Canada's super-rich

If it's true that "money talks," then the bank accounts of Canada's wealthiest citizens are doing a lot of blabbing these days.

First, let's define wealthy. Are millionaires automatically wealthy? At one time, a million really meant something. But then, real estate values started exploding and stock markets began soaring, and before you could say "ueber-rich," the ranks of Canadian millionaires began to swell.

A Statistics Canada report in 2008 found there were 1.1 million millionaire families in Canada, but that was based on 2005 data, before the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression started three years later. The proportion of families with a net worth of $1 million or more had risen to nine per cent from five per cent in 1999.

Impressive numbers. But super-rich? In most cases, they aren't even close. No, we're talking about the tiny sliver at the very top of the money pile — the ultra-high net worth club whose members are referred to as billionaires.

Canada has 2.5 per cent of world's billionaires

Financial publications, which love to track the rise and fall of the super-rich, agree that the money gods have been especially generous toward this small but affluent group.

In its annual tracking of billionaires, Forbes magazine's writers and researchers declared that 20 Canadians had cracked the billionaire threshold by early 2009 (in U.S. dollars, too).

That's 20 out of 793 billionaires worldwide. The world's billionaires had an average net worth of $3 billion US, down 30 per cent in twelve months. Their collective wealth is $2.4 trillion, down $2 trillion in a year. But remember, we're talking about just 793 people here. Canada's share of the billionaire booty: $52.3 billion US.

Canadian Business magazine does its own annual tracking of the richest 100 Canadians.

The two lists agree that the richest of the rich Canadians are the members of the Thomson family. Forbes says No. 2 is grocery magnate Galen Weston and his family, and the Irving clan from New Brunswick is third. But Canadian Business magazine gives the Irvings second place, with a net worth of $7.11 billion.

The Thomson family's wealth simply boggles. Canadian Business pegs the Thomson fortune at $18.45 billion. Forbes magazine put it at $13 billion US in March 2009 — good enough for 24th place in the world. That's only $27 billion US behind Bill Gates. (Net worth: $40 billion US).

Money made in everything from food to circus

What can we say about Canada's billionaires? Well, they're a mixed bag. Some come from very old money; some — like the co-CEOs of Research in Motion — are very new. Most of them still live in Canada. Most are in their later years, but six are in their 40s.

They made their money in vastly different ways. Pharmaceuticals, media, food retailing, printing, money management, construction, cellphones and the circus.

Take Guy Laliberté. You may not have heard of him, but you've heard of his company. Back in 1984, it consisted of just Laliberté and a group of street performers in Quebec. Now, it's 4,000 employees, including 1,000 dazzling acrobats and artists showcasing their talents before almost 90 million spectators around the world. The collective name for the enterprise that Laliberté now owns: Cirque du Soleil. His almost total ownership has given him a net worth of $2.5 billion US, Forbes says. 

Unlike fictional billionaires like Scrooge McDuck, the super-rich do not keep most of their fortune in cash. Their money is usually tied up in shares of the companies they started, so their fortunes rise and fall with the market. How well Canada's billionaires fare in the years to come might depend more on investor sentiment than their own business acumen. Not that this crowd is terribly short on that.

That doesn't mean that the rich don't have things to worry about. A survey by Sensus Research of 165 Canadians worth more than $10 million once showed that almost a quarter were worried that lazy children or grandchildren would squander the family fortune. About a third of them worried they wouldn't be able to maintain their lifestyle.

It's a tough world out there.