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Why is it still, for some, a newsflash that reality for today's youth is a solar system away from the world of just 25 or 30 years ago?

Last week I was in Whitehorse where I released a peer-reviewed policy report on poverty in Yukon. The report was part of the much larger Social Economy Research Network of Northern Canada project.

Report findings include the following:

I confessed in this space three and a half years ago that I was among those who openly wept when Barack Obama was elected president of the United States. I had closely followed the plight of black Americans ever since I toured the deep southern USA in my late teens, a time when the civil rights movement was in its infancy, segregation was the law, violence against blacks was The American Way, and Martin Luther King was not yet the FBI's Enemy Number 1.

That a black man could win the presidency was literally a dream come true. Everyone in the world knew something truly important happened on November 2, 2008. But no one knew exactly what that was, and almost four years later, it's still hard to know, harder than anyone expected.

There is a class war going on in Ontario, but it may not be the one that most of us, even on the Left, would like to believe. It is a war by all of our political representatives and a large proportion of our middle and upper classes on the poor and working poor in the province. A war whose great hallmark is to have created and maintained terrible poverty and suffering in the midst of tremendous social productivity and wealth so as to subsidize nearly 17 years of relentless personal and corporate tax cuts.