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Our collective share of the pie shrunk last year.

You might have seen reports that the trade deficit remained an expanse of misery in January. The same day that Statistics Canada released those dreary numbers, it also published its annual report on the distribution of household wealth, or, if you prefer, “Distributions of household economic accounts for income, consumption, saving and wealth of Canadian households, 2018.”

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The net worth of households was $10.7 trillion in 2018, compared with $10.9 trillion in 2017; the first decrease since at least 2010, which is when Statistics Canada began publishing this particular set of data.

Collectively, we’re 60 per cent richer than we were a decade ago, so keep that in mind before you take to Twitter to vent about Stephen Harper’s austerity or Justin Trudeau’s taxing of the rich. Still, the good times rolled a little slower last year. That’s partly because the housing bubbles in Toronto and Vancouver started to deflate. But it’s also because a group of wealth creators on which the country has relied since the Great Recession had a tough time in 2018.