If you feel like you’re being pushed around in life, you’re not alone. Our recent research has found that Canadians are increasingly feeling a sense of powerlessness in their lives. This sentiment has been steadily increasing, driven by economic challenges and rising perceptions of inequality.

In 2019, we led a national survey on quality of work and economic life with the assistance of the Angus Reid Group.

Since then, we have repeated this survey annually, amassing a dataset of 23,000 Canadians across the socioeconomic spectrum.

We’ve repeated questions that measure what researchers call powerlessness, which captures the lack of personal control and helplessness we feel when dealing with problems and events in life.

“You have to change people’s perceptions of downtown before any of this stuff is going to be successful.”

— Downtown Winnipeg business owner Phil Klein

Brandon and Winnipeg are two different cities, with two different kinds of history and character — not to mention the difference in population. While Brandon is dubbed Manitoba’s “second-largest city,” in reality the province’s capital city is at least 14 times our size.

An emergency responder will tell you that the voices of a bad accident never leave the place where it happened. That pausing at a stop sign or a roadside memorial near an old accident scene can bring a lot of things flooding back.

Even time passing doesn’t change that: a year later, things can still be as fresh as when they happened, as if the intervening time has failed to change anything.

A year after a serious accident at Carberry lead to 17 deaths, first responders are still facing the fallout from that day.

Others are facing their own personal pain.