The cat's out of the bag. We always suspected that those at the top were soaking up the rewards from this booming economy while everyone else treaded water – working longer and harder just to stay alive. Now, it's official.

The figures are in, the numbers have been crunched and the verdict is inescapable: When it comes to work, all Canadians, except the rich, are putting in longer hours. Yet when it comes to pay, all Canadians, again with the exception of the most well-to-do, are being left behind.

Or, to put it another way: There's a party going on but most of us aren't invited.

That's the gist of a damning report written by Toronto economist Armine Yalnizyan and released today by the leftish Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. Yalnizyan, research director for the Community Social Planning Council of Toronto, is known in the trade as a careful analyst who sticks to the facts. In The Rich and the Rest of Us, she's done just that. Her analysis of 28 years of Statistics Canada data on families raising children under the age of 18 found:

The poor are working harder but earning significantly less. Median annual earnings for the 10 per cent of Canadian families at the very bottom of the income scale stood at $3,358 in 1976. By 2004, that figure, adjusted for inflation, had dropped by almost 70 per cent to $1,050.

The not-quite-so-poor aren't doing much better. A stunning 40 per cent of income earners – those making less than $50,000 – are worse off now than in the 1970s, even though they, too, are working longer hours.

The middling classes, those earning between $50,000 and $85,000, are managing to hold their own in terms of pay. But to do so, they've had to speed up the treadmill. The roughly 376,000 Canadian families in the middle of the income scale, for instance, are now working 20 per cent more than in the '70s. But their inflation-adjusted earnings have risen by a mere 2 per cent over three decades.

The rich are laughing. The top 10 per cent of Canadian families, those with median earnings of $166,000, saw their pay packets rise by 30 per cent since the late '70s. But to earn that money, they don't have to work more. In fact, they are working less – by about 5 per cent.