Postal code head start

2 min read · March 27, 2026
New Power Labs

Where you're born in Canada shapes where you'll end up.

Economist Miles Corak mapped intergenerational income mobility across all 266 Canadian census divisions using decades of tax data. His research found that in Canada, place is a powerful predictor of future outcomes: your financial future, to a startling degree, depends on where you happen to grow up (Miles Corak, 2017).

Higher mobility communities are concentrated in parts of Southwestern Ontario, Alberta, and Saskatchewan. They tend to correlate with lower poverty, less income inequality, and a higher share of immigrants. Manitoba, by contrast, generally displays the lowest intergenerational mobility among the 10 provinces.

And the gap is widening. Children whose parents were in the bottom income quintile are less likely to exit that quintile in adulthood and less likely to transition into the middle class. Mobility is declining at both the national and provincial levels (Connolly and Haeck, 2024).

Place encodes advantage before a single decision is made, before a person applies to a school, pitches an investor, or walks into a bank. The infrastructure of opportunity: transit, childcare, local employers, community college density, etc., is already in place at birth, distributed unequally across postal codes. 

The geography of investment largely mirrors the geography of advantage, reinforcing the very map that mobility research reveals.

Capital tends to flow where capital already is. Investors cluster in the same cities, source deals from the same networks, and back founders who look like the founders they've backed before. 

The question for funders: how often are you looking beyond the postal codes that feel familiar?

Narinder
New Power Labs

Like what you’re reading? Subscribe to get weekly Equity Shots in your inbox.