How offshore tax havens fuel inequality in Canada and abroad
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Thomas Piketty
13 min read
The article references the World Inequality Database compiled by this French economist. Understanding Piketty's influential work on wealth inequality, particularly his book 'Capital in the Twenty-First Century,' provides essential theoretical background for the inequality statistics discussed.
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Tax haven
17 min read
Central to the article's thesis about offshore wealth storage and its colonial origins. The Wikipedia article covers the legal structures, history, and global impact of tax havens in depth, providing context for the $682 billion figure cited.
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Base erosion and profit shifting
14 min read
The article discusses how corporations use offshore subsidiaries to reduce taxes. BEPS explains the specific mechanisms companies use to shift profits to low-tax jurisdictions, which directly relates to the $7 billion in savings mentioned for TSX 60 companies.
This piece was originally published in Ricochet.
A group of dozens of wealthy Canadians calling themselves “Patriotic Millionaires” recently wrote an open letter to Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne asking him to implement policies to reduce income inequality in next month’s budget “by effectively taxing the rich.”
“One of us is a former member of the Canadian Parliament, and the other is a current member of the one per cent, so we’re well-positioned to tell you that our current level of wealth inequality is threatening the stability of our economy and democracy, and is partially the result of a failure to tax extreme wealth,” Patriotic Millionaires Ratna Omidvar and Sabina Vohra-Miller write in the Hill Times.
Omidvar and Vohra-Miller point to a new report from Statistics Canada that shows how income inequality — defined as the gap between the top and bottom 40 per cent of income earners — is at a record high in 2025, and contributing to significant economic distress.
The World Inequality Database, compiled by French economist Thomas Piketty, measures economic inequality by the share of income and wealth earned by the top one per cent.
The difference between income and wealth is similar to the difference between deficit and debt — the former is an annual measurement while the latter builds up over time, providing a more holistic measurement.
In 2023, the top one per cent in Canada earned 11.6 per cent of all income in Canada — higher than at any time from 1940 to 1998, but lower than the peak of 14.2 per cent in 2007, right before the global financial crisis, and 14.3 per cent in 1939, at the outset of the Second World War.
When it comes to wealth inequality in Canada, the top one per cent of wealth holders now hold 24 per cent of total wealth, and close to half of that is held by just the top 0.1 per cent. More than a trillion dollars is held by just 1,800 families, the top 0.01 per cent of wealth holders, according to a new report from the Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO).
“PBO finds that there were approximately 169,400 families in the top one per cent in 2023, and they each had a net wealth of at least $7.4 million. PBO projects these
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