Valeant Pharmaceuticals International tops the ranking of Canadian CEO salaries for a second time this year — and that’s after a $100 million pay cut.
Michael
J. Pearson, Valeant’s CEO, smashed the record for the top spot last
year with $183 million in total compensation; this year Valeant’s new
CEO, Joseph Papa, held on to the number-one ranking with $83 million.
Despite
that 55% pay cut, Papa still easily bested the second-highest paid CEO
on the list, Magna International’s Donald Walker, at $28 million.
This
ranking is compiled each year by the Canadian Centre for Policy
Alternatives, using publicly available data. (Companies take varying
amounts of time to disclose executive compensation, which is why this
ranking covers the year 2016.)
The
left-leaning think tank uses the figures to highlight the gap between
what the average Canadian makes compared to C-suite executives. This
year’s average CEO salary among the top 100 highest-paid executives
topped $10.4 million, which is 209 times the annual wage of an average
Canadian.
