By Yumna Iftikhar | The Independent
The wage gap between Canadian workers and the country’s top-paid CEOs grew even larger in 2024, according to a new report.
“By 9:23 a.m. on January 2 [of 2024] Canada’s 100 highest-paid CEOs had already made what the average worker will make all year,” the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) says in the progressive think tank’s report, Living the high life: A record-breaking year for CEO pay in Canada.
In the report economist David Macdonald finds that while an average Canadian worker earned $65,548 in 2024—an increase of nearly $3,000 from 2023—Canada’s highest-paid CEOs earned nearly $8,000 an hour during the same period of time, amounting to an annual raise of $3 million.
Meanwhile in Newfoundland and Labrador, where minimum wage workers earn $16 an hour, labour leaders say during collective bargaining they often hear representatives say companies can’t afford to pay their workers with fair and reasonable wage increases.
“It’s really hard to take that commentary from employers and corporations that they can’t somehow afford decent wage increases for workers,” says Newfoundland and Labrador Federation of Labour President Jessica McCormick.
What goes up must come down (on workers)
The CCPA points out that the bulk of a CEO’s earnings come from bonuses awarded to the individual based on the company’s profitability. The report ranks the 100 highest-paid CEOs in Canada in 2024, and many of the companies those CEOs lead have a presence in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Familiar names include the CEOs of Dominion and Shoppers Drug Mart parent company Loblaw, Suncor, Air Canada, Tim Horton’s parent company Restaurant Brands International, Fortis, and ExxonMobil subsidiary Imperial Oil.
James Farrell, a lawyer and a director at the Fish, Food & Allied Workers (FFAW) union, says it’s disheartening that CEOs earn millions largely off the profits generated by their workers, many of whom “aren’t able to scrape enough together to keep things going and have to work other jobs.”
The CCPA compiled the list from publicly-available documents. To compare CEO pay with worker pay, the report uses data from Statistics Canada’s Survey of Employment, Payrolls and Hours.
Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke topped the list, earning more than $205 million in 2024, which the CCPA says is the highest annual salary on record for any CEO in Canada. The lowest-paid CEO on the list earned $7 million in 2024.
Reading the report “feels pretty terrible,” says Josh Smee, CEO of Food First NL, a non-profit that works to improve food security in the province.
Smee is concerned to see executive pay growing faster than inflation, while workers’ pay often doesn’t keep up. “People who are working average jobs [are] losing ground against things like food prices,” he says. “And the folks who don’t really need to worry about food prices anyway are actually gaining ground.”
According to the report, Canadian CEO’s wages have increased 49 per cent since 2020, while workers’ wages have increased just 15 per cent over the same period. The report notes that Canada’s 100 highest-paid CEOs now make, on average, “248 times more than the average worker in Canada.”
The report notes that since January 2020, prices of goods and services have gone up by 18 per cent, and that “since workers’ pay went up by only 15 per cent over that period, it means that workers took an effective three per cent pay cut.”
McCormick says the findings affirm wages are “a key component” of confronting the affordability and cost-of-living crisis. She encourages non-unionized workers to consider unionizing so they can use their collective power to negotiate higher wages with employers. The Canadian Labour Congress estimates that, on average, unionized workers make $7 an hour more than non-unionized workers.
The provincial government can also help by increasing the minimum wage, McCormick adds. “Examining our minimum wage and aligning it more closely with what a living wage would be in the various regions is another key way to do that.”
Newfoundland and Labrador’s previous Liberal government increased the minimum wage by $0.40 to $16 last April. But McCormick says that’s still far from a living wage, which the CCPA estimated last August was between $24.40 and $28.30 in the province, depending on where in the region a person lives.
Higher taxes on millionaires
To reign in some of the wage disparity, the report offers two solutions: a millionaire tax and a wealth tax.
A millionaire tax would tax individuals earning more than $1 million at a slightly higher rate on every dollar over the million-dollar mark. The report also notes that taxes on the richest Canadians are near an all-time low, pointing out that “in the 1950s and 1960s, the top marginal combined income tax rates on the highest-paid workers were just below 80 per cent,” and that today, “combined federal and provincial top marginal income tax rates are closer to 50 per cent, depending on the province.”
A wealth tax, on the other hand, would be based on a person’s total net worth rather than just on their annual income. It’s a form of taxation that has been proposed by some economists, advocacy groups, and the federal NDP.
The CCPA argues a wealth tax should apply to anyone who has at least $10 million in net assets, and that even a 1-3 per cent wealth tax would help fund a national childcare plan and eliminate wait times in emergency rooms. “There is no reasonable need for a single person to have $10 million, much less $100 million, in net worth,” the report says.
McCormick agrees tax reforms would help increase funding for programs like national pharmacare. “If we want to improve those types of programs, this is the way we can do it, by finding new sources of revenue and trying to close that gap,” she says.
Smee is happy the report points to real solutions for social problems like food insecurity, and that the solutions are about increasing income and funding special improvements by raising taxes on the wealthiest individuals. Canadians, he says, are “a bit shy about having a conversation about what the responsibilities are of those who earn [millions].”
According to Statistics Canada, in July 2025 Canadians were paying a little over 27 per cent more for food than they were in 2020.
A food pricing report from Canadian researchers estimates grocery costs will rise another 4-6 per cent in 2026, meaning a family of four in should expect to pay $994.63 more on groceries this year compared to in 2025.
Seeing grocery store CEOs on the CCPA’s list of top earners highlights the importance of having diverse profit and non-profit grocery retailers in the province, says Smee. “If the need to compensate executives and shareholders is removed, it opens up some really interesting opportunities for business models that could help ease the pressure on people who are really struggling,” he says.
