Deciding Whose Lives Count: Canadian Policy on the Cost of Living Crisis
A personal reflection on what the intersection between income inequality and life expectancy looks like to those who live it, and to those who legislate it.
By: Victoria Gibbs
In March 2024, I was in the front row at a fireside chat in Montreal, listening to a woman worth over a billion dollars speak a sentence that will sit with me for the rest of my life: “The same things that keep you up at night, keep me up at night.” The words that followed were simple talking points, a hollow list, but somewhere among her concerns was the cost of living.
Sure.
The cost-of-living crisis is not an abstraction for me; the impacts of income inequality are embedded in my family history. When I think about the cost of living, I do not think of the housing market, the unemployment rate, or bottom lines — I think of my uncles and what a lifetime of financial precarity does to one’s body.
The FP Canada 2026 Financial Stress Index reports that nearly half of Canadians have lost sleep over financial worries, with 43% citing money as their leading source of stress. Women and Canadians under 35 are disproportionately affected, 45% of women and 50% of Canadians 18-34 indicate money as their most significant source of stress. The longer-term toll of that stress is easy to overlook; research shows financial stress leads to a higher prevalence of chronic disease and decreased life expectancy. Lower-income Canadians bear the brunt of this burden. A Statistics Canada 16-year follow-up study estimated that the gap in mortality between the highest and lowest income groups results in approximately 40,000 preventable deaths per year. If accounted for as an official cause of death, this would make deaths from income discrepancies the third leading cause of death in Canada.
For some, this crisis is more than numbers in a publication; it is a lived reality.
January 31st, 2018, was a snow day in Prince Edward Island. The kind where they close schools out of precaution, but parents still go to work. My Uncle Barry should have been at work that day, but he had a funeral to attend. He never made it. He died next to the open door of the first new car he had ever owned. He was 54-years-old. My family found humour in the irony that he died on his way to a funeral.
It was less humorous when it happened to Uncle Stevie, who met the same unexpected fate. July 22nd, 2019. He was 53-years-old.
Did their hearts stop because of their genetics? Manual labour? Or was it financial stress?
The honest answer is that we can’t separate them, but research shows it is rarely just genetics. Low-income individuals experience more chronic stress than those from higher income brackets and have fewer resources to manage it — a compounding disadvantage that the body bears over time. The consequences of which result in people paying with their lives.
When my uncles were in their mid-twenties, despite the 1990 recession, Statistics Canada labour force data reported a peak unemployment rate of only 4.4 percent among Canadians with educational attainment above a bachelor’s degree. Higher education can act as a shield from financial precarity, but for many Canadians from communities like ours, that has never been a realistic option. We cannot keep building policy on the assumption that it is.
In 2020, Prince Edward Island’s (P.E.I) legislature unanimously recommended a bold policy step: a full basic income guarantee pilot program, backed by then-NDP leader Jagmeet Singh. P.E.I.’s blend of agricultural, fisheries, and industrial workers made it an ideal testing ground for a program that could scale nationwide. As of 2023, the proposed guaranteed income program would have provided $18,260 annually to over 50,000 Islanders, at a total cost of $270 million per year. Former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he didn’t see a path forward, so we moved on. Under Prime Minister Mark Carney, we are still moving on.
A basic income pilot in Canada is not without precedent. From 1974 to 1979, the federal and Manitoba governments operated the Mincome (Minimum Income) Experiment, which demonstrated that a guaranteed annual income program increased school completion rates and reduced hospitalizations. The evidence already exists; what is lacking is political will.
A standard objection to guaranteed basic income programs is that they will “make people lazy” and lead to higher unemployment. But Finland’s two-year Universal Basic Income experiment challenged misconceptions, showing no significant negative impact on employment; instead, recipients were happier, healthier, and less stressed.
A $270 million pilot based in P.E.I. is less than four percent of Canada’s 2026 increase in defence spending, and only 0.07% of the total federal budget. A pilot program for guaranteed basic income is the first step toward addressing a crisis that will otherwise cost billions of dollars in health spending, housing, and social welfare programs. Above all, it will cost Canadian lives.
I know that for a lot of people in this country, the cost of living is not a crisis; it’s just another average day. For those of us who study or work in policy, who went to university and earned degrees, it means we have become a certain class of citizen, regardless of where we came from. That distance is easy to forget; it’s important that we don’t.
I don’t have a tidy answer on how to compel the government to address this issue. What I do know is that the woman at that fireside chat — who claims to lie awake in her billion-dollar bed — doesn’t actually share these nightmares. And, the people who make policy decisions that impact lower-income Canadians, though not billionaires themselves, don’t either. To pretend otherwise is its own kind of policy failure.
This is thoughtful and touching. But I think these issues stem from wealth inequality more than income inequality.