Toronto incomes are on the decline (or, The Friday Pessimist, Thursday edition)

Given that I’ve been harping on the state of the declining economy for nearly a year now, you’d think I’d be happy to have my prognostications repeatedly proven correct. At this point, however, it feels like piling on. Today’s Statscan Daily provides the latest census data on incomes. Dig a little deeper and you discover that Toronto incomes are on the decline—not a relative decline, but a real decline. I can’t find those numbers myself, but here’s a snippet from the e-mail notice I just received from Jack Layton: “The 2006 census data reveals a significant downward trend for Toronto families of 2.4 per cent despite a national increase in income of 3.7 per cent and a provincial increase of 1.4 per cent.”