For all the growing diversity the 2011 census and related surveys have portrayed in Canada, Wednesday's final release of data from the National Household Survey reveals a contrasting constant: the richest of the rich in Canada are married, middle-aged, white men.
The rest of us are up to our eyeballs in mortgage debt.
Statistics Canada has published the final batch of data from its new and controversial National Household Survey — the survey meant to stand in for the long-form census scrapped by the Conservatives in 2010. The release was delayed for a month because of a glitch in the agency's formulas.
It shows that the median family income in Canada is $76,000 — generally higher in the west than the east — while the median individual income is just $27,600. That means just as many individuals earn less than $27,600 as earn more.
The richest 10% of individuals are making more than $80,400. And the very rich — the 272,600 individuals who make up the top one per cent — are all making more than $191,100.
Those people are making an average of $381,300 each, 10 times the average Canadian income of $38,700. The large discrepancy between the median and the average suggests there is a very small percentage of the super-rich.
A similar income gap was recently highlighted in the U.S. by an analysis of Internal Revenue Service data that found that the divide between the wealthiest 1% and the rest is the biggest it has been since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The analysis, by economists from the University of California, Berkeley, the Paris School of Economics and Oxford University, found that the wealthiest one per cent saw their income increase by 31.4% between 2009 and 2012 while the income of the 99% grew only by 0.4%.
In Canada, the portrait of the rich differs starkly from the portrait of Canadians in general that has been exposed in previous releases of the census and NHS. Data up till now have shown an increasingly diverse population — aging, but also multi-racial, open to unconventional family structures, with women making huge strides in the workplace.
The rich, on the other hand, are a throwback to the old days: overwhelmingly male, between the ages of 45 and 54, almost always married or living in a common-law relationship.
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