“That,” I told them, “is charity. Observe: Some got candy; most didn’t.” If every Canadian who needed a candy got one (as in, say, a generous guaranteed annual income), that would be social justice, a sharing of wealth. But wealth isn’t shared – just the opposite.

In Canada, the ratio of CEO income to average worker income has gone from 45 to 1 in 1960 to more than 500 to 1 today. This is greed and entitlement on a toxic scale.

Here, governments watch and citizens watch as the poor get creamed, the middle class eviscerated, and the rich richer.

The top 0.01 per cent of Canadian income earners, the 2,400 people who earn at least $1.85-million, aren’t just basking in investment income and business profits. Nearly 75 per cent of their income comes from wages, just like the average Canadian, according to a new study from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. The top 1 per cent, the 246,000 Canadians who earn more than $169,000, receive about 67 per cent of their income in wages.

That’s a change from the 1940s, when the rich took 45 per cent of their income from wages, 25 per cent from business profits and the rest from investments, dividends and interest.

, the income share of the richest 1 per cent fell from 14 per cent to 7.7 per cent. That trend was reversed over the past 30 years, as the top 1 per cent regained its 14-per-cent share of Canadian income. Over that time, the richest 0.1 per cent almost tripled their income share and the richest 0.01 per cent increased their share fivefold.

The richest 1 per cent accounted for a third (32 per cent) of all income gains from economic growth between 1997 and 2007. This is four times the share of growth in the 1960s, and double the share of growth in the Roaring Twenties

The richest 1 per cent accounted for 14 per cent of all personal income by 2007 -- levels comparable to the mid 1920s.

Well if hard work and a good education was the fool-proof recipe for success, the middle class should have seen big gains in the past generation. This generation of workers is better educated than any previous generation, and they are working more hours per household than ever before. But median pre-tax incomes were essentially at the same level in 2007 as in 1980 (about $55,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars).