We’re richer than we think: Census finding

September 20, 2017

The median total income of Canadian households rose from $63,457 in 2005 to $70,336 in 2015, a 10.8 per cent increase, according to Statistics Canada data from the 2016 Census—the best performance in at least 30 years.
An important factor over the decade was high resource prices that drew investment and people to Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Newfoundland and Labrador, boosted the construction sector, and more generally filtered through the economy as a whole, Statistics Canada noted.
This boom in the resource sector coincided with a decline in the manufacturing sector, with fewer jobs in this sector in 2015 than 2005.
The bulk of these manufacturing job losses were in Ontario and Quebec.
The increase in the most recent census compares with 9.2 per cent income growth in the previous decade and a decline of 1.8 per cent in the decade before that.