The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) has once again released its annual report on CEO pay in Canada. Coming in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and record inflation, the findings are sobering. By 9:43 a.m. on January 3 of last year, the average CEO pay — CAD $58,800 — in Canada’s top one hundred corporations exceeded that of the average Canadian worker for the whole year. Average compensation for Canadian CEOs now sits at a staggering $14.1 million. The highest-paid Canadian CEOs in 2021 made 243 times the average salary of a worker, up from the previous record of 227 times in 2017.

While inflation has been hurting workers, it’s been good for business. Not only has CEO compensation hit new highs, but corporate profits hit 18.5 percent of GDP in the second quarter of 2022, the highest in modern Canadian history. This surge has been led by fifteen industries that have experienced big profit increases since 2019, while other industries saw their profit rates decline. Unsurprisingly, the big winners include oil and gas, but food retail has also seen their net income rise 120 percent since 2019. This comes on the heels of a major scandal in 2018 that saw suppliers and the major Canadian grocery store chains collude to raise the price of bread over the course of fourteen years.

Bosses have been getting plenty of help from the Canadian state as well. The Competition Bureau of Canada has vowed an investigation into food prices, but the investigation will not look at relationships between suppliers and grocery stores. That’s too bad, because the bread-price-fixing scandal was made possible by the cozy relationship between grocery stores and their suppliers.