Richer Canadians create more greenhouse emissions: study

Not only are the rich getting richer in Canada, they're also creating more greenhouse-gas emissions on a per-person basis, a new study says.

Because of this, more affluent Canadians should take on more of the burden in efforts to fight global warming, concludes this report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

Those in the top 20 per cent of income-earning households produce 1.2 times more carbon emissions per person than the average and 1.8 times more than those in the bottom 20 per cent, the report indicated.

"Whenever I go into policy discussions — federal, provincially, municipally — it's typically middle-class professionals making policy for the middle class, and we don't have a lot of consideration of how this plays out for really low-income households or how it plays out for really high-income households," Marc Lee, a senior economist with the centre and lead author of the report, said Tuesday.

Emissions were estimated by looking at personal spending data for 2009 from Statistics Canada. Lee explained that higher-income people tend to have more of an impact on the environment both directly and indirectly.

For example, higher-income earners are more likely to have one or more vehicles that use fuel. As well, they probably have bigger homes that take more energy to heat or air-condition.

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