Social Capital Partners releases new report on wealth inequality in Canada – concludes that official statistics significantly underestimate the problem

April 4, 2024| News release

TORONTO, Apr. 4, 2024 –Social Capital Partners (SCP) today released a new report documenting how wealth inequality in Canada is far closer to the inequality that exists in the United States than official statistics claim.

The report, entitled “Billionaire Blindspot: How official data understates the severity of Canadian wealth inequality”, critically analyzes Canada’s flagship wealth survey, the Survey of Financial Security (SFS), and outlines how its methodological shortcomings lead to significant underreporting of wealth inequality.

“Wealth concentration is getting worse in Canada, just like in the U.S. The difference is that Americans have the data they need to accurately understand, discuss, and propose solutions,” explains the report’s author and SCP’s policy director, Dan Skilleter. “StatsCan has already acknowledged the need for better data, and we hope that this report will encourage them to act on our recommendations, ensuring a more accurate understanding of wealth inequality in Canada.”

The report concludes that the top 1% in Canada own 26% of all wealth, and the top 0.1% own 12.4% of all Canadian wealth. These numbers are significantly higher than official estimates and are much closer to U.S. levels of wealth inequality than previously understood. The report concludes that the American survey, the Survey of Consumer Finance (SCF), does a much better job of measuring reality and presents a series of recommendations to improve the Canadian survey.

“Deep wealth inequality corrodes democratic societies and threatens economic resilience,” said Matthew Mendelsohn, CEO of Social Capital Partners. “The misleading portrait of wealth inequality in Canada undermines our ability to have an evidenceinformed debate about how to address growing wealth concentration. Canadians are telling ourselves a story about wealth inequality that is fundamentally wrong.”

“Wealth concentration is getting worse in Canada, just like in the U.S. The difference is that Americans have the data they need to accurately understand, discuss and propose solutions.”

Changing narratives Wealth inequality

Share with a friend

Related reading

BlogThe Ownership Solution
Three professionally dressed people walk together on a city sidewalk, smiling and talking about employee ownership trusts FAQs. One woman holds a notebook, another gestures while speaking, and the man carries a bag.

Four reasons our economy needs employee ownership now

Employee ownership offers a timely solution to some of Canada’s most pressing economic challenges, writes Deborah Aarts in Smith Business Insight. Evidence shows that when employees share ownership, businesses become more productive, innovative and resilient. Plus, beyond firm-level gains, employee ownership can help address the coming mass retirement of business owners, protect local economic sovereignty, boost national productivity and reduce wealth inequality. There is enough data about the brass-tacks benefits of employee ownership to sway even the most hardened skeptic.

Blog
The image shows the tall clock tower and stone facade of the Canadian Parliament building in Ottawa, featuring Gothic Revival architecture against a partly cloudy sky—an inspiring setting for discussing employee ownership trusts FAQs.

Advice to the public service: Five ways to confront monsters and chaos

Canada's political and bureaucratic leaders are quickly trying to re-wire the federal government to confront a belligerent Unites States, but systems can’t deliver what they were not designed for. This is a time like no other in our history, writes Matthew Mendelsohn, and those making decisions have not been trained for this—because we haven’t experienced anything like this before.  Drawing on his own time in Ottawa, he walks us through five  priority “machinery of government” changes our public service needs to make to meet the threat of an increasingly authoritarian, imperialist America.

OpinionIn the media
A leafless tree with twisting branches stands before two old, two-story houses under a clear blue sky, their porches and pale exteriors subtly hinting at the history of civic responsibilities in the neighborhood.

How to get single family homes out of the hands of investors | Toronto Star

About 1.3 million homes in Canada that could be family-owned are held by investors—mostly individuals. In The Star, Matthew Mendelsohn, the Missing Middle Initiative's Mike Moffat and Jon Shell explain how a simple tax change could finance new rental construction while also freeing up homes for families to buy. The policy would temporarily allow investors to defer capital gains taxes if they reinvest proceeds into new purpose-built rentals. Many policy changes are needed to fully address the complex Canadian housing crises, and this could be one that puts Canadian capital to more productive uses.

Skip to content