Canada's highest-paid CEOs and other top executives broke compensation records in 2021, according to a new report, earning an average of $14.3 million as skyrocketing inflation began to take hold.
The average calculated in the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) report, released Tuesday, far exceeds the previous record of $11.8 million in 2018 and is 31% higher than in 2020.
It is also 243 times the average annual salary for a worker of $58,800 in 2021, which marked only a three percent increase from the previous year.
According to the report, Canada's highest-paid executives will have already earned the full salary of an average worker in less than an hour on the first working day of the new year.
The report, written by CCPA senior economist David Macdonald, found that inflation played a major role in the increase in executive pay.
Although Canadians really started to feel the inflation squeeze in 2022, along with multiple interest rate hikes aimed at controlling it, inflation was already at 4.7 percent in December 2021, more than double the Bank of Canada's benchmark of two percent.
With companies achieving record profits in 2021 as a result of rising prices, a trend that only increased last year, executives earned more performance-based bonuses that increased their compensation.
The report recommends setting a $1 million cap on corporate deductions on compensation, meaning anything beyond that is subject to corporate income taxes.