By the time most Canadians drag themselves into work on Tuesday after the holidays, the country's highest-paid CEOs will already have earned the average employee's annual salary.
By 9:46 a.m. Tuesday, the 100 highest-paid private-sector executives will have earned an average Canadian's salary of $38,010, says a new study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
For minimum-wage workers, the country's top earners made their entire salary average of $15,931 by New Year's Day.
"When you say that the average CEO made $9 million in 2005 and the average Canadian made ($38,000), the comparison between those things is so far into the stratosphere that I think people have trouble just coming to terms with what the comparison means,'' Hugh Mackenzie, an economist with the independent research institute that focuses on issues of social and economic justice, told The Canadian Press.
"Converting it into time sort of puts it into a frame that people can get their heads around."
The statistics are based on 2005 salary figures from Statistics Canada and Report on Business magazine's most recent listing of the 100 best-paid CEOs of Canadian publicly traded companies.
According to the figures, by the end of the workday Tuesday, the average CEO will have pocketed a staggering $70,000.
"I was kind of hoping it would get into the second week of January. As it turns out, it was not even close," said Mackenzie. "Once people get over how stunning the differentials are, I think it really raises a lot of questions in people's minds."
"How can somebody possibly be worth that amount in income and . . . if those people are taking that much money out of the company or out of the economy, what does that mean for what's left for the rest of us?''
Recent scandals have focused the public spotlight on the huge salary and severance packages that top CEOs receive.
Former Ontario Hydro One CEO Tom Parkinson resigned last December after criticism surfaced about expense account irregularities and his $1.6-million annual salary and bonus.
Despite his resignation, Parkinson received a $3-million severance package.
Since Parkinson's wages were largely based on the earnings of CEOs in the private sector, Mackenzie says Canadians need to start looking at private-sector pay practices.
"I think people are now starting, certainly in the (United) States... to ask questions about how the market actually works... like who gets onto these compensation committees and how the consultants that are brought in to do the studies, how they actually do the work that they do.''
"These large corporations are not one-man bands. These are very large, sophisticated operations, and it just kind of boggles the mind that anybody thinks it's reasonable to be paying out, as an annual income for the year for a chief executive officer, numbers averaging $10 million for the top 100.''
With files from The Canadian Press
