It appears the global economic slowdown hasn't hurt Canada's wealthiest families.
Canadian Business magazine is out with its Top 100 richest Canadians and it reveals that despite tight times, the rich are still getting richer.
More than half of the 100 richest -- 55 to be exact -- are billionaires. That's up from 53 billionaires on the RICH 100 list last year. Collectively, the top 100 have a net worth of about $172.7-billion, up $70 billion from a year ago.
Once again, the Thomson family easily tops the list, as it has done consistently for years. This year, not only are the Thomsons still the wealthiest, but their fortune has grown 19 per cent, to $22 billion.
But the prize for the biggest gain goes to Ivanhoe mining executive Robert Friedland. Friedland's worth rose 217 per cent last year, to $1.59 billion, and he jumped 61 spots on the list, to No. 32.
While it might be hard to believe for many Canadians still reeling from the market crash that saw many of us lose about a third of our investments, Canada's rich fared well last year. That's because they all jumped back into the markets, Canadian Business Editor Steve Maich explains.
"What happened last year is while a lot of us were worried about our jobs, the stock market and commodity markets started looking forward to the global recovery, and we saw a huge surge in the market," he told Canada AM Thursday.
"That was really the story of the entire list. If you had exposure to public companies, or commodities or the Canadian dollar, you did very well."
The reason the Thomson family did so well last year is because much of their wealth is tied to their own Thomson Reuters company, whose stock has seen healthy growth in the last 12 months.
"They own a lot of the stock, so every time the share price goes up by a penny, the family gets about $4.7 million richer," said Maich. "The stock did very well last year, and as a result, so did the entire Thomson family."
The same is true for the Irving family, who find themselves at No. 2 on the list. The wealth of their company is tied to the commodity market and natural resources, and when the price of oil rose last year, along with gold and copper, the Irvings cashed in.
James (Jimmy) Pattison, founder of the Jim Pattison group, also did well, coming in at No. 4 on the list, after the Weston family. He, too, was broadly invested in the markets, but also in the real estate market.
"Real estate in Canada did very well for a lot of our billionaires in the past year," said Maich. "We didn't see that huge drop-off that they saw in the U.S. Our market held up fairly well and then surged back. And so you get a guy like Jim Pattison making billions."
Maich says the common denominator for all the billionaires was investment in the markets.
The stock market actually bottomed out the year before last. Since markets tend to look forward six months, that anticipation of recovery sent a lot of these stocks right back up.
That's not to say that the rich folk on the list were not hurt badly in the market crash of 2007. They too took the hit that we all took the year, says Maich.
"The year before there was a real drop for the rich, a drop of about $10 billion," he said. "We're not back up to the peak of 2007, but we came a long way back.
"These billionaires are almost a microcosm of the economy as a whole. They do well when the markets do well. So we saw asset prices recovering through most of the year last year. As a result, our billionaires are even bigger billionaires."
