HARPER FINALLY GETS HIS DUE.

Cast your mind back to the dark days of 2014 and 2015, before Sunny Ways. The last days of the Stephen Harper government. The leader holed up in his Centre Block crypt, lonely and accursed, like some latter- day Richard III, though with better hair and no hump. The country wallowing in recession and despond, longing for tens of billions of dollars of infrastructure spending and federal deficits to save it. The people wailing for cool, enlightened leadership with brashly striped socks.

Well, wait a second. Stop tape. Statistics Canada has just released “High-income trends among Canadian tax filers,” its annual contribution to class warfare in Canada. Turns out things weren’t as gloomy in 2015 as we all thought or as Justin Trudeau kept saying. From 2014 to 2015, StatCan tells us, “The real average income of all tax filers rose 2.6 per cent.” That was the largest yearly increase since 2005–06. Stephen, we hardly knew ye!

Even better, “the bottom 50 per cent of tax filers” — i.e., those struggling to get into the middle class — “saw a 3.4 per cent increase in average total income, compared with a 2.3 per cent gain for the top half.” Just to emphasize: That’s a real, after-inflation increase. To be fair, it’s not clear it’s an after- tax gain, because these numbers are for “total income,” which covers all forms of income, including cheques and refundable tax credits from governments, but doesn’t deduct any income taxes. ( You might call it “election-platform data”: all benefits, no taxes.) In theory, the whole gain could have been taxed away. And there may be something to that so far as the top half of the distribution is concerned. But for the bottom 50 per cent, it seems unlikely. No government raises income taxes at the low end these days. ( Other taxes, including payroll taxes, are a different matter.)

I’m betting this good news of “growth throughout the income distribution” as StatCan puts it, won’t be how this new data gets reported. Reporters are more likely to emphasize class conflict, which in fact StatCan does too, with its headline of “Top 1 per cent share of total income rises nearly 1 per cent.” See? We knew it: Harper really was a villain. Except that, oops, the top one per cent’s 2015 share of total income, 11.2 per cent, was still 0.9 points below its peak of 12.1 per cent in 2006, following 13 years of Liberal rule.

CBC’s new four- headed version of The National seems to enjoy following up on its … I was going to say “news stories” but most are really ideology stories … with PowerPoint slides providing an interesting little factoid showing how far behind more enlightened realms Canada is on various planks in the progressive agenda. I wonder if they’ll make one for this story emphasizing the interesting tidbit that ( from StatCan, again) “This was the first increase in the share of total income going to the top 1 per cent since 2006.” Got that? The first increase in the top one per cent’s share in a decade. Not exactly the impression you’d have gotten by following the feverish debate on inequality in this country’s media over the last few years. As the debate gets more and more extreme, the data get more and more moderate. Remind you of any other big policy issue?

Other data points that may not make the CBC cut:

Female tax filers keep moving into the top one per cent. They now represent 23.2 per cent of that group, up 1.5 points from 2014. Almost 63,000 Canadian women earned the $ 234,700 you needed to be in the top one per cent of earners in 2015.

The share of income tax shouldered by the one per cent rose again, to 22.2 per cent of all income taxes. To emphasize: They had 10.3 per cent of income and paid 22.2 per cent of income taxes. And this was before the Trudeau government raised top tax rates in the name of fairness, a tax share twice that of your income share and 22 times your population share being deemed not fair enough.

Will the rise in the top one per cent’s share of income be sustainable? Maybe not. It was the result of an unusually big increase in dividend income. Overall for the year, such income rose from $ 64 billion in 2014 to $ 77 billion in 2015 before falling back to $ 70 billion in 2016. Corporate profits were good in 2015. But profits fluctuate so that may not be so repeatable. And there may have been greater corporate payouts so as to beat tax increases that either already were, or people could reasonably have anticipated would be, on their way in 2016. That’s a one-time effect, unless governments keep playing the tax- raising game, which I suspect some will use these new data to justify doing.

TURNS OUT THINGS WEREN’T AS GLOOMY IN 2015 AS JUSTIN TRUDEAU KEPT SAYING.