About time

Good on the CCPA for tracking the minute at which an average top-100 CEO earned as much as the average Canadian will this year - which for those paying attention took place before most Canadians took their coffee break this morning:

By the time the average Canadian grudgingly drags his or her still-hungover body into work Tuesday, swaps holiday tales with the stiff in the next cubicle, and hunkers down to work, the country's highest-paid CEOs will have already earned the worker's annual salary.

Minimum-wage workers would have barely rolled out of bed on New Year's Day by the time the country's top earners pocketed the $15,931 that will likely take the low-paid workers all of 2007 to make.

A study released Tuesday by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives says the 100 highest-paid private-sector executives will have earned an average Canadian's salary of $38,010 by 9:46 a.m. Tuesday...

Mackenzie crunched the numbers based on 2005 salary figures from Statistics Canada and Report on Business magazine's most recent listing of the 100 best-paid CEOs of Canadian publicly traded companies.

According to his figures, by the time Canadians flick on the 6 p.m. news Tuesday, the average CEO will have pocketed a staggering $70,000.

"I was kind of hoping it would get into the second week of January. As it turns out, it was not even close," Mackenzie quipped. "Once people get over how stunning the differentials are, I think it really raises a lot of questions in people's minds."

"How can somebody possibly be worth that amount in income and ... if those people are taking that much money out of the company or out of the economy, what does that mean for what's left for the rest of us?"

Of course, pointing out the problem is only a small first step. But it's still far too rare for the gaping chasm between Canada's highest-paid executives and the bulk of its citizens to be exposed this vividly. And the acknowledgement can only lead to important questions about how the gap has evolved, and what can be done to start narrowing it.

(For those wondering, yes, I have been looking forward to just this type of analysis for quite some time.)

(h/t to Indiescribe.)