Every year, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) tracks the compensation of Canada’s most lavishly paid executives. And every year, it releases a version of the same eye-popping statistic: namely, how much of the new year it is estimated to take the wealthiest executives to earn what a typical worker will make over the next twelve months. According to the center’s analysis of 2020 wage data, released earlier this month, Canada’s hundred highest paid CEOs took home an average of $10.9 million in 2020 — an increase since 2019, even as both Canadian society and the global economy were rocked by the first wave of the pandemic.

The result? The country’s top executives now make roughly 191 times that of the average Canadian worker, meaning that they had pocketed what millions will make this year before lunchtime on January 4. (This ratio, believe it or not, is actually narrower than it’s been since 2014. But, as CCPA senior economist David Macdonald explains, the reason is that so many low-wage workers lost their jobs in 2020 that the average worker wage is somewhat misleadingly skewed upward when many of those who are typically among the lowest paid are excluded.)

Most strikingly, high rates of CEO pay persisted even amid the most severe economic retrenchment since the Great Depression of the 1930s — as sure a sign as any that those at the top of the corporate ladder are basically impervious to the kinds of shocks and disruptions that millions were subjected to when the pandemic hit. For some half of workers earning $17 an hour or less, Macdonald notes, 2020 brought with it either unemployment or reduced working hours.