Excess CEO pay hits home

A story in the Financial Post reports the CEO of Canada's TD Bank is donating his $3 million dollar bonus to charity this year, leaving him with $8 million in compensation this year.

It's a trend that's growing popular in the U.S. but TD Bank CEO Ed Clark became the first to announce such a move in Canada.

No word yet on whether he'll dedicate some of his bonus to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, to acknowledge our ongoing work on tracking CEO pay in Canada.

Our latest study, released on January 2, shows the pay for Canada's highest paid 50 CEOs leapt from about 85 times the wage for the average Canadian worker in the mid-1990s to 398 times the average wage.

The study found the 100 highest paid CEOs of public companies received an average of $10-million in annual compensation, a 22% increase compared with a 3.2% raise for average Canadians in 2007.

-- Trish Hennessy

Projects: