Synthesis of inequality by income
Right off the bat, I understand what the video is going to discuss by the site’s opening quote, “wealth inequality is much worse than Canadians think it is and a far cry from what they think it should be”. Before even watching the video, I visualized the wealth gap as being heavily weighted towards the rich leaving the poor with very little. However the visuals from the video still shocked me.
As a Canadian, I always think of Canada as being geared towards equality and justice. Compared to the states, who have a huge wealth gap, I thought that Canada was at least doing an okay job at making sure the overall wealth of the country was being distributed in a proper way. The graph showing what how wealth should be divided, as voted on by Canadians, was generally unsurprising and fair. The narrator even stated that conservatives voted for this even distribution, which showed that many Canadians believe that the “current system is skewed”. The next graph showed what Canadians think the actual wealth gap is, and it showed a much more uneven distribution than what they thought would be an ideal, even plan.
At this point I remember the initial quote, and immediately realize that the number are much more uneven than Canadians think. Instead, the reality shows that the overall wealth holds all the money and almost half of Canadians only hold 6 percent of the countries wealth. When the narrator said that a CEO of a company gets payed 206 times more than the average worker, I was shocked at the ridiculous difference. How much more does a CEO work than an average worker? Does the CEO work harder at all? They are paid more solely due to their title and the position they climbed the ladder for, meanwhile people who work just as hard get no recognition and no money. The fact that the wealth pile for the wealthiest group did not even fit on their chart was equally as shocking. The difference is truly shown with this visual in such a shocking way, but this shocking news is also our countries unfortunate reality.
In the end, the narrator made the point that our country was not always in this unequal position. Due to our political choices, we as voters have dug ourselves into this hole. Given that so few young people voted in the last election, it is important to recognize that voting matters in the long run. University students are only now realizing how expensive things are, including rent and necessities, and the wealth gap is now also our problem. We must become more educated, and this video helps set the fire under us in order to spread knowledge about the inequalities Canada contains. Poor political choices may have been made in the past, but that does not mean we can make better choices going into the future in order to fight for better wealth equality in Canada.