Canadian CEO salaries skyrocket amid recession
By Gurmukh Singh, IANSTuesday, January 4, 2011
TORONTO - Even as other G8 economies struggle to emerge from the meltdown, Canada’s best-paid 100 CEOs breezed through the worst of the recession with earnings 155 times higher than the average Canadian salary, a study released here Monday said.
Titled ‘Recession Proof,’ the study by the Ottawa-based Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) said the average salary for Canada’s best paid CEOs was a whopping $6.6 million even during the darkest period of the recession in 2009.
On the other hand, the average Canadian’s income is just $42,988.
In plain terms, a CEO earned the equivalent of the salary of an average Canadian by mid-afternoon Monday, the study pointed out.
“At this rate of reward, this handful of elite CEOs pocket the equivalent of the average Canadian wage by 2.30 p.m. on January 3 - the first working day of the year,” said study author and CCPA research associate Hugh Mackenzie in a statement.
The fattest cheque of $24.2 million went to Aaron Regent of Barrick Gold Corporation. He was followed by Hunter Harrison of the Canadian National Railway Co., who took home $17.3 million. Third-placed Gerald Schwartz of Onex Corporation pocketed $16.7 million.
Mackenzie said these “skyrocketing level of executive pay in Canada and the US” are the main cause of deepening inequalities in North America.
Showing how sharply CEO salaries have risen during the last 10 years, the study author said that in 1998, the best paid 100 CEOs pocketed an average of 104 times more than the average Canadian wage earner, compared to 155 times now.
“Even that extraordinary number understates the real story,” said Mackenzie.
“Thanks to a change in corporate reporting introduced in 2008, we only have a conservative statistical estimate of the stock options that make up about one third of CEOs’ 2009 pay. The public will never know how much most of these CEOs actually got paid in 2009.
“And that’s only half the story. These CEOs are sitting on $1.3 billion of stock options they haven’t yet cashed in. That’s about $2 in future income for every $1 they declared in 2009,” the study author added.
(Gurmukh Singh can be contacted at gurmukh.s@ians.in)
