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This may feel like an intrusion upon your dearly held beliefs – which in itself is rather rude, so forgive me – but here's the truth.

Class snobbery is not an antique notion that only exists in Britain. Judgment of others, based on class, is terribly common.

And it's a two-way street – the upper-class types look down upon the lower; and the lower look askance at those who seem to hold themselves above the rest.

Conrad Black's lawyers are only too aware of the class divide as the jury deliberates in Chicago, where the former press baron is on trial for allegedly looting more than $60-million (U.S.) from investors.

“He is different from you and me,” lawyer Edward Greenspan said of his client. “He's a rich man.” He urged jurors not to convict Lord Black because of “his wealth, his lifestyle or his vocabulary.”

Canada and the United States are “two of the most classist countries in the world,” says Shirley Steinberg, a cultural theorist and associate professor at McGill University whose book, Cutting Class: Social Class and Education, co-authored with Joe Kincheloe, was published this year.

“Absolutely, we have class and discrimination in this country,” she says. “But in Canada, it's harder to spot. We give it plausible deniability. You can act as though it doesn't exist. And if you deny that which exists, no one can get you on it. We who talk the loudest about what we don't have, have it.”

Canadians shouldn't feel smug about policies of multiculturalism, she notes. “That's tokenistic, liberal drivel. Besides, who wants to be tolerated? I'd rather be liked.”

Maritimers are second-class citizens compared to central Canadians, she says by way of an example. “They're not seen as professionals, generally. Their trades are fishing and farming and manufacturing.” (Any fan of Trailer Park Boys, a TV series from the Maritimes, knows class distinctions can even be fodder for comedy.)

Ethnic and even regional accents can spur discrimination, Ms. Steinberg adds. Political leaders are subjected to the same silent class judgment, she points out. “Jean Chrétien had low-class irritating mannerisms as opposed to Pierre Elliott Trudeau.”

But more insidious than its denial is the fact that the rules of snobbery continually evolve. “Class distinction always reinvents itself,” she notes.

Acquisition of high class was pursued by the first immigrants to Canada. They did what Lewis Lapham said of early settlers in America in Money and Class in America. They “assigned spiritual meaning to the texts of money.”

In Montreal, the centre of Anglo economy in the 19th Century, a class rose up that was commonly referred to as “the merchant princes.” They had a society photographer, William Notman. They had debutante balls as part of the St. Andrew's Society.

In a souvenir book about the Montreal Board of Trade in 1893, the text made Anglo-Saxon commerce seem like a noble cause. “The flag has acknowledged commerce as mistress and followed humbly in her wake,” it intoned.

Along with the railway barons, bankers and financiers, the leather-bound book documented the leaders in the trades, puffing up each man (and there were only men, of course) to render him as important as the next. “There is no surer criterion, no more accurate judge, of the progress of a country in the higher and more artistic ranges of civilization than is afforded by the condition and expansion of her dry goods trade,” the script heralded.

But that notion seems rather quaint in modern times, when being “in trade” is deemed a low-class pursuit. Why else did the Eatons distance themselves from, and ultimately lose, the department store that bore their name? It was beneath them to be thought of as shopkeepers.

Even the WASP card is no longer a social passport. “I would have to say that the old Anglo brand names do not really carry any class clout,” says a Montreal native of some notable pedigree, who only spoke on condition of anonymity (as befits the rule of not talking openly about fellow members of one's socio-economic tribe.)

“It is always a bit of a surprise to come across a Birks, Molson or McConnell with a continued strong presence in the Montreal milieu, business or otherwise, and so those that are ‘still here' are so because they have, on the whole, distinguished themselves as individuals,” he says. “… In North America, class is no longer gene-based.”

A sure sign that class distinctions have changed is that once-prominent families in Canada are now subject to “reverence and nostalgia,” observes Alexander Reford, a historian whose great-grandmother was Elsie Reford, the niece of Lord Mount Stephen, financier of the Canadian Pacific Railroad in the 1880s.

Mr. Reford lives in Jardins de Métis on the Gaspe, where his ancestors established a summer fishing retreat. Tourists, predominantly French Canadian, flock to the area, not just for the beautiful gardens his great-grandmother started, but to soak up some Anglo history.

Mr. Reford, perfectly bilingual, can often be seen in the summer months regaling his visitors with stories about the class of men who often oppressed French Canadians. “We're a long way from the time when those merchants were routinely condemned,” he explains. “I'm in the business of selling nostalgia.”

But if class always mutates, it has only come full circle. We're back to money: new, old or borrowed. To be snobby about snobbery, is an indication, if anyone needed one, that class distinction has never been a high-minded preoccupation.

A resident of Rosedale, a Toronto neighbourhood of big trees and money that seems to grow on them, says she no longer feels at home there because of class discrimination.

“I grew up here,” she says. “I've never lived anywhere else. But I feel uncomfortable here. I feel controlled by my neighbours, by their expectations and also by their arrogance. I feel a pressure around how the property looks and the fact that I like to do my own gardening. People look down on that. People see me out there in the garden, and they think I'm out of my mind. If you have to do it, then they figure you don't have the money to hire landscapers.”

She and her husband have decided to move to a different neighbourhood.

“There's a strange entitlement culture in Rosedale,” she says. “You get sussed out very quickly about where you are in the pecking order. It's not good enough to just live here. It's what you do, who you know and how much money you're perceived to have.”

One new emerging social divide is the class of the philanthropists, a development linked to the status that money brings. After all, philanthropy suggests that you have so much, you don't need it all for yourself. It's a show of generosity, but also of vast wealth; a form of that ancient class practice known as noblesse oblige.

The recent opening gala at the newly renovated Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto was a celebration of the new class of philanthropists as much as it was of Daniel Libeskind's architectural audacity. Many of the significant donors, including Jamaican-born Michael Lee-Chin, come from the city's ethnic-minority communities.

“There may be a lot of smiles through clenched teeth at the Michael Lee-Chins of society,” observes Robert Gage, a Toronto hairdresser who watches more than what ladies should or should not do with their appearance. “But the FOOFs [Fine Old Ontario Families] are fooling themselves if they think they still matter. They know the game is up.”