Canadians may view their country as a land of opportunity, but it is also a land of abiding inequality in its distribution of personal wealth according to a Rags and Riches: Wealth Inequality in Canada, a new Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives study.

The study draws on special data runs commissioned from StatsCan by the CCPA to provide extensive new analysis for the very richest and very poorest Canadians on the distribution and characteristics of wealth dating back to 1970 for each of five regions of the country.

The study finds that gaps between rich and poor are evident for each of Canada’s regions, with large differences in wealth across the regions themselves. Average wealth overall tends to increase from east to west.

While housing is the single largest asset of Canadians and also their single largest debt, financial assets play a more significant role in explaining the skewed distribution of wealth in Canada.

“Financial insecurity may now be the norm in Canada, rather than the exception. Only people with above-average wealth truly enjoy financial security,” says the study’s author, social policy analyst Steve Kerstetter, a former Director of the National Council on Welfare.

The poorest 20% of family units had financial assets averaging only $1,974. “If their current income suddenly vanished they would have barely enough in assets to sustain their families for five weeks,” adds Kerstetter. “This compares to more than four years for the richest 20%.”

“Our federal and provincial governments,” says Kerstetter, “would do well to rethink their policies–particularly their tax policies–that have conferred huge benefits on Canada’s wealthiest people: the ones who need government aid the least. These favoured few have been further enriched at the expense of the great masses of Canadians who have been able to scrape together only a tiny portion of the country’s personal wealth.”