Minutes before lunchtime on the first working day of the year, Canada’s 100 highest paid chief executive officers had already earned more than the average Canadian will earn in all of 2017, according to a new report.

CEO earnings in Canada – which rank among the highest in the world relative to the average worker – have soared to record levels in recent years, with the top 100 CEOs taking home an average of C$9.5m (£5.8m) in 2015, an analysis by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, an Ottawa-based thinktank, showed. Their compensation is now 193 times that of the average industrial wage in the country.