Canada’s top CEOs will make $50K before noon on Jan. 2

If they were to live on the average worker’s pay, Canada’s CEOs could stop working at around 11 a.m. on Jan. 2 and take the rest of the year off. That’s because by 10:57 a.m. on the second day of the year, their earnings will have already hit $49,738, the equivalent of the country’s average wage, according to research by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPPA).

Canada’s CEO pay broke a new record in 2016, with the 100 top-paid chief executives of publicly traded companies netting $10.4 million on average, or 209 times the average income, the CPPA said in its latest annual survey of chief executives’ compensation. In 2015, the average CEO pay was $9.6 million, or 193 times more than what the average Canadian made.

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Looking at the median, which represents the mid-point of the pay distribution, means values won’t be skewed by a few CEOs who outearn the rest by a large margin, said Yvan Allaire, executive chair of IGOPP and author of its executive pay reports.

Indeed, the median CEO pay based on the CCPA’s ranking of the 100 best paid CEOs was $8.3 million, Allaire noted.

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Ottawa should eliminate that special tax treatment for shares handed out to executives as part of their pay, both the CCPA and Allaire said.

There is no reason to treat capital gains from those shares any differently than employment income, Allaire told Global News. “This looks like compensation and it should be treated like compensation,” he said.

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