Welcome to “Canada’s Gilded Age.” That’s what the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) is calling the era of runaway corporate salaries and bonuses. The name is fitting. In a new report, the think tank finds that 2022 was a smashing success for CEOs, who broke records with an average annual pay of $14.9 million — a surge of $600,000 above their 2021 remuneration. It’s good work, if you can get it.

However, for the rest of us that aren’t corporate executives, the struggle to make ends meet continues. The average CEO salary shakes out to 246 times the earnings of the average worker, which means that by the morning of January 2, chief executives had earned as much as one of their workers does in a year. This stark reality exposes a rigged system.

The CCPA reveals that CEO salaries grew by 4.4 percent last year — amounting to an average increase of $623,000. While this growth falls beneath the 6.8 percent inflation rate, but we can safely assume that the brass was able to weather the rise in prices comfortably. In fact, they may have even welcomed the higher costs, given that much of their compensation is tied to expanding revenue and profits.