Re: Canada ====================== National News Mid-income earners are stuck in neutral 25 September 2007 The Globe and Mail <javascript:void(0)> MONTREAL -- Decades of economically buoyant times have failed to drive up the fortunes of middle-income Canadians, who have found their average earnings stalled, a new study indicates. Fresh Statistics Canada figures show "the rich are getting richer," several economists interviewed yesterday said, yet most of their good fortune hasn't found its way to vast numbers of working Canadians. After two decades of overall economic expansion, the top 5 per cent of earners saw average incomes leap from $133,000 to $178,000. During the same period, earners in the middle of the pack saw average incomes frozen at $25,000, with family incomes nudging up slightly from $42,000 and $43,000. "People in the middle have genuine reason to be puzzled about where these benefits from economic growth are," McGill University economist Christopher Ragan said. "People who are not rich - those in the middle - got no more in real terms in 20 years. The real purchasing power of the average guy in the middle hasn't gone up in that time." "The concern from Canada's point of view is that income growth is not even." Statscan used tax returns and survey data to track income from 1982 to 2004. Results are adjusted to 2004 dollars. The period witnessed "substantial" growth in the average income of the richest Canadians, the agency found. "These increases, for the most part, were not paralleled in lower parts of the income spectrum." Some economists said the figures indicate Canada has failed to see its prosperity shared equally down the income scale. "We're told we should be grateful for the rich around us, and the result would be a trickle-down effect," said Armine Yalnizyan, an economist and research fellow the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. "That would be terrific if it weren't for the sponges at the top." Over all, Statscan's study focused on those on the top of the economic heap. It found that, compared with the United States, the club of high-income earners is easier to join in Canada than it is in the Unites States. About $89,000 catapults a Canadian into the country's top 5 per cent of individual earners, compared with a minimum of $165,000 in the U.S. The threshold to pierce the highest 0.01 per cent of earners in Canada was just over $2.8-million. In the U.S., it was $9.4-million. Those who fit into Canada's high-earning world can be found in some predictable places, including the Alberta oil patch. Calgary leads cities with a higher-than-average share of families with incomes over $250,000, followed by Toronto, Hamilton and Vancouver. Three quarters of high-income Canadians are men, mostly in their preretirement years. Almost half of the wealthiest income earners live in Ontario. "We've known the rich are getting richer, but we know more about who these people are," said economist Brian Murphy, the lead author of the study. "They're middle-aged married men living mostly in Alberta and Ontario." Women are vaulting into the clan of the Canadian rich, too. While females made up only one in seven top income earners in 1982, their share grew to one in four by 2004. "Women are sharing in high incomes in a way they haven't in the past," Mr. Murphy said. Still, some economists didn't find cause for celebration, saying the figures for low- and middle-income earners are troubling. "People have been playing by the rules and they're being left behind," said Ms. Yalnizyan. "Since 1982, people have been told to work hard, get better educated, improve productivity and grow the economy. Checklist done. "Yet most of the population has gone nowhere. When 80 per cent don't get a piece of the pie, there's trouble in paradise."
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