Abacus poll shows support for a wealth tax has risen to nearly 90%

TORONTO – A majority of Canadians believe the pandemic made income and wealth inequality worse and 81% think now is the right time to tackle it by increasing taxes on the wealthy and large corporations, says a new survey commissioned by the Broadbent Institute and the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada.

Conducted by Abacus Data, the survey shows overwhelming support for a number of tax measures, with 89% of Canadians saying that it could influence their vote.

“Canadians know things are becoming more unfair. Most think that we should take action now by raising taxes on the wealthiest and are willing to use their vote to get it,” says Katrina Miller, Program Director at the Broadbent Institute. "Political leaders should pay attention to the growing public demand to tax the rich because there has been no better time to take action on this issue.”

The super-wealthy have everything they could ask for. Internationally, their global power and influence have enabled them to concentrate corporate ownership, reap record profits, keep workers’ wages low and pay less tax than they did 30 years ago. Canada is no exception.

The current state of affairs is not an accident; it stems directly from political decisions and an economic system designed to benefit the wealthiest among us. Since the 1980s, governments around the world have reduced taxes on corporate profits and personal wealth, weakened regulations and privatized public infrastructure. These decisions allow the powerful to hoard wealth at the expense of workers, consumers, the environment, and social cohesion.

Broadly speaking, much of the attention focused on economic inequality in Canada has been on income inequality, while the role of wealth inequality has slid under the radar. The two phenomena are linked, and an understanding of one can help us reflect on the nature of the other. 

Tax wealth, not just income
Wealth inequality shows the opportunity that some groups have to accumulate substantial resources over time. An understanding of wealth inequality shows us that economic inequality is not random; rather, it’s part of a self-perpetuating cycle. If economic inequality were based on pure chance, we would not see the extreme concentration of wealth and privilege that we have today in a small group of bankers, family heirs, CEOs and media barons.

As Canada’s wealth pie has grown over the years, the share of the richest 1% has increased while that of the 99% has decreased; this led Canada’s top 1% to increase their share of net wealth from 15% in 1999 to 25.7% in 2019. In the past ten years alone, the richest Canadians have doubled their wealth, compared to virtually no change for the bottom 50%.

Calculated from Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook, 2020 and 2019

Economic inequality isn’t just unfair; it also creates a deeply dysfunctional economy. The more those at the top make decisions based on increasing their own wealth rather than our shared wealth, the less the economy can perform its role of sustaining people and our societies.
There are clear and concrete solutions that we can implement as a society - if we have the political will.

Wealth accumulation in Canada has been fostered and facilitated by political decisions:

• Corporate and personal tax cuts have allowed the wealthy to accumulate more wealth — and more power.
• This power has been used in turn to pressure governments to deregulate — especially by reducing protections for workers, consumers, and the environment.

Taxing the rich is a real possibility to address both income and wealth inequality, by:

• Creating an annual net wealth tax is a good start toward a fairer economy, but is not enough on its own.
• Changing how we tax capital gains will raise almost as much money as a modest wealth tax.
• Increasing the tax rate for corporations, closing loopholes, and increasing taxes on the highest income earners will make the economy more equal, and raise revenue that can be used to fund important public investments.
  
  

These proposed tax changes are actually quite moderate, and well within the range governments in Canada have set in recent history. While this means that doomsday predictions about devastating impacts to the economy are clearly exaggerated, it also means that we need to do more than just tax wealth — we need to also change the built-in levers in our system that ensure the rich get richer and the poor stay poor.

The impact of a wealth tax
There is significant resistance to the changes that we’re proposing, so it is important to note that, after a certain point, the accumulation of wealth no longer makes a difference to a person who is wealthy - $100,000 more or less will not prevent them from getting what they want. This includes all the luxury items and privileges they have become accustomed to, that are already far away from anything that could remotely be thought of as essential needs. Most of the money that we are looking at taxing is never used, and could never conceivably be used productively in a single person’s lifetime.

Take David Thomson and family, Canadians who own and control a media and publishing empire founded by their patriarch Roy Thomson. The family’s wealth was estimated at $50.6 billion in September 2020, a jump of $8.8 billion from the beginning of the pandemic. Forbes lists David as the 33rd richest person in the world, and Bloomberg estimates that this wealth is split between David, his two siblings, and four cousins. Even split between seven people, this amount is difficult to wrap our heads around. Billions. If you lived for 100 years and spent $1 million dollars every day of your life, you’d still have money left over.

This, at the same time that there are nearly 5 million people living in poverty in the same country. Years of tax cuts and austerity have helped the Thomson family accumulate this wealth and left too many of the rest of us with insecure jobs, inadequate housing, and a failing social safety net. We risk the tax cut / austerity dynamic happening again in the post-pandemic response if we don’t organize to ensure that our governments choose a different path.

The wealth tax proposed by the NDP in the 2019 federal election would have taxed each Thomson heir at 1% of their total wealth (over $20 million). At their current valuation, that would be an additional $505 million a year to the federal government, a fraction of the expected growth in their wealth over the year. This amount alone would cover the cost of eliminating the interest on all federal student loans in Canada.

It’s long past time to build a society and economy that will foster shared wealth.

The Institute's Program Director, Katrina Miller, was on yesterday's Danielle Smith Show to discuss the Institute's latest report, Multi-Millionaires and Fair Taxes: The Case for a Wealth Tax. The segment dives into the report and dispels myths about the Wealth Tax. Listen and share here.

MONTREAL— Quebecers greatly underestimate the wealth gap in Quebec and would prefer a much more balanced distribution of wealth. These findings are the key takeaways from the first nationwide survey that asked Canadians from all provinces how they think wealth is distributed and what they think would be the ideal distribution.

David Foot and Daniel Stoffman / The Globe and Mail

It’s rare for a book on economics to become a bestseller. It’s even rarer for a book by a hitherto unknown economist to reset the discussion among economists and policy-makers over a vitally important economic issue. But that’s what French economist Thomas Piketty did with the publication earlier this year of his 700-page tome, Capital in the Twenty-first Century.

Daniel Tencer / Huffington Post Canada

Canadians “vastly underestimate” the extent of wealth inequality in Canada, but would still like to see a much more equal society, according to research carried out for the left-leaning Broadbent Institute.

Kate Robertson / NOW Magazine

A new video by the Broadbent Institute shows that Canadians would be surprised at how big the gap really is between the rich and poor in this country.

Sara Mojtehedzadeh / The Toronto Star

David Akin / QMI

OTTAWA — They're richer than we think.

A new poll from the progressive think-tank The Broadbent Institute concludes that Canadians do not have an accurate picture of the difference between the amount of wealth controlled by the country's richest people and the amount controlled by the poorest.

Animated video shows what people think gap is compared to the ideal and actual wealth distributions

OTTAWA—Canadians vastly underestimate the wealth gap in Canada and want a much more balanced distribution. This is the key finding in the first-ever survey to ask Canadians what they think the wealth distribution is and what they think the ideal should be.