Canadian CEO Pay Breaks All Records, Reflecting A New Gilded Age For Canada’s Rich

100 Highest-Paid CEOs now Make 246 Times More Than Average Workers

A News Release from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives with a Foreword from Doug Draper at Niagara At Large

Posted December 2^nd, 2024 on Niagara At Large

A Brief Foreword by Doug Draper, Niagara At Large –

I can already image at least some who read the news release below saying; “Gee, thanks for starting the New Year by posting news that makes me angry.”

To that I say if we’re not angry we’re not paying attention and if we’re not paying attention, the only change we may have is that things will get even worse.

We’ve got to know about this growing wage gab across Canada and the obscene amount of money the few at the top are shoveling, and we’ve have got to put the heat on our elected representatives at the provincial and federal levels of government to do something about it.

Meanwhile, I’ve lost patience with all those politicians and Chambers of Commerce and other representatives for big business out there who keep beating this drum that we can’t raise the minimum wage or have the kind of living wage or basic income that Ontario Premier Doug Ford blew away during his Conservative government’s first term in in office because the cost of more decent wages for regular working people will hurt business and be passed onto consumers.

But who is paying for the skyrocketing wages these Chief Administrative Officers and members of their corporate boards are getting? Aren’t they being past off to consumers in terms of higher costs for goods and services”

I would like to hear more politicians and others in the business world talking about that and, most importantly, doing something about it to make the system fairer and more equitable for all of us.

Now here – immediately below –is the news release I urge you to read from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, then please pass the entire Niagara At Large post at – https://niagaraatlarge.com/2024/01/02/canadian-ceo-pay-breaks-all-records-reflecting-a-new-gilded-age-for-canadas-rich/ – on to  others in your internet or social media circles.  

A News Release from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives

OTTAWA— Canada’s 100 highest-paid CEOs again broke every compensation record on the books in 2022, according to a new report by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA).

In Canada’s New Gilded Age: CEO Pay in 2022, CCPA Senior Economist David Macdonald shows that those 100 CEOs, who are overwhelmingly male, got paid a whopping average of $14.9 million in 2022. This amount surpasses their previously record-breaking pay of $14.3 million in 2021 and sets a new all-time high in our data series.

They now make 246 times more than the average worker wage in Canada, besting even their previous high of 243 times the average worker wage in 2021.

“The top CEOs make $7,162 an hour and so it only takes a little over eight hours to make the $60,607 annual pay of the average worker. If we say that both get paid vacations, like New Year’s Day, then by Tuesday, January 2, 2024, at 9:27 a.m. those CEOs will have already gotten what the average worker makes in a year,” says Macdonald. “This is truly the hallmark of a new Gilded Age.”

To make matters worse for workers, inflation is pushing up costs and salaries are not keeping up. In 2022, the average worker in Canada got an average pay raise of $1,800, or three per cent. But, prices went up by 6.8 per cent in 2022, meaning workers took a real pay cut of almost four per cent compared to 2021.

The top 100 CEOs, on the other hand, saw an average pay raise of $623,000, or 4.4 per cent in 2022. The CEO raise was also less than inflation, but CEOs do not struggle to cover basic costs as many workers do.

Indeed, CEOs benefit from inflation because extreme CEO pay is linked to soaring corporate profits: It’s driven by bonuses, not salaries, and those bonuses are tied to company performance, like revenue and profits. In 2021 and 2022 as inflation soared, so did corporate profit margins. As a direct result, CEO bonus pay also hit all-time highs as companies profited from higher prices.

This report proposes that governments address the rampant income inequality between the rich and the rest of us through four taxation measures that both disincentivize extreme CEO compensation and redistribute CEOs’ extreme income to Canadians on the lower end of the income spectrum.

They are:

• Creating new top income tax brackets

• Removing corporate tax deductibility of pay packages over a million dollars

• Introducing a wealth tax

• Increasing the capital gains inclusion rate

“CEO pay continues to soar without restraints,” says Macdonald. “Taxation can be the control we need.”

Read the full report online here.

About the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives – The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) is an independent, non-partisan research institute concerned with issues of social, economic and environmental justice. Founded in 1980, the CCPA is one of Canada’s leading progressive voices in public policy debates.

The CCPA produces the research and analysis necessary for policymakers, activists, and everyday Canadians to make informed decisions and press for social change.

For more from the CCPA, click on – | Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives

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