It's public knowledge because many of their holdings are public knowledge (if you "own" a significant chunk of a public traded company(ies) or are an officer of one that you hold, it's reported to security commissions and the like) and their net worth is basically that porfolio plus whatever they get in salaries and the like (also public if it is a publicly traded company). In the end, these number are estimates, though, since they can and do have holdings that aren't public.

For instance, it's public knowledge what Galen Weston makes at Loblaw and how much of its stock he owns, but he could be reinvesting some of that money in a broader stock portfolio that we can only estimate or guess at.

Now, for business empires that are privately held and not traded on the exchanges, then it's more guess-work.  My employer is part of a large group that is 100% privately owned so any information on the net worth of the owner (who is, I believe, very, very wealthy at this point) would be pure guesswork. However, very few people on the world's or Canada's richest lists got there purely through privately held corporations since any significantly sized corp usually ends up going to the markets for financing sooner or later.

Mendalla

Thanks Mendalla!

I knew some of their shares/salary would be public.  It was the overall portifolio that I wasn't sure about.  I suppose things like who got how much of an inheritance might be a bit cloudy as well.  I could see where the order could easily be switched around a bit, especially if the estimates of two of the people on the list were pretty close.

I'd be interested in seeing a list of the 100 POOREST Canadians, and hearing their stories. 

Indeed. Perhaps something the Observer could take on? I can't really see Fortune or Canadian Business doing it.

Mendalla

Card-carrying Marxists like to keep track of whom to direct their humourless anger at ;3

So those with the most debt?  Would have been people with some wealth to be provided the credit to end up in debt, and decided to spend way beyond their means.

Here's a non-Canadian:

http://blog.yourmoney.ca/2012/11/the-worlds-most-indebted-man-owes-63-bi...

Mike, have the poorest list lost their wealth or did they never have it in the first place?

Crazy:

I would suspect that the poorest Canadians might well be found among Canada's native peoples. In that case, their wealth has been taken from them. We all do it whenever we deny the relative value of what they have always seen as their wealth. Our "wealth" involves trashing their "wealth": oil, gas, mineral extraction, lumbering, farming methods… these have diverted and polluted watersheds, scattered wildlife, desecrated sacred places, contained their communities, broken all sorts of relationships of interdependence. In support of this "progress", our "wealth" has driven the tearing apart (by force) of their families and alienation of generation from generation, the smashing of their "idols" and of their spirituality.

Then there may be some non-native street folk in that 100 poorest list.  Where have their opportunities ever existed? Alienating families? Alienating school experiences? Predatory drug dealers? Judgemental spiritual mentoring and social policy? Denial of work, housing, living income. The way up from the bottom is a ferocious challenge. The experience of abject poverty offers few experiences of the love and forgiveness that would lift a broken person up… charity is generally about maintenance, not improvement.

Of course, almost all of this poverty could be ended — not allieviated but ENDED — if there was a political will to make it the big public priority. We'd have do deal with exploiters like loan sharks, pimps, cheque cashing offices, slum landlords, rip-off employers…. We'd have to close a few casinos and civilise alcohol distribution, we'd have to include wider values in our accounting standards and enable the recovery of social and environmental costs from "developers", and enable courts to bring down "sentences" that impose justice and community responsibilities and not just punishment; we'd need education to be free and universally available to all ages; school carricula would need to include a  lot of cultural and ethical awareness, and we'd need to provide more effective overall healthcare and ensure universal minimum standards of nutrition are met; we'd need to celebrate in new ways, open our attitudes and lose our prejudices, be more personally hospitable and "present" to new immigrants and the poor in our immediate communities… charity should transform, not ameliorate, relationships. We should not NEED old folks' homes or social workers. This choice would, of course, involve us in an endless journey and a certain amount of self-sacrifice, some pain and hardship, and heroic determination and resolve. It would require a social groundswell as strong as freeing slaves. emancipating women or ending public executions… or have we done enough of that sort of boring stuff?

Can we forget that blaming poverty on the poor is like blaming slavery on the limited intellect of "negroes"? — or attributing the intellectual and and political exclusion of women to their natural "weakness" and political incapacity … so it seemed appropriate to list them among their husbands' "goods and chattels"?

… maybe we can keep it all at a distance, look after "No. 1" and tut-tut over the distasteful images that opccasionally appear on our television and in our news media (television is NOT a news medium) …and keep asking why doesn't someone do something, wondering all the while why we can't be like the "lucky" Canadians on the richest 100 list. But I heard on the radio yesterday an assertion that something like 30 per cent of Canadians include a lottery win as a part of their retirement planning. That sounds to me like some sort of social/political "critical state".

"civilize alcohol distribution" - could you explain this?

It exists in some provinces as a provincial cash cow. There are direct punitive provisions to deal with drunkeness and drink-driving… but the positioning of alcohol in Canadian society is strange. Like widespread attitudes to food in North American culture, it's largely about consumption: fast, vast and undiscerning. Drunkeness and obesity have similar antecedents here. And both are seen as health and medical issues when, as way of thinking,  "quality of life" is potentially more productive.

But that is a small part of the overall issue of poverty. Poverty is a social dysfunction that affects us ALL. It should concern us ALL. It does not.

Anyway, this thread (symptomatically, I'd suggest) is about the 100 richest and maybe a hint that there's an invasion of privacy issue about our knowing who they purportedly are.

