Wages in Canada
Published on 27-10-2019
After examining the Corporate Profit Rate in Canada in the previous post, I’d like to turn now to see how you fared in the past two decades. Let’s have a look at wages in Canada from 2001 to 2017. But first, I want to wonder why we only have data from 2001. As always, my source is Statistics Canada, and they don’t have wages related data prior to 2001 or rather they don’t want to have. Economists and statisticians don’t like to look back more than 2 decades. It wouldn’t look good. I mean the latest two decades wouldn’t look good in the context of the past. Here is an article about criticizing economists.
So, how did you fare wage wise in Canada in the past two decades? The first chart shows the weekly average earning from 2001 in absolute numbers (dollars). I won’t go into what is it enough for. I am interested now in the rate of growth or the lack of it. The second chart shows this rate of change. The yearly average, the orange line, is 101.89 %. Your wages grew in average less than 2% per year. Important to note that these wage numbers are unadjusted, meaning that Statistics Canada did not factor in inflation and things like that. If we were to do that, we could say that your wages in the past two decades were stagnating at best or declining.
You can compare that to the average yearly Corporate Profit Rate seen before which is 11.89%. And that is profit, not income growth like in your case. Your rate is about your income, not your savings. Something to think about.