Statscan fixated on the wealthy

Agency divides earners into 1% and ‘the rest’

So, it looks like Statistics Canada has finally worked out the fine points of the complicated business of measuring income inequality in Canada. In a set of statistics published Monday in The Daily, the agency’s routine distribution vehicle, the government of Canada’s official statistics creator and disseminator has distilled Canadians down into two income groups: the “Top 1%” and the “Bottom 99%.”

That, at least, is how Occupied StatsCan divided Canadians in its Monday news release, titled “High-income trends among Canadian tax filers, 1982 to 2010.”

Here’s what StatsCan said: “The top 1% of Canada’s 25.5 million tax filers accounted for 10.6% of the nation’s total income in 2010, down from a peak of 12.1% in 2006. In the early 1980s, the top 1% of tax filers held 7.0% of the total income reported by all tax filers. This proportion edged up to 8.0% in the early 1990s and reached 11.0% by the early 2000s.”

As for the rest of Canadians, referred to as the “Bottom 99%” by StatsCan, the agency apparently has no meaningful data except to say that “the rest” of Canadians had median incomes of $28,000.

What is the point in carving Canadians into two such groups, including a group called “the rest” or the “Bottom 99%”, unless you’re seriously preoccupied with class and income and a little social unrest.

Ultimately, the news release added nothing to the ongoing ideological debate over inequality or any meaningful new analysis. All it did was reinforce StatsCan’s recent role as one of the country’s leading class war farists. For a decade of more, StatsCan has been fixated on, even obsessed with, Canada’s rich, tracking their incomes, sex, age, geographical location, taxes paid and marital status.

The latest stalking document contained nothing much new, but grabbed online headlines — Huffington Post: “Income inequality in Canada: Rich Taking Ever Larger Share of the Pie, But Is the Trend Fizzling?” Over at the Toronto Star, there’s no news like old StatsCan news: “Richest one per cent of Canadians earn one-tenth of all income.”

If there’s any shock in such numbers it is how little it takes to become a member of the top 1%: $201,000. Are Canadians really ready to mount a social revolution over such a small number?

StatsCan tried to turn it into an ideological stalking point by noting that the $201,000 is 37% higher than it was in 1982, when the figure was $147,000. StatsCan doesn’t have data that goes back further. The fact that 1982 was the pit of one of the worst recessions in Canadian history, when GDP fell 6.7%, suggests StatsCan is essentially cooking the statistical books.

Another measure is median income, which StatsCan also warps into a meaningless comparison. The median income — the mid-number in which half the 1% earn more and the other half earn less — is a remarkably low $283,400. But StatsCan spins it into a warfare stat by comparing it with the median of “the rest,” $28,400.

The income statistics are based on total income from all sources, including investment income. Such income would have jumped among the 1% before the 2008 crisis. The numbers also suggest that since 2008 the 1% had less investment income.

The agency could also have tracked after-tax income. But it didn’t. Other agendas seem to prevail, ones that have been alive at StatsCan for some time.

Back in 2008, the agency cranked out a paper titled “Income Trajectories of High Income Canadians, 19822005.” It contained many of the same preoccupations that appeared in Monday’s release, and at least one of the same authors and number crunchers.

The listed contact for Monday’s release is Brian Murphy, located at the StatsCan complex in Ottawa’s Tunney’s Pasture. Mr. Murphy was co-author of the 2008 paper

The agency could also have tracked after-tax income. But it didn’t

with Michael Wolfson, former assistant chief statistican at Statistics Canada and now University of Ottawa professor.

Mr. Wolfson appears to be displaying an activist bent since he left StatsCan. In a recent op-ed for The Globe and Mail, he attacked a Fraser Institute paper that appeared to show that Canadians are mobile up the income chain. He called the Fraser results “misleading” and concluded that the bottom was marked by a “reality of precarious jobs among the poor” that belie the Fraser Institute’s Horatio Alger ‘rags to riches’ myth.”

Unfortunately, neither Mr. Wolfson nor StatsCan has ever presented any detailed analysis of income shifts over time across all income groups. Are Canada’s poor and middle class worse off or better off than they were 30 or 50 years ago?

Instead of tracking such useful and important data, StatsCan’s occupy activists have been busy tracking Canada’s rich. And you know what? The big discovery is that the 1% are rich (sort of ) and pay a lot more taxes than the rest of us: 21.2% in 2010, up from 13% in 1982.