Statistics Canada's official wealth survey significantly underestimates wealth inequality. Canada’s wealth concentration is not as extreme as in the United States, but closer than official data suggest. This misleading portrait undermines Canadians’ ability to have an evidence-informed conversation about how to address growing wealth concentration and the threats it represents for economic resilience and democratic stability.
The report contains three recommendations for the federal government and Statistics Canada:
- Ensure that the wealthiest Canadians – including its billionaires – are captured by creating new tiers of estimated ‘net worth’ that target the top 2-0.001% in all future SFS surveys, as done in the U.S.;
- Modernize how wealth inequality data is published and displayed, including ways to track the wealth shares of the top 0.1% and 1%;
- Treat the Statistics Canada Survey of Financial Security (SFS) with more seriousness by deploying it with greater frequency.
Share with a friend
Related reading
How Employee Ownership Trusts keep wealth in Canada | Canadian Business
The coming wave of business successions will shape Canada’s economy for generations. In Canadian Business, Jon Shell explains how employee ownership safeguards economic sovereignty, while boosting growth, productivity and local wealth, giving employees struggling with affordability a new source of income. As entrepreneurs and owners seek alternatives to selling abroad, the employee ownership trust (EOT) provides a practical answer. Instead of letting the EOT tax incentive expire at the end of 2026, now is the time for the government to double down on employee ownership.
A housing boom isn’t a win for wealth equality and here’s why
Canada's wealth gap appeared to narrow between 2019 and 2023 and we set out to make sense of this. SCP's Director of Policy Dan Skilleter, the lead author on our 2024 Billionaire Blindspot report, connected with sector colleagues working on wealth concentration and dug into all the best available data. What he found was that the dip was largely a mirage, driven by a pandemic housing boom that temporarily inflated the one asset ordinary Canadians hold: their home. Meanwhile, these soaring prices locked out an entire generation from building wealth altogether.
A Conservative case for Community Benefits Agreements?
When a developer builds a new bridge or transit line, a Community Benefits Agreement ensures the project will also benefit the people living nearby. In Canada, CBAs have long been seen as a progressive policy tool. But what if Conservatives embraced them too, just with different priorities? In this piece, SCP's Director of Policy Dan Skilleter explores how Conservative governments might champion their own vision for CBAs and what that means for advocates on the left. The lesson: if you want good social outcomes from big projects, stop letting perfect be the enemy of the good.