Making Money Fast

Top CEO's receive your entire year's pay by January 2.

If you're an average Canadian worker, you probably earn around $38,000 a year. But what it'll take you 12 months to earn, Canada's 100 highest paid CEOs had earned by 9:46 a.m. on January 2.

By the time Canadians tuned into the 6:00 news on January 2, those 100 CEOs had each pocketed nearly $70,000. The highest paid CEO among them had 'earned' more than $570,000 by the time he sat down to supper on January 2.

"If time is money, are Canada's 100 highest paid CEOs really worth more in a day than most Canadian workers are in a year?" asks Hugh Mackenzie, research associate with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA).

"People wonder what the growing gap between the rich and the rest of us looks like. This provides us with a pretty good snapshot of how unevenly the Canadian workforce is valued these days."

This information is extracted from a report prepared by the CCPA called "Timing is Everything: Comparing the earnings of Canada's highest-paid CEOs and the rest of us". A PDF of full report of the full report can be downloaed from the CCPA Web site (202 kb). Additional information about the growing gap in Canadian wages can be found on the web site growinggap.ca.