Income inequality in Canada has hit the highest level ever recorded as wealth becomes increasingly concentrated in fewer hands, says Canada’s statistics agency.
The gap in the share of disposable income between the richest two-fifths of Canadians and the bottom two-fifths grew to 47 percentage points in the second quarter of 2024, Statistics Canada reported Thursday.
That’s the widest gap recorded since 1999, when Statistics Canada first started collecting such data.
The gap was driven by the top 20 per cent of income earners, who saw the largest increase in their share of disposable income, the report said. That increase was driven largely by investment gains, which the statistics agency attributed to high interest rates.
Part of the problem is in referring to the top wealth holders as ‘earners’ … they didn’t earn anything, they merely held ownership over some financial mechanism and siphoned off wealth from others.
Earners are supposed to be those people who do actual labour or apply their skill to something and get paid for the work they do.
A better measure would to be to determine who much actual human labour was completed, how much skilled work was done and how much individual work by people was done and then tally up how much wealth they would have all collectively created with their activity.
Then figure out where all that wealth went to. Did all that wealth go to the people who generated all the activity … or did it all go to owners and investors who just laid claim to all corporations, companies and businesses where all these people worked.