work as to skilled tradespeople and engineers; they are all equally essential to our society. To prevent wage suppression, collective bargaining should be strengthened, and we will stand with workers, their unions, and their workplace representatives in the fight for fair pay and good conditions.

At the same time, Canada needs a reliable social safety net that calms anxieties about the future and protects against decline in the face of illness, job loss, or old age. No one who works full-time should have to stop at a food bank on the way home. The privatization and commercialization of essential services — healthcare, dental care, prescription drugs, long-term care, and housing — must be stopped, and non-profit and public providers must be given priority. A fair tax system is essential: one that eases the burden on low- and modest-income earners and ensures that large corporations and the very wealthy can no longer dodge their fair share of funding the country we all rely on.

We reject the politics of division that pits one group against another. A struggling worker in one province has far more in common with a struggling family in another than either has with any narrow circle of extreme wealth. We will fund this renewal not by punishing the working middle class, but by reclaiming the wealth that monopolies have extracted from all of us, and returning it through the Citizen Dividend.

Personal prosperity should not be a matter of social background, but the result of diligence and individual effort. Every child has the right to have their talents discovered and nurtured — and no Canadian should be denied a career in medicine, the trades, or the arts because of the income of their parents.

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Our country deserves a confident policy that prioritizes the wellbeing of its own citizens and is built on a clear understanding that the interests of our larger neighbour is not always the same as ours. Our goal is an independent Canada in a multipolar world — not a junior partner whose resources, data, and decisions are dictated from abroad.

What are the policy positions of the new party? How can I support the Common Good Party? How can I become a supporter or sponsor? You probably have many questions.