Remember the Bob Newhart drinking game?Friends would watch The Bob Newhart Show and take a shot every time someone said “Hi, Bob.” It's tempting to start a similar game during this unofficial federal election campaign. Whenever a party leader says “middle class” you have to take a drink. We need to fight this temptation. Our health care and justice systems, not to mention our society as a whole, could not withstand that level of collective inebriation.Tom Mulcair, for example, used the phrase 13 times in English (and once in French) last week in Toronto during a lunchtime speech to a Bay Street business crowd. Our financial markets are simply too fragile to have our nation's financiers staggering back to their offices (in even worse shape if they are bilingual).What is the obsession of all three parties with the term “middle class,” or the interchangeable “hard-working Canadians?”  If you watch enough political commercials, you would quickly come to the conclusion that an entire segment of our society is under siege.I kind of get it. The middle class is the largest self-identifying voting bloc in the country that consistently turns out at the polls. The last few years have been tough and, depending on which economist you believe, it has been particularly hard on middle-income earners. The strategists, therefore, advise our political parties to lead with policies that will make the middle class's lives easier.There is nothing wrong with promising support for middle-income Canadians. But is the plight of the suffering middle class the greatest problem facing our nation?Not when compared to issues like: climate change; an aging population; Canada's proper place in a troubled world; the plight of our nation's Aboriginal Peoples and our response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission; refugee policies; precarious employment; and perhaps most important, the need for a true national anti-poverty plan — far from an exhaustive list.In his recent Globe and Mail column “There is no middle in the middle-class debate,” Konrad Yakabuski noted the absence of almost any mention of the poor from the current middle-class debate, calling it “a historical anomaly, since political debates surrounding inequality had until quite recently always turned on the question of how to reduce poverty.”We reached a low point with the recent NDP television commercial featuring Tom Mulcair beside a really hot cup of coffee bragging that he was “raised on middle-class values,” somehow equating his emphasis on supporting the middle class with the values they hold.The term “middle-class values” has many meanings, but it usually conjures up a feeling of community, of caring for others and worrying about those less fortunate. Think of your local Rotary Club raising money for disabled children, or Habitat for Humanity,or the people who show up to help clean their local park as part of an Earth Day celebration.In my opinion the epitome of middle-class values occurred in Woods Harbour, Nova Scotia, in the late 1980s. When a group of Sikh refugees arrived on a nearby shore in lifeboats, the community welcomed the mainly vegetarian group with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches simply because the folks appeared hungry. As one local put it: “Around here, it's no problem.”We can't confuse the concept of middle-class values with the concept of making the lives of middle-income Canadians easier. If you want to appeal to middle-class values, you need to start talking about other issues.So what is going on in Canada today? The best line in the 1989 film Look Who's Talking comes from the character played by George Segal. Confronted by Kirstie Alley to take responsibility for their unborn child, he says that he would love to, but he's going through a “selfish phase.”Are Canadians going through a “selfish phase?” Is the ballot question really going to be “what's in it for me?” To the extent that this is true, we have work to do — our civic leaders, educators, the media, religious leaders and our non-governmental organizations need to help strengthen our true middle-class values.But there might be another reason. Voters may have simply lost faith in the capacity of government to solve big problems. So if government can't do anything else, the argument goes, at least they can make my day-to-day life a little easier.The answer to this is more complicated. Ironically, it may involve our political parties resisting the temptation to portray each policy pronouncement as a panacea for whatever is ailing us. Our politicians may have to start admitting the complexity of issues and the lack of easy answers, combining immediate action with a process to better engage citizens to help work out longer-term solutions together.Treating the upcoming election as a drinking game has a certain appeal. The stakes, however, are too high. It's up to us to demand that our politicians stop looking at every issue through a “middle-class” lens.John Milloy is a former Ontario cabinet minister who served as MPP for Kitchener Centre from 2003 to 2014.  Prior to that, he worked on Parliament Hill, including five years in the office of Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. He is currently the co-director of the Centre for Public Ethics and assistant professor of public ethics at Waterloo Lutheran Seminary, and the inaugural practitioner in residence in Wilfrid Laurier University's Political Science department.  John can be reached at: [email protected] or follow him on twitter at: @John_Milloy.