VANCOUVER, Nov. 15 (Xinhua) -- The top one percent of Canadian tax filers held 11.2 percent of the country's total income in 2015, up from 10.3 percent in 2014, but 0.9 percentage points below the peak of 12.1 percent in 2006, according to Statistics Canada Wednesday.
The average total income for the top one percent rose 12.2 percent from 2014 to 529,600 Canadian dollars (428,400 U.S. dollars) in 2015.
The top one percent of individual tax filers saw their share of total income rise by almost one percentage point from 2014 to 2015, the result of a sharp increase in the dividend income from Canadian corporations, according to the statistics.
This was the first increase in the share of total income going to the top one percent since 2006.
The top one percent of tax filers paid, on average, 183,000 Canadian dollars (148,000 U.S. dollars) in income taxes to the federal, provincial and territorial governments in 2015, up 13.5 percent over 2014. They accounted for 22.2 percent of total income taxes paid by all tax filers, up from 20.5 percent in 2014 but below the peak of 23.3 percent in 2007.
Women accounted for a record 23.2 percent of the wealthiest tax filers in 2015, up from 21.7 percent in 2014. It was the largest yearly gain for female taxpayers since 1989.
Most of the income increases among Canada's one percenters took place in major cities such as Vancouver and Toronto.
The bottom 50 percent of tax filers saw a 3.4 percent increase in average total income.
