Canada’s Superrich Are Getting Richer — Even During the Pandemic
Canada’s self-image as a land immune to US-style extremes of wealth is increasingly divorced from reality. Canadian billionaires have quadrupled in a generation, and without a wealth tax, their share of the country’s riches will only keep growing.
Many of Canada’s billionaires have grown substantially richer during the pandemic. (Cris DiNoto / Unsplash)
One unavoidable feature of living in a small country is having your perceptions warped by larger ones around you. For Canadians, who number less than 40 million and reside next to the world’s most powerful nation, the problem has always been especially acute: American impressions of Canada invariably shape how the country sees itself. When those impressions are favorable, the result is a kind of feedback loop in which Canadians’ self-perceptions are torqued around those imported from abroad. Though there are certainly other reasons, this partly explains why so many Canadians tend to assume that the issues plaguing America barely exist north of the 49th parallel.
Suffice it to say, this is a big mistake — and it elides plenty of discomforting facts about Canada’s unequal society and the extent to which wealth and power are slanted toward a small few. The problem is one that the authors of a new report published by the advocacy group Canadians for Tax Fairness seem keenly aware of. As researchers Toby Sanger and Erika Beauchesne point out in the introduction to their study, “There’s a convenient fiction perpetuated that Canada hasn’t experienced the great extreme inequalities of wealth at the top end that the United States has.” While it’s true, they add, that Canada’s wealthiest people don’t possess fortunes on the scale of Jeff Bezos or Warren Buffett, the overall number of Canadian billionaires has actually grown at a rate outpacing that of the United States — as has the sum of their total wealth.
In 1999, for example, Canada’s twenty-three billionaires possessed a combined wealth of $72 billion. By 2018, their ranks had more than quadrupled to one hundred — their wealth totaling a whopping $339 billion, a nearly fivefold increase and more than that held by the poorest 12 million Canadians combined. As Sanger and Beauchesne illustrate, the basic trend in recent years has been one of upward redistribution to the wealthier segments of Canadian society, with billionaires being only the tip of the iceberg, and the poorest becoming even poorer:
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