Billionaire Blindspot: How official data understates the severity of Canadian wealth inequality

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.