CEOs in Canada already made your total income for all of 2026

By Michael Laxer

In yet another indication of the grotesque growth of inequality in Canada in our new Gilded Age a report released today by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA), found that the 100 best-paid chief executive officers in Canada make 248 times what the typical worker earns. They were paid a whopping $16.2 million, on average, in 2024.

In a vile example of just how out-of-control inequality has been allowed to get, the report notes that "It’s challenging to represent massive disparities like a CEO making 248 times more than the average worker. Sometimes representing this in terms of time can help: the highest-paid CEOs made $7,812 an hour in 2024, equivalent to making $130 every minute of every working day.

If we assume both average workers and CEOs get paid vacation, then it takes just over eight hours on the first weekday of the New Year for Canada’s highest-paid CEOs to make what the average worker will make all year: $65,548. By 9:23 a.m. on January 2, the highest-paid CEOs already make what will take the average worker to make all year."

9:23 a.m. has already come and gone in Ontario where no doubt everyone returning to work after a short holiday will be thrilled to learn this.

While CEOs are laughing all the way to the golf course in their limos, it turns out that the "average price of goods and services that Canadians buy went up by 18 per cent between January 2020 and January 2025. Since workers’ pay went up by only 15 per cent over that period, it means that workers took an effective three per cent pay cut. Their pay went up, but the prices on everything they buy went up faster, so they ended up worse off by the end of 2024.

Over that same period, the cost of food in grocery stores went up by 22 per cent, well more than the 15 per cent pay raise the average worker got. Price spikes were worse for some more specific food items: the price of pasta went up by 47 per cent, just shy of the 49 per cent increase in CEO pay over this period. The price of beef went up by 39 per cent and eggs are 35 per cent more expensive than they were in 2020. These prices rose twice as fast as average worker pay, although still less than the CEOs’ pay increases. Bacon and chicken prices both rose by just under 30 per cent, or double the raises received by the average worker."

The report has various social democratic recommendations for taxation schemes to put a dent in this though in a future piece on The Left Chapter we will be looking at why this approach is, at best, like putting a small bandage on a gapping wound.

You can read the full report at: Living the high life: A record-breaking year for CEO pay in Canada - CCPA

Michael Laxer is a leftist writer and activist based in Toronto. A former NDP candidate and Spokesperson for the Socialist Party of Ontario, he is the publisher and editor of The Left Chapter.

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