By noon on Jan. 3, when most Canadians were back on the job, the holidays over, each of the country's 100 highest-paid chief executive officers had already earned the $44,366 the average person makes working full-time all year.
If you, like me, reacted negatively to this news, you might also be unhappy to learn that we have been dismissed by many Canadian commentators as envious, naive, unaccountably blind to the brilliance of the men who run some of our biggest companies, and shockingly ungrateful to men like Magna International's Frank Stronach, who arrived here penniless and built a multibillion-dollar auto-parts company from scratch.
These are insults, not arguments. They're meant to keep lower-earners in their place. But staying put and saying nothing is not a good strategy for the 99.99 per cent of Canadians who make up the rest of the country's workforce. The already wide gap between Canada's top 100 CEOs (along with another 2,360 Canadians who make up the richest 0.01 per cent of Canadian tax filers) and the rest of us continues to grow at a brisk pace. Last year, the top 100 CEOs made 189 times more than the average Canadian salary. In 1998, they made 105 times more. Thirty years ago, they made 25 times more.
As the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives rightly says in its report this month, people who earn an average of $8 million a year "no longer live in the world occupied by the rest of us."
In this alternative world, created and populated by people like them-selves, the 100 top CEOs get to decide how much they, and the other 99.99 per cent, should be paid.
