OTTAWA — Four minutes into the first working day of the new year, Canada's best-paid CEOs had already pulled in what the average Canadian worker earns in a year, an economic and social policy think-tank said in a critical analysis of pay scales for the rich and powerful.

Or at least that's what they pulled in during 2007, the latest full year for which figures are available, and what may have been their "last hurrah" until this current recession ends, according to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

"The 100 highest paid CEOs of Canadian publicly traded corporations received an average of $10,408,054 in total compensation in 2007," the report by the left-of-centre research organization said, noting that was a record average 22.7 per cent increase from the year before and brought their combined pay packet to a record of more than $1 billion.

"At that rate of pay, Canada's richest CEOs pocket the average Canadian wage of $40,237 by 9:04 a.m. Jan. 2, before most Canadians have booted up their computer for another year of work," said Hugh Mackenzie, association researcher and author of the report.

He noted that this included the CEOs of the big banks that recently received billions in federal government support, and energy CEOs who, until recently, were surfing the big wave of crude-oil price increases.

And it would have only taken those CEOs until the end of the lunch hour on Jan. 2 to bank the annual pay of someone earning a substantial salary of $100,000 a year, it said.

"In contrast, average Canadian earnings rose by only 3.2 per cent (in 2007)," the report noted, adding that was the best increase in five years.

The average CEO took home 259 times the pay of the average worker, it said, noting that the average pay for the top 50 CEOs was 398 times the average wage, up from 85 times the average wage in 1995.

"Compared with ordinary Canadians, whose wages have been stagnant for 30 years . . . they have enjoyed a decade of record pay hikes and will land on a softer cushion if they stumble from their lofty heights in the new year," Mackenzie said.

"Things have certainly changed since 1960, when then-General-Motors-CEO George Romney . . . turned down a $100,000 bonus, kept his salary at $225,000 a year, and declared that no executive should be paid more than 25 times the factory wage," the report commented.

Further, more than half of the top 100 CEOs' total compensation came from cashing in stock options, which are taxed as a capital gain, or at half the regular income tax rates paid on wage and salary income, the report observed.

"Unfortunately for Canada's CEOs, however, the party may be coming to an end," the report said, noting that CEO pay and lucrative severance packages have, at least in the U.S., become a target of public scrutiny as their companies fail.

"Congress threatened to prevent any of its bailout funds to be used for CEO bonuses," the report said, noting the CEOs of the three big U.S. automakers got a rough ride on both of their visits to Washington seeking taxpayer financing to keep their companies from going under. "On the substantive front, stock options are becoming a lot less interesting as a pay option for CEOs, as literally millions of dollars of tantalizingly close-at-hand windfalls have become essentially worthless in a few short months.

"It's only a matter of time before this new reality takes root in Canada," it warned.

No one from the Canadian Council of Chief Executive Officers, composed of the CEOs of Canada's largest corporations, was available to comment on the report.

In September, the Canadian Securities Administrators, an umbrella organization for the country's securities regulators, concluded a two-year overhaul of the way public companies disclose what, why and how executives are paid.

The new requirements, such as spelling out how specific elements of compensation encourage certain results or how much money executives are entitled to under various employment-termination scenarios, went into effect at the start of this year.