income inequality in canada: the facts

From ReWORKit:
In light of Occupy Wall Street and the spin­offs that are grow­ing in many other cities, there have been a large num­ber of excel­lent arti­cles and stud­ies going around look­ing at the top 1% of income earn­ers in the United States. I have included links to some of them below.

This U.S. focused read­ing got me think­ing about Canada’s place in this all this, and the con­ven­tional wis­dom about how much more of an equal soci­ety Canada is.

An arti­cle in the Guardian back in May enti­tled "Top income earn­ers: are they get­ting richer? See the data" exam­ined the World Top Incomes Data­base pub­lished by the Paris School of Eco­nom­ics. From this data, I cre­ated this chart to com­pare the incomes of the super-rich in select coun­tries over the past 25 years.

Read How does Canada’s 1% compare to other countries? by Dar­ren Pus­cas.

The short answer, as is often the case, is: not as bad as the US, but that sets the bar far too low. As Puscas says, "...it is clear to see that the immense riches of the top earn­ers have not trans­lated into big pay­days for Cana­di­ans."

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