Canada’s Richest 1% Nearly As Wealthy As Poorest 80%

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Canada has become outrageously unequal, and three recent reports provide the gory details.

Last September, the Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) updated its estimates of “the top tail of the family wealth distribution in Canada,” using its “high-net-worth families database” developed to address missing data about the wealthiest.

In January, Oxfam Canada released “The Rise of the Super-Rich: The State of Inequality in Canada,” which describes income and wealth inequality in Canada as reaching “crisis levels.”

In February, Canadians for Tax Fairness and BC Policy Solutions released “The New Robber Barons: A Quarter Century of Wealth Concentration in Canada,” providing further insight into the truly grotesque levels of inequality in this country and how they’ve deepened over time.

Taken together, these three reports paint a dark picture. Without addressing the growing chasm of wealth inequality in Canada, it’s difficult to imagine addressing any of the pressing social issues that plague this country.

Because Statistics Canada doesn’t produce regular estimates focused on the wealth of the very richest — despite releasing other helpful figures about the distribution of income and wealth — these reports also fill important data gaps. In the face of staggering wealth inequality, no policymaker can plead ignorance.

The reports’ findings are shocking.

According to Canadians for Tax Fairness and BC Policy Solutions, 86 billionaire families held as much wealth as Canada’s 6.2 million least wealthy families in 2023.

Oxfam reports that the richest 1 per cent in Canada hold nearly $1.25 trillion in wealth, almost as much as the bottom 80 per cent of Canadians. As the report puts it, “That isn’t a narrow wealth gap but a wide, expansive, echoing wealth chasm.”

What’s more, between 2024 and 2025, the wealth of Canada’s richest 40 billionaires grew by almost $95 billion, or more than 20 per cent.

The concentration at the very top is truly astounding.

For example, the top 0.01 per cent of wealth holders in Canada is made up of only approximately 1,800 families. This small number of families holds more than 5 per cent of wealth, totalling nearly $900 billion. All have a net worth of more than $170 million. According to Canadians for Tax Fairness and BC Policy Solutions, in 2023, the wealth of this small group was 4,041 times greater than the average wealth in the bottom half of families.

The top 0.1 per cent, including all those with a net worth of at least $36 million, hold more than 11 per cent of wealth in Canada. Combined, this group is hoarding more than $1.8 trillion in wealth.

The top 0.5 per cent — those with at least $12 million in net worth — account for almost 20 per cent of all wealth.

Finally, the top 1 per cent hold almost a quarter of all wealth in Canada. A person in the top 1 per cent owns 210 times more wealth than an average person in the bottom 50 per cent.

By contrast, the bottom 40 per cent collectively hold slightly more than 3 per cent of total wealth in Canada, each with an average net worth of just under $87,000.

As the PBO figures show, wealth is also heavily concentrated beyond the very top. According to their report, the top 1 per cent of economic families in Canada hold 24 per cent of the country’s total net wealth; the top 10 per cent hold 53 per cent of total net wealth; and the top 20 per cent hold 69 per cent of total net wealth.

It’s not hard to figure out why. The pay of top executives continues to grow by leaps and bounds, buoyed by massive corporate profits. Meanwhile, returns on financial assets pad the wealth of the elite, far outpacing the growth of workers’ pay.

According to Oxfam, in 2024, Canada’s billionaires grew their cumulative wealth by more than $309 million every single day. 

In their report, Canadians for Tax Fairness and BC Policy Solutions show the degree to which these richest families have increased their share of wealth over time. According to their findings, in 1999, the top 1 per cent of Canadian families owned 19.3 per cent of household wealth. But by 2023, they held 22.7 per cent, an increase of $3 trillion. (The PBO put the 1 per cent’s share of wealth even higher, at 23.8 per cent in 2023.)

This growing wealth concentration helps to stabilize the ranks of the richest as well. The Thomsons were the richest family in Canada in 2025 with a net-worth of $90.2 billion, and were also the richest family in 1999. Meanwhile, Galen Weston had an individual net worth of $20.6 billion in 2025, an increase of 14 per cent from the previous year.

As Oxfam warns, such levels of inequality destabilize democracy and contribute to authoritarianism. As the rich hoard more income and wealth, their political power and ability to shape public policy to their preferences grows. Think, for example, of the Liberals scrapping both the plan to increase capital gains taxes and the luxury tax on private jets.

Tellingly, many of Canada’s richest derive their wealth from corporations in the most concentrated sectors of the economy, such as telecommunications, food and energy. The super-profits earned through ownership in these concentrated sectors is the flip side of the cost-of-living crisis affecting working Canadians, from inflated food and energy prices, to some of the highest cell phone rates in the world.

While the wealthiest have benefited from strong financial asset growth, a weaker real estate market and the cost-of-living crisis have squeezed the wealth and incomes of the working class.

There has also been notable growth in poverty, after enhanced pandemic-era benefits made a strong dent in the share of Canadians living below the poverty line.

As the reports from Oxfam and Canadians for Tax Fairness and BC Policy Solutions argue, Canada desperately needs deep reforms to its tax system to address these issues.

Canada’s income tax system has become far less progressive over time. While the average earner is paying 36 per cent of income in tax, the richest 1 per cent are paying just 23 per cent, according to Oxfam. Tax havens further allow the wealthiest to stash even more of their treasures offshore and out of the reach of the tax collector. Canadians for Tax Fairness estimates that the rich have at least $682 billion hoarded offshore, a 165 per cent increase since 2014.

Maintaining low effective tax rates on the rich while allowing them to stash wealth offshore is bad enough, but even more distressing is not taxing wealth at all. As wealth becomes ever more concentrated, there is effectively no mechanism to redistribute it.

Oxfam suggests a wealth tax targeting the ultra-rich starting at 1 per cent on net worth over $10 million, rising to 2 per cent on net worth over $50 million and then to 3 per cent on net worth over $100 million. This tiered approach could raise $121 billion in tax revenues over five years, the report estimates.

Canadians for Tax Fairness and B.C. Policy Options goes even further. They propose a tax of 1 per cent on net wealth above $10 million, 2 per cent above $50 million and 3 per cent above $100 million, which would raise an estimated $39 billion in its first year alone and could generate a healthy $495 billion over 10 years.

Their report also recommends an inheritance tax to curb the intergenerational transfer of wealth, as well as reforming the capital gains tax so that capital income is taxed like income earned from work. At present, only 50 per cent of capital gains are taxable, forgoing an estimated $30 billion in revenue at the federal level in 2025 alone.

While we need to restore progressive taxation and train our tax powers on hoarded wealth, we also need to empower workers to take more of the value that their labour creates through collective bargaining.

As these reports show, income and wealth inequality are indeed at crisis levels in Canada. We therefore need a multi-pronged war on inequality.

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