By Dan Skilleter | Part of our Special Series: Always Canada. Never 51
The nation’s fiscal fact-checker, the Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO), takes aim at the severity of wealth inequality in Canada in a new report. This is the third time the PBO has run the numbers since 2020 and the report shows just how much of Canada’s wealth is concentrated in a tiny circle of families.
The fresh analysis, using updated survey data from Statistics Canada, reaffirmed the dramatic lopsided shape of our economy—one where the top one per cent of families own nearly one quarter of all the wealth in the country, and where the top five per cent own over 40 per cent.
It’s unusual for an independent office like the PBO to take the time to repeatedly publish updates of a study like this. So why do it, then? It’s because StatsCan’s “official” data on the state of inequality in the country are flawed and misleading—but the government keeps publishing those numbers anyway.
We know why the government’s official numbers are so misleading. When Statistics Canada interviews a sample of Canadian families every few years to get a picture of what they own, the list of families contains a curious omission. They don’t talk to any of the richest families.
No effort is made to ensure that the richest families even get a request to participate—before even factoring in that participation is purely voluntary and these families are the most likely to decline such an interview. Statistics Canada does not correct or adjust for this.
So, the government’s best available data on Canada’s wealth gap excludes, by design, the wealthiest families in the country. If we didn’t have the PBO fact-checking Statistics Canada’s work, the numbers would tell us the top one per cent own only 2.5 per cent of all wealth – not nearly 25 per cent of all wealth in Canada, as the PBO reports.
And without the resources and authority to conduct surveys, the PBO’s only means to get at the real wealth of those richest families is to incorporate data from the “rich lists” compiled by media outlets like Maclean’s or Forbes – reporting that undoubtedly understates the true wealth of these families, due to how much of their personal financial information remains out of public view.
While not a perfect measure, the PBO’s numbers are closer to the truth, and their fact-finding persistence will continue to be necessary until our government gets its act together.
As I argued in a 2024 report called Billionaire Blindspot, Canadians live with a false sense of comfort—or even smugness—about how equal we are. While we have our inequalities issues, we think of ourselves as a beacon of egalitarianism compared to our neighbours to the south.
We tell ourselves “At least we’re nothing like them,” and we have official government statistics to back us up. But as I showed in my report, when you add in what we publicly know about Canada’s richest families, as the PBO took it upon itself to do, the concentration of wealth here looks quite similar to the U.S.
It’s insulting that Canadians are forced to rely on the PBO’s continued interest in wealth disparities across our population for the public to get sporadic glimpses of reality. And it’s deeply problematic that our official statistical agency is perfectly fine with misleading Canadians.
It’s time for our government to get serious and take on this vital monitoring work itself. Wealth distribution is a core measure of our country’s health, given that pronounced economic inequality is linked to lower long-term GDP growth rates, higher crime rates, poorer public health, increased political polarization and likelihood of financial crisis.
Other countries, like the U.S., make sure their measures include interviews with the wealthiest families, making their data much more reliable than ours. Failing that, Statistics Canada should find credible external sources to undertake the modelling work rather than requiring the PBO to step in to provide more accurate and useful measures of wealth inequality in Canada.
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