In 1964, my grandparents purchased with a mortgage an Etobicoke bungalow for a little over fourteen thousand dollars. Back then, my grandfather worked the assembly line at Campbell’s Soup, and my grandmother worked as a receptionist at Gulf Oil. Respectable working-middle-class jobs. Decent pay. Decent benefits. Nothing flashy. Just honest work and a realistic path to ownership. A proper working-class pattern where, if you kept your head down and did your job, you could build something.

The quick version of how they got to Canada is something out of another era. An out-of-wedlock pregnancy during a Roman Catholic era meant marriage in 1944, in what is now Slovakia.

Back then, it was part of what I jokingly call Hapsburgiastan. From the fragments I’ve gathered, my grandfather may have been part of some kind of secret society, and his consular job seemed to involve a few shady shenanigans along the way. Nothing concrete. Just pieces and whispers. To properly pattern the story would probably mean hiring a researcher in Hapsburgiastan to dig through archives and translate documents. You know, Som chudobný a nehovorím po slovensky! I’m broke, and I don’t speak Slovak!

Rumour has it his consular job… and maybe those quiet connections… took him across Europe and Asia for both official business and side hustles. But whatever happened in Paris during the post-WW2 years seems to have landed him in the crosshairs of his new comrades in Moscow. After that, things moved quickly. A steamer trunk. Wife and kids. A rushed trip to the port. Mid-fifties, ship to Montreal. No ceremony. Just a quiet exit and a hard reset.

I’m shaky on the next chapter, but I know he became a miner in Rouyn-Noranda for some stretch before eventually moving to Toronto. Another restart. Another drift. Building from scratch in a new country.

The point is, even after all that upheaval, buying a house wasn’t easy but it also wasn’t out of reach. A factory worker and a receptionist, with two kids, could realistically save, plan, and eventually own. That was the deal. That was the social contract.

Fun fact: the building my grandmother worked in wasn’t far from the church where I recently worked. These days, I think it houses some kind of prep school for the upper-crust. Same streets. Same city. Different world.

Because today? A factory worker and receptionist couple would be hard pressed to afford rent, let alone rent and save for a mortgage. That path feels locked off now. Ownership has drifted into pipe dream territory for anyone without boomer parents leaving tidy sums of post-war fiscal exuberance, invested wisely and passed down.

And here’s the elephant in the room that no one really wants to talk about: in the 1950s and 60s, wealthy Canadians paid a hell of a lot more tax than they do now. They were still rich then. They are stupidly richer now. That’s the difference. Not hustle. Not grit. Not avocado toast and Starbucks.

Back then, wealthy individuals had fewer mechanisms to avoid realizing taxable income. Today, income can be structured, deferred, and reshaped. Capital gains benefit from lower inclusion rates. Taxes get postponed. Wealth compounds quietly. Meanwhile, wages don’t keep up, and the ladder that once existed gets further out of reach.

So, while I’m high fives for high levels of immigration, I keep coming back to a hard question. If families can’t land in Montreal like my grandparents did, find respectable work, and after a decade or two of discipline and fiscal prudence save for a down payment… then what exactly are we offering? Opportunity, or just survival?

We live in a resource-rich country, with a class of old money, a smaller class of new money, and then the rest of us. The mandem piecing together careers, or multiple gigs, all optimized to deliver maximum value to shareholders, not stability for workers.