Because They've Earned It ...

By 3:15 p.m. on Jan. 3, the country's top executives had already made more than most Canadians make in an entire year. How's that for a kick to the giblets?

The National Post’s Kelly McParland is not at all impressed with a study that found even during the recession, income for Canada’s top CEOs has continued to rise and is now 155 times greater than the that of the average worker. McParland says the study’s results are “self-evident [because] rich people, by definition, are richer than non-rich people.” Anyway, he says, CEO’s pay “doesn’t come from your pocket or mine. It’s not siphoned away from the homeless, the needy or the hungry,” and even if you divvied up all the CEOs’ increased income and handed it out, every Canadian would only get something like 12 bucks. Does McParland really not see how reports like this, self-evident or not, might upset people? Is it not slightly distressing that executives’ income is apparently completely unrelated to the crummy economy that governs their employees? His attempt to minimize the size of their salaries by boiling it down to the “12 dollars per Canadian” figure is also pretty lame. If Dalton McGuinty was wasting the equivalent of 12 dollars per Ontarian on some ineffective government program, McParland would justifiably be up in arms.

According to the editors of the Toronto Star, CEOs’ pay is actually coming out of our pockets. Because much of their salaries comes in the form of stock options, which are taxed at half the rate of income, Canadians are losing out on millions of tax dollars each year. The Star suggests that Finance Minister Jim Flaherty overhaul the executive tax structure with his next budget, or (given the supreme unlikelihood of that event) the issue should be taken up by the opposition. That is something we in The Mark Newsroom would like to see, if only for variety’s sake. For whatever reason, conservatives tend to have the monopoly on channeling the rage of the everyman, and this is the kind of simple issue that even the hapless Liberals could conceivably sink their teeth into.

Also, welcome back readers! We in the Mark Newsroom hope you had as good a holiday as we did (all of our presents were wrapped in Canadian op-ed pages. It was a good Christmas.)