This chapter presents tables of data on Canada and an account of its increased earnings distribution. It highlights the difficulties in reaching conclusions about the changes in earnings dispersion in Canada in recent decades. The pictures drawn here underscore the problems associated with the absence of a single, authoritative series covering the past twenty-five years. The graphs also underline the fact that the changes in recent decades — a fall in the bottom decile in the early 1980s, and a rise in the top decile in the later 1980s (and possibly after 2000) — are smaller in magnitude than the ‘dramatic’ reduction in dispersion from 1931 to 1951, and are not dissimilar to the widening that characterized the Golden Age of the 1950s and early 1960s.
Keywords: country data, data sources, earnings distribution, Golden Age, earnings dispersion,