Ontario is home to the nation’s largest number of billionaires, while also claiming the greatest proportion of Canada’s poorest families, says a new report.
An estimated 38 billionaire families live in the province — more than 40 per cent of Canada’s total — according to “Show me the money: A provincial overview of extreme wealth in Canada.”
The report was issued Monday by the non-profit Canadians for Tax Fairness, an organization that says it advocates for just and progressive tax policies.
According to the report, Ontario is also home to nearly half of all families in the country worth more than $100 million and the province’s richest families — the 0.01 per cent — hold an average of $546 million in wealth.
Meanwhile, nearly 1.9 million families in Ontario live below the poverty line, about 40 per cent of Canada’s total, according to Canadians for Tax Fairness.
The organization says Ontario should impose a provincial tax on the very wealthy to pay for public investments and social programs.
“When we have extreme wealth it’s often paired in Canada and across the West with massive inequality,” said Jared Walker, the executive director of Canadians for Tax Fairness.
“We’re left with an economy that makes it impossible for people to pull themselves out of the downward spiral and conversely, allows a very small number of people for whom the economy is working to grow fabulously wealthy,” said Walker.
Canada has never had a wealth tax, which could apply to a family’s or individual’s total holdings, and not just the money they earn in annual salary.
Opponents of the tax say they are a “get-rich-quick scheme” that many countries have already abandoned because the tax is complex to administer, meaning it’s onerous to value long-held personal or family assets, and may cause a flight of capital to countries without a wealth tax.
But Massachusetts has already legislated additional levies on the portion of an earner’s income that exceeds a million dollars. And Washington state, which doesn’t tax wages or salaries, is considering a wealth tax of nearly 10 per cent on earnings over a million dollars.
In California, voters will weigh in on a wealth tax this November during the general election when they answer a ballot referendum question on whether the state should institute a one-time five per cent emergency billionaire tax to offset federal health care funding cuts.
Oxfam Canada, an anti-poverty and injustice advocacy organization that promotes the rights of women and girls, has been actively campaigning for a federal wealth tax. The non-profit says that Canada’s tax system favours the wealthy, who have the option of tax havens to shelter their wealth, allowing them to pay less in income tax than a typical Canadian.
According to Oxfam, the average Canadian pays 36.7 per cent of their income in taxes, while the richest one per cent pay 23.6 per cent.
“Canada’s tax system is meant to be progressive, meaning those with higher incomes should pay a larger share,” said Diana Sarosi, Oxfam Canada’s director of policy, campaigns and communications, in an email. “But the reality is different.”
With wealth inequality reaching a record high in 2025, “one of the most direct ways to address inequality is through a progressive wealth tax,” said Sarosi.
“Inequality is not inevitable and governments are not powerless,” she said. “The rules that currently favour wealth and privilege can be designed to ensure everyone has a fair chance for a dignified life.”
But Joseph Steinberg, an economics professor at the University of Toronto, said that his research shows that wealth taxes don’t work.
Steinberg, who began studying the taxes about a decade ago, said a wealth tax would produce little overall economic gain because the tax would reduce incentives for the ultra rich to invest in the economy as well as increase tax avoidance, meaning more money would be moved into tax havens.
“Even though you’re targeting only a very small number of people,” said Steinberg, “if those people account for something like 20 per cent of investment in the country, you’re going to get a little bit of a diminishing investment as a result of that,” he said.
“And so there’s a tension between raising revenue and hurting the economy.”
Steinberg also says he believes that a wealth tax at the provincial level, as opposed to a federal wealth tax, is especially risky.
“The problem is that at the subnational level people — especially rich people — are highly mobile,” said Steinberg. “Tech billionaires in California — it’s trivial for them to move their families and their businesses to a different state,” he said.
To counter that, Canadians for Tax Fairness is proposing the province institute an exit tax, as well as an annual provincial wealth tax, to ensure the wealth doesn’t leave the province, or a one-time wealth tax.
The report includes a number of scenarios for how the wealthy could be taxed according to proposals from other proponents, which have included U.S. senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
For example, Ontario could pull in about $21 billion a year if it instituted taxes that range from one per cent to five per cent on wealth holdings from over $10 million to more than a billion dollars.
“There’s some movement on this so we wanted to say, ‘hey, these are some things that we could do here in Canada across all the provinces,’” said Walker. “And here are some ways that we could pay for some health care, pay for some education, fix some schools.”
