Statscan: Rich got richer, poor and middle class stayed same

September 24, 2007

Statscan: Rich got richer, poor and middle class stayed same

A new study says high-income Canadians got a lot richer between 1992 and 2004, while the rest of the population made little financial progress.

The Statistics Canada study, which used tax returns to explore trends among high-income earners, found the top five per cent of the tax-filing population accounted for about 21 per cent of total income in 1992; by 2004 it accounted for 25 per cent.

The study found little improvement among the rest of the population and it says that while there were more high-income earners who were women in 2004, their share of the pie was depleted.

Three-quarters of the 1.2 million high-income Canadians were men, even though men were a minority (48 per cent) of individual income recipients in general.

--Report on Business (not, I note, the National section)