Since March 2020, while hundreds of thousands of workers were left dependent on paltry unemployment support, and many were killed by cases of COVID contracted at their workplaces, the Canadian economy minted fifteen new pandemic billionaires. These new members of the plutocratic class emerge overwhelmingly from real estate, software, and commodity monopolies.

Because of a common cognitive distortion, the actual magnitude of a billion is not readily understood. People often conceive of a billion as just one number placement up from a million — and a million is already beyond the ability of our minds to properly comprehend. Here’s a little trick to help get some sense of the enormous difference between a million and a billion: one million seconds is twelve days, whereas one billion seconds is thirty-one years. The idea that any one person should command quantities of money that large is absurd.

The capital that underpins the status of Canada’s new billionaires is, across the board, an enormous waste of resources. In all instances, the hoarded wealth that has minted these new billionaires would be better spent on health care, education, and almost anything else. A new Oxfam report that catalogs the spike in Canadian billionaires during the last several years puts on display a grotesque and indefensible upward transfer of wealth.