Done by 9:23 a.m.: The Quiet Math of CEO Pay in Canada

The 248-to-1 ratio isn't a force of nature. It's a setting. Here's who set it, and the one defence that quietly makes the whole thing worse.

Done by 9:23 a.m.: The Quiet Math of CEO Pay in Canada

There’s a specific kind of statistic that does something strange to your stomach. Not the big abstract ones we’ve all gone numb to. The specific ones. The ones with a timestamp.

Here’s one.

At 9:23 in the morning on January 2nd, 2025, Canada’s hundred highest-paid CEOs had already earned what the average Canadian worker would make for the entire year. Not by Christmas. Not by that first long weekend in May. By 9:23 a.m., on the second working day of the year, before most of us had finished a first coffee, the job was done.

The rest of us had 363 days left.

This is the headline figure everyone shares, and it’s the one that gets the screenshots. It’s also, weirdly, the least interesting thing about CEO pay in Canada. Because the usual move from here is outrage, and outrage is cheap. It feels like doing something while you do nothing. So let’s skip it.

Let’s look instead at how the number actually gets made. Because the mechanism is far stranger than the figure. And the single most popular defence of the whole arrangement, the one you’ll find sitting at the top of every comment thread, turns out to quietly make the case for the prosecution.

The Number Is Real. That’s the Uncomfortable Part.

Whenever a statistic lands this hard, the reasonable reflex is to assume somebody cooked the books. Cherry-picked a year. Counted things twice. It’s a healthy instinct, and I wish it applied here.

The figure comes from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and its annual Living the High Life report, now in its nineteenth year. Nineteen years is a long time to be quietly tracking the same thing, and it’s exactly the kind of unglamorous, longitudinal work that doesn’t trend but does hold up.

The numbers for 2024:

• Average pay for Canada’s top 100 CEOs: $16.2 million. A new record, beating the old one of $14.9 million from 2022.

• Average Canadian worker: $65,548.

• The ratio between them is 248 to 1. The highest ever recorded in this country.

• Shopify’s Tobias Lütke alone: $205.47 million. The largest single pay package in Canadian corporate history.

• And the price of admission, the bare minimum to crack the top 100: $7.2 million. That, too, is a record.

Run it down to the hour, and it somehow gets worse. At $16.2 million a year, the average top CEO earned roughly $7,812 an hour. That’s about $130 a minute. Someone on Ontario's minimum wage would need to work something like 236 years, full-time, no vacations, to match what one of these executives made in 2024 alone.

Two hundred and thirty-six years. You’d have had to start during George III's reign and still be clocking in.

So no, the number isn’t a glitch. It’s the cleanest part of the story.

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Why “It’s Just Stock Options” Makes It Worse

Now for the defence. You’ve seen it. The moment that 248-to-1 number circulates, a tidy rebuttal appears, usually upvoted to the top: this is skewed by Shopify. Strip Lütke out, and the average is only about $1.25 million.

And it’s true. It really is the most accurate pushback going.

It’s also completely beside the point, and it accidentally hands the other side a better weapon.

Start with the “only.” A $1.25 million salary is still nineteen times what the average Canadian earns. In the 1980s, the comparable ratio was around 3:1. So the calm, reasonable defence, relax, it’s just a million and a quarter, is really an admission that even the floor of executive pay has climbed more than sixfold in forty years. That’s not a rebuttal. That’s a confession wearing a tie.

But the deeper problem is that salary was never the story. In 2024, 84.3% of total CEO compensation came from bonuses, the performance-based pay tied directly to corporate profits. The base salary is the part you can point at to seem modest. The bonus is where the actual money lives.

Which raises the obvious question. Tied to what profits, exactly? Because that’s where this stops being a story about a few unusually lucky executives and becomes a story about everyone else.

Greedflation, and How the Loop Actually Closes

Nobody screenshots this part.

Before the pandemic, Canadian corporations pulled in roughly $400 billion a year in pre-tax profits. By 2021, as prices started their now-familiar climb, that figure jumped to $668 billion. In 2024, it sat at $630 billion. Call it a permanent step up of more than 57% above where it used to live.

Some of that is the ordinary churn of a big economy. But a meaningful chunk, per the CCPA and Statistics Canada, both, is something blunter: margin expansion. Companies are raising prices faster than their costs rise. Not just passing along the supply-chain pain, but using the chaos as cover to widen the gap permanently. Economists have a label for it that sounds like a slur and functions like a diagnosis: greedflation.

Now watch the loop close, because it’s almost elegant in how little villainy it requires.

Higher margins produce higher profits. Higher profits trigger bigger bonuses. Bigger bonuses, remember, are 84.3% of executive pay. Bigger bonuses produce record compensation. No smoke-filled room needed. Nobody has to cackle. You just need a pay structure, designed by boards largely made up of other well-paid executives, that automatically converts good times at the top of the company into personal wealth there.

And the people on the other end of those price increases?

