Launching The Missing Middle Initiative
Reviving the middle class for a stronger, more inclusive clean economy
What is the Missing Middle Initiative (MMI)?
The MMI, housed at the University of Ottawa’s Institute for the Environment, seeks to revive Canada’s urban middle class. We’re devoted to addressing the challenges facing young urban Canadians, for whom the middle class is getting harder to join. Through research, a Substack newsletter thought pieces, videos, and the Missing Middle Podcast, we explore the barriers preventing young Canadians and new families from entering the middle class and the policy solutions needed to help them achieve this.
Why the name the Missing Middle Initiative?
Back in 2023, when we were naming our podcast, we landed on the name the Missing Middle because it had three different meanings, all of which felt appropriate for the topics we discuss:
The decline of the young, urban middle class in our cities — that is, the middle class has gone missing
The polarization of political discourse in Canada and how we seem to be losing the ability to collaborate. The middle ground is increasingly harder to find.
Missing middle housing in our cities
These three themes feel even more relevant today than they did in 2023.
Why does Canada need a Missing Middle Initiative?
Canada has a crisis of youth happiness.
In the 2024 World Happiness Report, Canada ranked 58th in happiness for adults under 30. For those aged 60 and above, we ranked 8th. The kids are not okay and it’s not hard to see why. They’re being increasingly locked out of joining the urban middle class.
A generation of young adults believe they’ll never be able to enter the middle class, especially those living in metropolitan cities. Many cities risk losing their middle class altogether. The number of young people who think they’ll one day be able to afford a home — one of the traditional barometers of joining the Canadian middle class — is at an all-time low.
This generation faces a changing job market due to trends ranging from the advent of new technologies like ChatGPT to the reconfiguring of global supply chains. These trends provide this group with significant opportunities but also uncertainty. This is happening against a backdrop of other big global changes, from extreme climate change to geopolitical conflict.
What problem is it trying to solve?
The Initiative will focus on the issues and solutions needed to help young adults who are striving to join the middle class for the first time, helping to ensure the communities where they live remain accessible and inclusive. We believe that communities can’t be strong socially, economically or environmentally without a robust middle class. No community can be truly successful if the middle class cannot afford to raise children in it, to live and thrive there.
This concern is real. In the past decade, more people under 40 have been leaving Canada’s largest cities: Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal. We want to reverse this trend by helping a new generation of young Canadians join the middle class, ensuring cities remain vibrant and diverse.
Source: Statistics Canada.
What does success look like for the Initiative?
To solve any problem, you need to understand it. You also need to have a vision of success. What would having a strong, young, urban middle class in Canada look like?
We are big believers in creating a vision of success — a North Star that can help guide one’s thinking and choices. For Canada’s young, urban middle class, our vision of success is as follows:
Missing Middle Initiative’s North Star: A Canada where every middle-class individual or family, in every city, has a high-quality of life and access to both market-rate rental and market-rate ownership housing options that are affordable, adequate, suitable, resilient, and climate-friendly.
In a companion piece, we discuss each of the terms in the North Star — what they mean, how we measure them and why they’re included in our definition of success.
Our cities will only thrive if they have a strong middle class. The commonly heard refrain “if people can’t afford to live in Vancouver, they should move somewhere else” may seem sensible at the individual level. However, at a societal level, we can’t have all nurses living in Nanaimo, B.C. or Medicine Hat, Alberta and all patients living in Toronto. This would not work. We need the young middle class to thrive in any Canadian city.
How does the Missing Middle Initiative relate to clean growth?
The Missing Middle Initiative is aligned with our past work to develop and promote innovative policies and market solutions to improve economic, environmental and social outcomes for Canada. As shown by a 2024 Abacus poll, young people are increasingly less likely than older Canadians to consider climate change and the environment as a priority because they have other more immediate concerns, the top two being the rising cost of living and affordable housing — the MMI’s two focus areas.
Source: Abacus.
The lack of attainable, climate-friendly housing in urban neighbourhoods near job opportunities is increasing the under-40s' concern for affordability at the expense of their concern about the environment. The current housing crisis makes it harder for governments to enact nature—and climate-friendly policies, particularly where environmental policies are seen as at odds with affordability. Only by ensuring that young adults can thrive in Canadian cities and join the middle class can we help fulfill SPI's mission to advance practical policies and market solutions for a stronger, cleaner economy.
Why focus on the young, urban middle class? Why not prosperity more broadly? Why not focus on those most in need?
Canada has various economic challenges, and no one initiative can address them all. However, various organizations and think tanks, like the Smart Prosperity Institute, are dedicated to examining a subset of them.
There is a lack of organizations devoted to the current crisis impacting the young, urban middle class in Canada. This group's challenges don’t often receive the attention they deserve. There is an understandable and justifiable tendency to want to shift the conversation to “What about the poor?”
Discussions of poverty are vitally important and must continue, and Canada has fantastic organizations dedicating themselves to that cause. We believe there is a space to carve out a conversation focused on the urban middle class and the communities in which they live. In short, this initiative seeks to address a topic that’s often crowded out of the conversation.