Another day, another dollar? For Canada’s top executives, it’s more like another half-day, another $44,366.
That’s how much the average member of the 100 top-paid chief executives of companies listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange’s composite index was projected to earn by noon on Tuesday, the first working day of this year. That’s according the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, which for the fifth straight year has measured how long it takes for Canada’s richest chief executives to make the average Canadian’s annual pay.
The think-tank based its report on data from 2010. Its previous report, based on numbers from 2009, showed the average CEO among Canada’s top 100 making the average person’s pay by 2:30 p.m. on the year’s first working day.
The latest report showed Canada’s top executives earned, on average, $8.4 million in 2010, including salary, bonuses, stock grants and options. That was up 27 per cent from a year earlier. The average person, on the other hand, is actually earning less than during the 2008-09 recession, if inflation is taken into account, the centre said.
The report says those working minimum wage jobs on a full-time basis made an average of $19,798 in 2010.
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Not only is the gap between the county’s elite money earners and regular people big, but it’s getting bigger, the report said.
“The average of Canada’s CEO elite 100 make 189 times more than Canadians earning the average wage,” the report’s author, economist Hugh Mackenzie, said in a statement. “If you think that’s normal, it’s not. In 1998, the highest paid 100 Canadian CEOs earned 105 times more than the average wage, itself likely more than double the figure for a decade earlier.”
The centre said no comparable data is available for the 1980s.
The report says inequality between Canada’s richest and the rest has been growing since the mid-1980s, reversing a trend since the 1930s that saw increasing equality between the rich, middle and poor.
Although not technically a CEO, the top earning executive on the centre’s list was Frank Stronach, chairman of Magna International until May last year. He made $61.8 million in 2010, more than $40 million of that in bonuses, the Centre for Policy Alternatives said.
The next two spots were also taken by Magna officials – CEO Donald Walker was reported as earning $16.7 million, and Siegfried Wolf, a co-CEO until November 2010, made $16.5 million.
The lowest-paid executive among the top 100 was Pierre Beaudoin of Bombardier Inc., whose compensation amounted to $3.9 million.
There was only one woman among these executives – Nancy Southern of ATCO Ltd. and Canadian Utilities Ltd. with earnings of $4.8 million, which put her in 85th place in the centre’s rankings.
The total compensation among the top 100 executives in 2010 was $838 million, the centre said. That’s more than the projected deficits this year for several provincial governments, including those for Manitoba, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island.
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