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The top 10% of Canada’s earners make 34% of the country’s income, but are paying 54% of income taxes, says a new essay that questions the premise that the “rich” don’t pay enough tax.

“Despite common misperceptions and misleading rhetoric, our top 10 per cent of income-earners pay more than half of Canada’s income taxes — and this group includes people that few would consider wealthy,” said Philip Cross, a former chief economic analyst at Statistics Canada, in the essay released by the Fraser Institute.

The federal government and 7 of Canada’s 10 provinces in recent years have raised tax rates for upper-income earners. Cross says in 2017, the latest year of comparable data, the top 10 per cent of income-earners earned about a third of total income but paid more than half of the country’s total income taxes.

Cross says that gap has always been there, but it has grown wider over the past three decades. Between 1982 to 2017, the share of income earned by the top 10% rose 13.2% while their share of income taxes rose 22.4%.