Did you read your own link???? It says "top 1% earns, on average, $500K" It is exactly what I said: the average income of "top 1%" is $496K. Again, it is the AVERAGE among ALL top 1%. The threshold (i.e., 99th percentile) is $244,800, i.e., everyone who earns $250K is in the top 1%. The next question is "1% of what"? Definitely not of the entire population. Your article say "of taxpayers", so, at best, we are talking about 30M adults in Canada (not 35M population). But I doubt the "journalist" who wrote this article bothered to check what this 1% is of, and, since we are talking about earnings, it may be 1% of the labour force and the StatsCanada estimate of the labour force is Canada is 20M. Math is never crazy, math is either right or wrong. And my math is right.
Regardless, my point is: being in 1% (200,000-300,000 people in Canada, earning $250K+) barely allows one to provide for a family of 4 living in a moderate suburban house with annual inexpensive vacation in Florida, i.e., regular middle class. Being in 0.1% (20,000 - 30,000 people, earning $750K+) allows to live in a nice house, have nice (but under $100K) new cars every 3-5 years, fly (with a family) to Europe and Asia once or twice per year in business class and have children in private school. So, life if the upper-middle class. Only top 0.01$ (2,000 - 3,000 people, earning $2.5M+) can really be considered rich (based on their earnings, not assets). Such people usually include successful entrepreneurs and their children.grandchildren.grand-grand children/etc. Not to many people whom you could tax and they either have a mobile capital (so they can easily leave) or own a business in Canada that employs lots of people and such business will suffer and jobs will be lost.