June 21, 2017: Raizel Robin

Etienne Lajoie

Published in

Renegade Newsletter

5 min readJul 12, 2017

Guest: Raizel Robin

Story: Canada’s Middle Class Is on the Brink of Ruin

Publication: The Walrus

Date: May 17, 2017

LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW HERE

SUBSCRIBE HERE: http://tinyurl.com/h75mlf4

Canada’s Middle Class Is on the Brink of Ruin is this week’s feature story in the Renegade Newsletter. The story was The Walrus’ cover story. Robin is a Toronto-based writer

We spoke to her about the middle-class illusion, writing about debt and more. You can listen to the interview or read some of the best moments below along with some other great long reads.

Here’s an excerpt of Robin’s story that was published in The Walrus:

“We believe it’s our God-given right to have our $2.50 Starbucks coffee every morning,” says Alex Levine*, a senior strategist with a top Toronto ad agency. Levine plans campaigns for the major credit card companies, and, in the process, sees research on what Canadians want. Smartphones, laptops, and tablets. Designer water bottles. Organic vegetables and fruit.

Cottage retreats, summer camps, and activities for kids. After-school tutors. Individually, these may not be major expenditures — but they add up. And more than ever, we use credit cards to cover them. In fact, we use plastic for almost everything, no matter how minor the item. And this convenience makes it easier for Canadians to spend beyond their means.

To read the full story, click here

Here are the best moments from our conversation:

The challenge of writing an article about debt:

Before I started it, friends would ask me “what are you working on next?” and I’d say “something on debt” and it’s just like “ahhhhh,” nobody wants to hear about it, everybody’s trying to avoid it. So the challenge was to find stories that were utterly compelling, that would draw pretty much anybody in as well. You need to find people who

A-were willing to talk which is quite difficult, nobody wants to share the blood and gut of their awful financial situation and B-find stories people could relate to in some way.

How she found people to talk to:

Especially in Toronto, living in a city like Toronto, there some much conspicuous consumption. BMWs all over the place, there’s Porsches, there are Teslas […] Are we really making enough to afford this lifestyle? I kinda wanted to talk to those people with the two BMWs and the three houses, but they weren’t quite there yet […] so I ended up going to, talking to several, probably 6 or 7 bankruptcy trustees in different cities across Canada […] and worked with them to find people who might want to talk to me.

The Canadian dream:

People come to cities like Toronto or Vancouver […] to succeed.There’s a certain expectation that we’re going to succeed, we’re gonna be someone, we’re gonna make that big salary. And I think it’s a way for people to express, to show their success to others whether we can actually afford it in the end or not. And I think the banks have been playing a big role there.

What does it mean to be middle class?

Maybe for generations, since I don’t know, the 1950s, many of us have called ourselves middle class […] but that has changed.What middle class means now is different from what middle class was in the 1970s for example. I’m in my early 40s now, and I remember growing up where everything was used, you’d buy a used bike, you’d buy a used car […] and nowadays,

it’s totally… everything’s new, and I think a lot of that is because we’re financing with credit so we still expect a car or a bike for every child, but these things are more expensive. We will seek out newer things because we can, because banks are allowing us, offering us cheap credit, so we’re financing this lifestyle with a credit.

The payday loans:

Kervin is actually a super smart guy, really interesting, warm intelligent person, family man and he would go again. And that was their downfall was their pay loans […] There something about those storefronts, quick loans places, you can walk in, they’re friendly, it’s easy. “Ok a couple hundred bucks, I can pay that back,” but if you need that $100 that desperately, you probably won’t be able to pay it back next time and it just snowballs really quickly. When I asked him at the end of our interview “would you walk in into one of those places again,” his wife said “no way,” but he said, “you know, I might.”

Her relation with her subjects:

I think Jacqui, the single mom, that to me really cut deep in a way. You kind of have some distance as a journalist, keep distance from your topic and your subject and then somebody like that who’s talking about cashing her life insurance policy on herself […] it really brings it home to you, how difficult this is, how stressful on families, it can ruin lives, it can ruin relationships.

The challenges:

For me, the storytelling part is the easy part […] the personal stories have always been the most fun and the easiest. I’ll just sit down with a subject and we will talk, just ask a ton of questions and spend as much time as I need with them […] The harder part for me is connecting all the stories. For this especially, it was “how do these stories all connect together.