Between 2020 and 2024, the average Canadian worker’s wages rose about 15%. Inflation over the same stretch rose 18%. Do that subtraction, and you get a real-wage cut of roughly 3%. Meanwhile, the things people actually buy outran even that: pasta up 47%, beef up 39%, eggs up 35%, chicken up 29%, rent up 26%, and the cost of owning a home up 29%.

So the same pricing behaviour that funded a record year for CEO pay is the pricing behaviour that quietly drained the wallets of the people doing the paying. The bonus and the grocery bill are not two separate stories. They’re the same dollar, viewed from opposite ends.

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Why CEO Pay Is So High (and Why It Wasn’t Always)

The most useful fact in this entire discussion is also the easiest to forget: the 248-to-1 ratio is not a law of nature. It’s not gravity. It’s a setting. And it used to be set very differently.

In the 1980s, Canada’s CEO-to-worker ratio sat around 40 to 50:1. By the late 1990s, it had reached 104:1. By 2008, 170:1. In 2024, 248:1. That’s not the slow drift of an economy growing. That’s a curve bending steadily upward in one direction, decade after decade.

Then there’s the comparison that really stings. Germany and Japan, countries with comparable industrial muscle and arguably better engineering, keep their executive ratios in the 30-50x range. Same century, same technology, wildly different outcome. So “our CEOs are just that much more productive” doesn’t survive contact with the evidence.

Three structural choices, made in North America and not in those peer economies, explain most of the gap:

1. The stock option loophole. In Canada, employee stock options get a preferential 50% tax deduction. In practice, this quietly subsidizes paying executives in stock, with no equivalent perk attached to a regular paycheque.

2. Who sets the pay? Compensation committees can be stacked with other executives and directors, the very people who benefit from high pay norms. There’s no one in the room whose job is to push the number down.

3. The disappearing counterweight. The share of private-sector workers covered by a union contract, historically the most reliable engine of wage growth, has fallen sharply since the 1980s. The people with the least bargaining power are the denominator in that 248.

None of that is a conspiracy. It’s just a set of rules that happen to point the same way.

A Quick Word About the Man Who Used to Run Brookfield

One more piece of context, and I’ll lay it out without the dramatic music.

The government in office is now led by Prime Minister Mark Carney. Before politics, Carney chaired Brookfield Asset Management, one of the country’s largest private equity and infrastructure firms, and before that, he was a Goldman Sachs executive. His own story is, to put it gently, not separate from the world the CCPA report describes. It’s woven right through it.

In May 2026, reporting showed the Carney government had handed corporate subsidies to the steel industry with no binding strings attached to prevent that money from flowing into executive compensation. A reporter put the question directly at the press conference: What stops this from becoming bonuses instead of wages? The government did not offer a binding answer.

Around the same time, the CCPA floated two specific fixes: a 2% annual wealth tax on Canadians with net worth exceeding $10 million, and the elimination of the 50% stock option deduction. Neither has made the legislative agenda.

You can draw your own conclusion about why. I’d only point out that asking the people who benefit from a system to dismantle it has a long and unimpressive track record.

The Fixes Exist. The Will Is the Missing Ingredient.

What makes this maddening is that it isn’t an unsolved problem. We are not waiting on a breakthrough. Every tool below already exists, already works, and is already running in some wealthy country that looks a lot like ours.

• Fix the stock option deduction. Tax options as ordinary income, and you remove the main tax reason to pay executives in stock in the first place.

• Require pay-ratio disclosure. The US already makes public companies publish their CEO-to-median-worker ratio every year. Canada doesn’t. Sunlight first, accountability second.

• Try the multiplier model. Cap executive pay at a multiple of the lowest-paid worker. Under a 20:1 rule, a CEO who wants $10 million has to ensure the lowest-paid person at the company earns at least $500,000. It ties the ceiling to the floor.

• Tax windfall margins. A temporary levy on profit margins that blow past their own historical average, modelled on the UK’s energy windfall tax, aimed straight at the greedflation engine.

• Put a worker in the room. Germany’s co-determination model seats employee representatives on the boards that set pay. Funny how the ratios stay lower when the people affected get a vote.

Not one of these is radical. Each is just a choice we have, so far, chosen not to make.

Back to 9:23

So let’s return to that clock.

The thing about 9:23 a.m. is that the clock itself isn’t the scandal. The clock is just telling time, faithfully, the way clocks do. The scandal, if that’s even the right word, is everything that had to be arranged in advance for the morning of January 2nd to play out that way. The tax code. The boardrooms. The forty-year drift no one ever quite voted for.

A number like 248 to 1 feels like a force of nature when you’re standing underneath it. It isn’t. It’s a sum of decisions, and decisions can be made differently. Germany made them differently. Japan made them differently. We made them like this.

Next January 2nd, the clock will probably read a few minutes earlier. 9:21, maybe. 9:19. The curve has been bending the same way for forty years, and nothing on the current agenda is bending it back.

And the rest of us will still have 363 days to go.

If that sits wrong with you, good. That’s not outrage. That’s just paying attention. The two get confused all the time, and only one of them is useful.

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