No, it wasn't.  It was purely curiousity about the methods used.  I don't know what you mean by symptomatically.

Mike, how would you calculate the poorest Canadians?

Okay… my mistake? 

Interesting where curiosity leads.

Chemgal: without counting, I think you can fairly readily identity critical deprivation in Canada… in the World. It's about the limits of "survivable" and acces to physical, social and spiritual sustenance. I could introduce you to a few poor people if you like. They are not all in inaccessible northern communities.

Statistics Canada has a "low income cut off" that's often used as a guide (though StatsCan says that's not the measure's intention). It's 63% of average family income relative to family size and community size. In 2009, the low income cut-offs were: $18,421 for a single person - $22,420 for a coupole - $27,918 for three people - $34,829 for four.

Another measure, the  "low income" measure, defines poverty as 50% of median income.

The "Gini coefficient" is about income spread (it's not used in Canada).

We have a number of anti-poverty programmes on the go in Canada and, over the years, they shift the bar up and down but — according to Wikipedia — "Statistics Canada has refused to endorse any metric as a measure of poverty, including the low-income cut off it publishes, without a mandate to do so from the federal government." 

So I guess the declared level of poverty in Canada is really up to the Government spin advisors.

Dennis Raphael's scholarly book 'Poverty in Canada' (2011 - a second edition, I think) costs $60-$70… more that I can afford — but I've ordered it at the library… I'm waiting to see if they get a copy in. Get one if you can.

In 2011, StatsCan said the poverty rate edged up in 2009 to 9.6 per cent -- the second year in a row that saw rise after more than a decade of declines.

About 3.2 million people now exist in the "low income" group, including 634,000 children. Child poverty in Canada rose to 9.5 per cent in 2009 from 9.0 per cent in 2008.

And there are other concerns. Canada’s immigration policies are now more oriented towards business labour market needs. So we see a marked rise in the number of migrant workers in Canada. And not too many of us see them, let alone care very deeply about them.

BUT all of this is splitting hairs. We KNOW perfectly well that there is poverty in our country and we have yet to make it a butt-busting political issue. 

I think it's time we did — after all, we ALL PAY FOR THE CONSEQUENCES OF POVERTY — in health care costs, social costs… plus we lose all of the contributions those currently lost to poverty could otherwise provide to our communities, economy and society. Poverty is indicative not only of serious shortcomings and the failure of justice and compassion,  but also of deep inefficiencies in a society.

Mike, I'm just questioning how you would select the 100 poorest Canadians.  Those poorest on paper probably aren't living poverty-striken lives.

And I was saying that it's fatuous to start counting to 100. I had my tongue in my cheek when I was suggesting it: it was a rhetorical allusion/comeback to the 100 richest list  — which is also a fatuous idea (not your's I know) — if you don't mind my saying so.

There are questions that actually matter though (alluded to above).

But I would suggest that he "poorest on paper" undoubtedly include the most seriously poverty stricken. Stats Canada has identified 3,200,000 Canadians who should be given consideration when we talk about "poverty".

Sure, some low income people get by better than others. Income is not the absolute decider. So nor do higher incomes necessarily mean that people in some communities (especially in the north) escape poverty: costs for necessities may be so much higher and alternative ways of meeting basic needs may not be available.

Sorry Mike, I was more repeatitive than I meant to be.  I thought I had just thought about posting, I didn't realize I had actually written it down!

What I consider to be 'on paper' is a sum of all assets and all debt.  Based on that, I suspect few if any would be living in real poverty.  There might be a few interesting stories though!

I'm trying to imagine who are the poorest (in material wealth) Canadians.  I don't think it would be those with the most debt.  Just to be in debt means you have assets somewhere, and even going bankrupt doesn't usually mean that you loose everything. People I know who have declared bankruptcy have managed to keep their house (if they own one), their job, their car, their clothing and possessions. 

Poorest to me would be those who have nothing.   They are homeless.  They sleep at the shelter or under the bridge or in a cardboard box, or at best in condemned housing.  They eat at the community kitchen, get food from the food bank, beg or dumpster dive.  They have the clothes on their backs, and maybe a shopping bag containing their possessions.  They have no address, no job, no connections with society.  They are estranged from their families.  They are often ill.  They are malnourished.  Their lifespan shortened.  These are the poorest of the poor.  They exist all across this country.    They would be hard to track down, to count, to determine which among them is the '100 poorest Canadians'.

They are single mothers trying to support a family with a few part-time jobs and paying more than half of their income on rent.

They probably have no SIN #.  Mental illness (whether it was part of the initial cause or the effect of their living conditions) prevents them from using the resources that are available.  They may be paranoid, and who would blame them?

When I lived in Australia in the mid sixties, vagrancy—being without visible means of support—was still a crime, and people could be arrested for it. At that time, there were still a few remnants of nomadic aboriginals in Australia, who could be arrested for vagrancy because they had no money and therefore were deemed to be "without visible means of support."

As Mike said before, poverty is measured by lack of basics like nutritious food, basic shelter and clothing, spiritual sustenance, a healthy environment and basic safety and security. A millionaire could be lacking some of these, and a money-less nomad could have them all. Money alone is not necessarily an indicator of poverty or wealth.

They are also those with challenges and disabilities - mental, physical, and intellectual who might receive social assistance but are financially penalized when they are able to find even part-time work.