AN HISTORIC WEALTH GAP IN CANADA
Historic challenges present historic opportunities for working families
The income gap has hit a record 49%, up from 43.8% three years ago… but the tide of public opinion is turning.
Canada’s economy reached a truly disturbing milestone in 2025.
According to Statistics Canada, Canadians now face the largest wealth gap in our country’s history.
If it feels like you’re still getting squeezed even as experts report inflation coming down, there is clearly a reason for that.
In the first quarter of 2025, the income gap — defined as the difference in disposable income share between the top 40% and bottom 40% of households — surged to a record 49.0 percentage points from 43.8 points just three years earlier.
“This data is shocking. The greatest gap between the rich and working families speaks directly to the challenges our members are facing,”says UFCW Local 401 President Thomas Hesse. “Unions are the most effective way to address this disparity. Embracing your union and each other to flex our collective strength is clearly more important than ever.”
News of the growing wealth gap is obviously worrying. But there is hope.
Why the Wealth Gap is Alarming
One of the most alarming aspects of the staggering disparity between billionaires and working families is that relatively few people seem to be discussing it.
As Katherine Scott from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives put it: “This kind of information, the largest gap ever, it’s a wake-up call. We can’t sustain it, we have to pay attention to the structure of our economy and the distribution of that.”
“We have to grow the pie, but we have to talk about the distribution of the pie,” adds Scott. “It matters that people are able to live a decent quality of life with dignity. I think that’s a really important public policy goal, which seems to be lost in the current conversation.”
The labour movement has always played a crucial role in drawing attention to these kinds of issues, particularly due to the corrosive effects of wealth disparity on society as a whole.
As Stacey Fitzsimmons, associate professor at the University of Victoria, put it: “Why this matters is because the wider our income distribution is, the worse it is for all of us.”
Why There’s Hope
Despite the troubling nature of this analysis, there are people offering solutions, and the labour movement is leading that push.
A few years ago, the media began to notice that unions were experiencing a wave of popularity that was upending decades of anti-union hostility in many parts of Canada.
Some news outlets noticed this with curiosity, wondering if unions would seize the moment. Others marked it with clear irritation, wondering when this blip of “emboldened” labour would pass.
In the spring of 2024, a poll showed that this trend was holding.
That poll noted that 62% of Canadians believed that belonging to a union was a good thing, and that 70% of Canadians wanted governments to remove barriers to forming or joining a union (with only 9% strongly disagreeing).
Events have continued to show growing support for unions in jurisdictions across North America.
A recent deal that narrowly averted a strike at Safeways in Northern California was reached in the context of overwhelming public support for retail workers.
“The flip side of the adversity that workers are facing is a major shift in the conversation about workers’ rights,”says UFCW Local 401 Secretary Treasurer Richelle Stewart.“This requires unions to be more innovative and active than ever. The possibilities for what can be achieved with growing public support present an exciting opportunity.”
“As we face increasingly aggressive tactics in bargaining from employers, such as Sobeys’ recent move against our Walking Stewards in Safeway stores, we also see significant pushback against things like grocery greed, such as the community-based campaign to oppose the conversion of the Thornecliff Safeway to a FreshCo,” notes President Hesse.
“Never before has the public been so strongly behind our cause, precisely because our wins are their wins. There are unprecedented opportunities for us to work with community groups to fight corporate greed by building better workplaces and a better world,” concludes Hesse.
Posted on: August 05,2025