If you made more than $920,600 in 2023, you were part of the top 0.1 per cent of earners in Nova Scotia — that’s before taxes, but including investments, pensions, capital gains and any refundable tax credits or government transfers.
People at the top of the income distribution live in a different world, says Dalhousie University economics professor Lars Osberg.
“When you’ve got over a million dollars coming in every year, your problem is which European vacation do you take and how many do you take,” as opposed to how to pay rent, Osberg said.
New numbers from Statistics Canada based on tax filings from 2023 reveal how much the highest-income Nova Scotians make.
The median total income including capital gains of those in the top 0.1 per cent of tax filers was $1,181,600. For the typical Nova Scotian, it was $41,300 — about 29 times less.
“The long-term trend … in Nova Scotia, as in the rest of the country, has been to an increasing share of total income going to the top one per cent and particularly to the top one-tenth of one per cent,” Osberg said.
Even among the highest earners, there are disparities. To be in the top one per cent in Nova Scotia, you had to make more than about $255,000.
Osberg said you’d find professionals like doctors and lawyers around this range minimum.
That threshold is less than what Kishun Von Wulffen expected. He’s lived in Halifax for a decade and feels social mobility has gotten worse in that time.
“In terms of … ability to move up in the world, there’s not a lot,” he said.
For Halifax resident Mackenzie Murphy, the threshold to be in the top one per cent is a “daunting” number.
She said that times have changed for young people like her compared with her parents’ and grandparents’ generations.
“You have to have more and more education to sort of get anywhere,” Murphy said. “It’s really difficult that if you don’t have the means to go to school — which is also going up in price — then you really don’t have the means to make a good living either.”
The data also shows that those making the most money get a much smaller amount of their income from wages and salaries.
For the top 0.1 per cent, only about a quarter of their income — including capital gains — is from wages and salaries. For the top one per cent, it’s 38 per cent, compared with more than 60 per cent for all Nova Scotia tax filers overall.
“There’s a limit to how much more you can make from wages and salaries,” Osberg said. “There only are 24 hours in the day.”
However, he said for those with millions or more in wealth, the returns from investments can provide large amounts of annual income.
“The bigger the fortune, the bigger the income just on the basis of interest alone,” Osberg said.
In a report, Statistics Canada said for the top earners across Canada, dividends, interest and other types of income made up a larger proportion of earnings in 2023 compared with the previous year.
The median income of top earners in Nova Scotia was less than that of Canada overall.
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