Are you one of the Canadian 1%?

Statistics Canada has just released new data on what it takes to be considered part of the 1% in Canada.

The threshold for 1%-dom in 2015 was earnings of $234,700, up from $227,100 in 2014. There were 270,925 such individuals in Canada (the biggest increases over the previous year coming in Ontario and British Columbia). If you are interested in being part of the 0.1% Club, you would need to earn $826,800, and there were 27,095 others in the club. Aiming for the 0.01%, the top 10,000th of earners? The threshold was $3,636,000 in 2015, and you would be in the rarefied company of 2,710 other tax filers.

Well, all of this puts me well away from danger of being a 1%-er in wealthy Canada, although I am probably still a 1%-er worldwide (at least in terms of accumulated wealth, rather than annual earnings), which is a much lower hurdle, and has cheaper club fees.

The other interesting factoid coming out of the StatsCan data is that the top 1%'s earnings as a share of Canadian national total income actually took a little hop in 2015, to 11.2%, after remaining stable for a few years at just under 11%. To be fair, this was the last year of Stephen Harper's Conservative administration, and it is to be hoped that, in the last couple of years under the Liberals, this has fallen. But we are still going to be a long way from the 7% levels of thirty years ago.