The case for expanding benefits under the CPP as a needed response to the crisis of private pensions continues to win expert support -- even as the financial industry and small business lobbies continue to fight real pension reform tooth and nail.

It's like a bad riddle: almost everyone thinks they belong to it, but few can define what it is.

Politicians claim to champion it, but it's increasingly difficult to determine what it actually wants.

And, often, when we talk about it, we're really only referring to part of it -- the part that doesn't really belong to it at all, but likes to think it does.

What is it?

It's the middle class.

An important paper by Bruce Western and Jake Rosenfeld which is forthcoming in the American Journal of Sociology finds that the decline in private sector union density in the U.S. (from 34 per cent to 8 per cent for men, and from 16 per cent to 6 per cent for women) explains one fifth to one third of the increase in inequality of hourly earnings over the period 1973 to 2007. This shows declining union density to be a much greater causal factor than most studies have found.

StatsCan has released an interesting paper, "The Income Management Strategies of Older Couples in Canada." It looks at who controls the family finances in couples with one partner aged 45 and over. (They used the age cut off because a special question was added to the General Social Survey which is restricted to that age group.)

The release of the annual "Income in Canada" report is Statistics Canada's first word on the impact of the Great Recession on Canadians' incomes.

The report in The Daily was presented as a non-event, but the data reveal important stories about the winners and losers since the recession.

What comes through loud and clear is the fractured nature of the Canadian economy in the wake of the global recession: one part booming, the other part is busted.

It's often portrayed as an east-meets-west friction, but the story is a little more chequered than that.

Today's Statistics Canada release "Income of Canadians" provides data for 2009 and a partial reading on the impacts of the recession. (I say partial because the 2008 annual average data were impacted by the onset of the recession in the last quarter of the year, and since these impacts continued well into 2010.)

The data give some sense of the devastating impact of the recession upon working families, and also underline the importance of income support programs like Employment Insurance.

I recently had the chance to read a 2008 book entitled Who Goes? Who Stays? What Matters? Accessing and Persisting in Post-Secondary Education in Canada. Edited by Ross Finnie, Richard Mueller, Arthur Sweetman and Alex Usher, the anthology features 14 chapters written by a total of 21 authors.

I found chapter 4 (co-authored by Finnie and Mueller) and chapter 11 (written by Marc Frenette) to be particularly interesting.

Finnie and Mueller analyze results from the Youth in Transition Survey (YITS), where 15-year-olds, their parents and their high school administrators were interviewed in 2000; the youth were then interviewed again in follow-up surveys in both 2002 and 2004.

Some of their findings include the following:

I saw quite a lot of media coverage of a BMO report that Canadian retail prices are 20% higher than in the U.S. despite exchange rate parity. There were allegations of price gouging and references to the allegedly much more intensely competitive U.S. retail environment.

I hesitate somewhat to say so in case the argument is misused, but there are good and defensible reasons why the retail cost structure is higher in Canada.