Canada's top income earners are taking in an ever-increasing portion of the nationa's overall income, according to a new study.
The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives will release a study Wednesday that indicates the richest one per cent of Canadians took home 13.8 per cent of all incomes as of 2007.
CCPA senior economist Armine Yalnizyan said the concentration of wealth for top-earning Canadians is staggering, with the richest citizens making consistent gains over almost everyone in the country over the decades.
"The higher up the ladder you go, the more colossal this glomming of wealth becomes," Yalnizyan said in an interview with The Canadian Press.
Using data from income-tax forms, the CCPA reports that the top one per cent of earners doubled their share of total Canadian incomes from the 1970s to the 2007 tax year.
During the same period, the top 0.1 per cent of earners tripled their own relative share.
And the top 0.01 per cent of earners now make up more than four times what they did.
Yalnizyan said that many people in these privileged demographics have weathered the current recession in good stead because of their enormous wealth.
"Most Canadians are inching their way through recovery, trying to hang on to what they've got," Yalnizyan writes in the study.
"But for some Canadians, things have never been so good."
"The CCPA has concluded the wealth-consolidation trend is one that took root in the early 1980s but is now more pronounced than ever.
Prior to this sharp rise, a postwar trend had seen incomes become more equally distributed throughout the population.
Analysts want to figure out why the trend has since gone the other way and if such a development is a cause for concern.
"It's the best data we have on this issues," said Andrew Sharpe, executive director of the Centre for the Study of Living Standards.
"The key issue is, what's driving this?"
Yalnizyan's study has concluded that today's ultra-rich Canadians make their money from massive salaries -- as opposed to the crème-de-la-crème of decades past, who tended to be entrepreneurs who made their fortunes from private businesses.
These modern super-rich Canadians are typically those who run large companies and receive high levels of compensation.
Yalnizyan believes that income tax has not kept up with the higher earnings of today's top earners, which has allowed them to make gains on other groups.
Researcher Peter Nicholson, who previously wrote his own analysis of an earlier version of the same tax data, said the trend is part of a larger cultural shift where corporate honchos are the "rock stars" of the modern era.
But he said there is no real consensus on why the trend has headed in the direction it has.
"At least you have to understand why this is happening. Is it fair, or is it a good thing?"
With files from The Canadian Press
