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.
Share with a friend
Related reading
Ontario wakes up to the succession tsunami
In November, 2025, the Ontario provincial government finally stepped into the looming “succession tsunami,” launching a modest $1.9M Business Succession Planning Hub to help micro-business owners plan exits through local Small Business Enterprise Centres. Notably, the hub spotlights employee ownership and the new Employee Ownership Trust, signaling a shift toward mainstream adoption. But, as Dan Skilleter writes, Ontario’s approach focuses narrowly on retiring owners, ignoring how different buyers shape risks and benefits to workers, communities and Canada's broader economic sovereignty. This is a promising start that could and should grow into a broader succession-planning policy that protects Ontario’s long-term resilience.
Mapping the economic centre-left
The large and well-funded American blogosphere has a pretty wide array of economic voices and ideological camps within the centre-left tent. So big, in fact, that there’s a sub-genre of inter-blog conflict dedicated to people named Matt. Over the years, SCP Director of Policy Dan Skilleter has found it useful to categorize these various different centre-left ideological camps in his head. The categories are not mutually exclusive, and most people probably identify with a few at once. This explainer breaks down each camp's story about what’s wrong with the economy and how they’d prioritize dealing with it.
How intergenerational inequality threatens trust in democracy | Policy Options
Our political leaders must be willing to make difficult tradeoffs to rebalance policies toward the young and away from older Canadians, write Jean-François Daoust, Liam O'Toole and Jacob Robbins-Kanter in Policy Options. The broader economic picture for younger Canadians offers little hope, and economic frustration is shown to run hand-in-hand with political alienation. As intergenerational inequality persists and deepens, Canada risks experiencing an even sharper decline in trust in its democratic institutions than what already exists. Building affordable housing and supporting young families are essential first steps in a much-needed generational reset that puts fairness at the centre of Canadian political life.