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
Elbows up: A practical program for Canadian sovereignty | Report
Canada can’t become a sovereign country by doing the same old things, explains a new compendium of essays co-sponsored by the CCPA, the Centre for Future Work and several national civil society organizations. Elbows Up: A Practical Program for Canadian Sovereignty is a response to corporate rallying cries responding to Donald Trump with a familiar playbook: deregulation, austerity, tax cuts and fossil fuel expansion. The collection includes contributions from 20 progressive economists and policy experts, including SCP CEO Matthew Mendelsohn and others who participated in the Elbows Up Economic Summit held in September 2025 in Ottawa.
Pipelines and algorithms aren’t going to save us | The Hill Times
Smart investments in natural resources and AI alone will not get us through this moment of geopolitical rupture. As Matthew Mendelsohn writes in an op-ed for The Hill Times, SMEs contribute just over half of Canada’s GDP and employ 64 per cent of our people. We have to make more low-cost capital available to the smaller businesses, locally owned enterprises, not-for-profits and social enterprises who crucially employ and reinvest locally, act as important local economic infrastructure and provide services that are crucial for well-being. They are automatic stabilizers in the face of tariff threats outside our control.
What’s wrong with mainstream economics?
Mainstream, or “neoclassical,” economics still dominates how we teach, study and understand our economy, even though much of it doesn’t match reality. In this piece, economists Louis-Philippe Rochon and Guillaume Vallet explain why outdated economic ideas persist and how they can lead to harmful policies. They challenge five common myths about inflation, growth and inequality, showing that today’s economy is driven more by power and institutions than by perfect markets. As "heterodox" economists, they argue it's time for a new kind of economics that reflects how the real world actually works.