The average pay of Canada’s highest-paid CEOs by 12:18pm on Monday, January 4 was $48,636, an amount it takes the average full-time employee the rest of the year to earn, according to a new report.
The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ (CCPA) annual study of CEO pay in Canada shows that the country’s top 100 CEOs pocketed, on average, $8.96 million in 2014 — 184 times more than the average salary in Canada.
“The total pay package of the 100 highest paid CEOs exceeds the 2014-15 budgetary deficits of every province in Canada except Ontario, Quebec and Newfoundland,” said Hugh Mackenzie, research associate at the CCPA. “What we’ve learned is that the average pay of the top 100 CEOs in Canada has proven to be extraordinarily resilient, in good times and bad.”
Additional findings of the report, Staying Power: CEO Pay in Canada, include:
- In 2008, a recession year, the top 100 CEOs made $7.3 million, on average.
- 2013 represented a record high for average CEO pay since the CCPA began tracking it: they made, on average, $9.2 million.
- Share grants are replacing stock options as the preferred route to higher pay. Stock options dropped from 21% of pay in 2008 to 13% in 2014, while share grants increased from 26% in 2008 to 39% in 2014.
- Only two women made the Top 100 CEO pay list in 2014.
- Nearly half of the Top 100 can look forward to equally exorbitant pensions: 46 Canadian CEOs had pensions averaging $961,000 a year, almost as high as their $1.1 million average base salaries.
The study is based on total earnings of CEOs on the 249 publicly-listed Canadian corporations in the TSX Index, as reported in proxy circulars issued in 2015. It represents 2014 earnings data, the most recent year available.