Hipster Duck
Senior Member
You can believe whatever you like, but non-mortgage debt has been rising among Canadians for a quite a while now.
I'm not believing anything except what census evidence [from the US, I'll admit, but you and I would both admit that the US is kind of a bellwether for this] tells me. Non-housing and non-transportation spending as a proportion of household discretionary income is falling.
And it's not due to "frivolous spending", in general, it's due to maintaining the appearance of a middle-class lifestyle with reduced buying power. Note that it is impossible to support a family in a middle-class way on one average income these days. A couple generations ago, that was the norm.
A couple of generations ago, most honeymoons were to Niagara Falls. A couple of generations ago the average single family home was 900 square feet. A couple of generations ago most people got their shoes repaired and their clothes patched up, rather than throwing them away and buying cheap stuff (indeed, they can afford to throw them away because clothes are so cheap now). We might blame marketing for giving people the illusion that a middle class standard of living has to include a 2,200 square foot home with 2 cars and a vacation to a destination that involves a flight, but people made those choices themselves and are at least partially at fault. I would be sympathetic to the plight of the average Canadian family if their real income bought less than the exact basket of goods that a family in 1960 bought. If we paid more money to travel to Niagara Falls; if we paid more money for clothes or for the ham on white toast sandwiches instead of the Prosciutto and Ciabatta that we buy today, etc.