Two-Thirds of All Assets in Canada’s Economy Are Now Owned By Under 1% of All Companies
Multinational corporations currently own 67% of all assets in Canada's economy
Less than 1% of companies operating in Canada control over two-thirds of its assets, new figures from Statistics Canada show.
On Monday, StatsCan released a study looking at aggregated data from the financial statements of all Canadian enterprises.
In 2016, the most recent year for which data is available, only 0.8% of companies operating in Canada were multinational enterprises (meaning they have facilities or other assets in a country other than the home country).
Half were majority domestically-owned and half were majority foreign-owned.
Statistics Canada
Nevertheless, the report noted, this 0.8% of companies held 67% of all assets in the Canadian economy, in both the “financial and non-financial sectors.”
The biggest share of the Canadian-owned half of non-financial MNEs were in manufacturing (39.3%) and extraction (33.4%).
StatsCan notes MNEs dominated these sectors, along with finance, utilities and others, due to their capital-intensity and greater-returns to scale.
Statistics Canada
That is reflected by a big discrepancy in raw dollars — in extraction, the median value of assets held by MNEs was $14.4 million, versus $0.16 million for non-MNEs while in the utilities industry, the median value of assets held by MNEs was $17.34 million, versus $0.29 million.
As PressProgress reported previously, many experts and business groups have noted that most of the key sectors of Canada’s economy are oligopolies, dominated by a very small group of very large and powerful companies.
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