A friend and I were trying to figure out, briefly and not very productively, who actually has power in this country. He started where you would expect him to start, with institutional power: the Prime Minister, the cabinet, the premiers, the bureaucracy, the country’s chain of command, written down and ratified by the polls every few years. I came back with corporate power, the CEOs of the banks and the grocers and the oil companies, the dynastic families who own enough of the country to qualify as their own GDP line. He poked the obvious hole, that those CEOs answer to boards and boards fire them with regularity. I poked the same hole back, that politicians answer to voters and parties who drop them every cycle. The conversation didn’t really resolve into anything, the way these conversations don’t, and the question of who actually runs this country sat there afterwards, mocking us both, refusing to be settled by anyone’s gut intuitions or anyone’s feel for the news cycle.

So I went home and turned it into a spreadsheet, because that is the kind of person I am, and because the question seemed worth more than five minutes of inconclusive arguing.

What follows is a blog post version of that spreadsheet. What you could call the “serious” version of this information, all eleven scoring dimensions and roughly fifty people graded across them, lives elsewhere on a server I keep meaning to tidy up and maybe someday I’ll complete it for the world’s eyes; this is the friendlier sibling, with fewer footnotes, more opinions, and a great many charts.

The Headlines, Top 25 Ranked

Here are the top twenty-five Canadians by composite power score, on a hundred-point scale, with bar colour indicating the institutional sector each person primarily draws their power from. The scores are precise to one decimal place because that is how spreadsheets work, not because they actually mean anything to that resolution, and if two people are within a couple of points of each other you should treat them as roughly equivalent and yell at me via email rather than at each other.

A few things jump out before we even get into the discussion. The Prime Minister is on top, which is reassuring for democracy and unsurprising for everyone else, and there is then an unexpectedly long stretch of names that most Canadians have never heard of, sitting comfortably above names that have been on the front page of every newspaper for the last two years. The second slot belongs to a man whose name your aunt could not pick out of a lineup, the third belongs to a man whose name even most of the political press could not pick out of a lineup, and somewhere around the eleventh and twelfth positions we finally start hitting people who have been on television enough recently that you might have a vague impression of them. The Leader of the Official Opposition arrives at twenty-fourth, which is a fact that surprised me because he has very little power when not sitting in the Prime Minister’s chair but should probably have enough power to keep the Prime Minister in check. At any rate, when the spreadsheet finished computing and I kept double-checked the inputs to see if I had made an obvious mistake. He simply isn’t, by this kind of measure, in the top fifteen or the bottom of say 100 where he could almost equally be placed, and once you understand why, you start to understand what most of the country actually gets wrong about how power works.

The colour breakdown across the top twenty-five is itself revealing, with public service and the courts producing the densest cluster after the elected federal politicians, and capital, broken into its several flavours, accounting for roughly a third of the visible bars. Everything else, the dynastic families and the Indigenous national chief and the cabinet ministers further down, fills in around the edges of those two largest blocs.

The Shape Of All Fifty

Before going further, here is the shape of the data we are working with, plotted as a line graph from rank one to rank fifty, with the tier boundaries marked as background bands. The interesting thing is not really the highest point or the lowest point, which everyone would have guessed was at the extremes, but the cliffs and the plateaus, the places where the curve falls off a step and then sits roughly flat for a while.

The first cliff is right at the top, between Carney at 89.4 and the next group at 82 to 84, which is the gap between someone holding the most powerful elected office in the country during a national economic crisis he was specifically hired to manage, and everyone else in the system, no matter how impressive they are. The second cliff sits around rank fifteen, where the curve transitions from people who can move the country to people who can move parts of it, and after that the curve flattens out into the long, gradual descent through the ranks that you would expect from any list of this kind, with small step-changes between clusters and the vast majority of names sitting within a handful of points of each other, which is itself a useful piece of information about how power actually distributes once you get past the very top.

The Compact List, All Fifty

The full ranking, in one compact view, with mini-bars so you can see at a glance how the scores compare. The top fifteen got the longer treatment above. The longer prose for everyone else is below.

How The Sausage Got Made

Eleven dimensions, weighted, scored zero to ten, summed to a hundred. Here are the weights I used.

The weights tell you what the model thinks power is, and this one says that holding office and money matters most, that the long shadow of indirect influence matters almost as much as direct command, and that durability is, in the original methodology, treated as a footnote. I am suspicious of the durability number on reflection, because a model that gives a first-term cabinet minister with a single portfolio nearly the same authority score as a sixth-generation dynastic family head is missing something important about what power actually is over time, and if you bump durability from five to eight and trim authority and wealth a couple of points each to make room, the dynasties move up by roughly two points and the rankings tighten at the top. Carney still leads. The Thomson family still does not crack the top three. The spread compresses, and that compression is, I think, closer to the shape of the truth, but I left the original weights in place for the headline ranking on the principle that you should publish what you said you’d publish.

Briefly, the eleven dimensions, in case you were wondering what each of them is meant to capture: institutional authority is whatever office, statute, or charter formally lets you do things; wealth and assets is the obvious one, except that what counts is deployable wealth rather than paper wealth; income and capital flow captures how much new money or new resource allocation passes through your hands annually; direct influence is who you can pick up the phone and tell what to do; indirect influence is who has to listen to you even when you haven’t said anything yet; agenda-setting is how much of the national conversation you can shape on purpose for your own ends; network access is the Rolodex; legitimacy and trust is whether anyone outside your inner circle thinks you should have the power you have; coercive constraint is your ability to stop other people from doing things, regardless of whether you can make them do anything; durability is how much of your power survives losing your current job; and independence is how much of it is yours rather than your office’s. Two people with identical wealth and an identical title can score very differently on this last dimension, which is part of why a premier on a thirty-eight-percent approval rating going into an election cycle has dramatically less independent power than the same premier on a sixty-one-percent rating with no scheduled date with the voters.

What Kind Of Power Is It?

Two people can have the same total score for very different reasons, and that is one of the most interesting things this exercise turns up. The Prime Minister and a private-equity chair both end up near the top, but if you look inside their numbers, almost nothing about the composition of their power is the same, and the chart below is meant to make that legible. For each of the top fifteen, the bar shows the composite score broken into six buckets: office (the institutional authority weight), capital (wealth plus income), influence (direct, indirect, agenda-setting, and network access combined), legitimacy, constraint, and persistence (durability plus independence).

The contrasts here are the part worth lingering over. Carney’s bar is mostly office and influence, with relatively little capital (he is well-off but not wealthy at the scale of the people below him in the list) and a pretty short persistence segment because the Prime Minister’s job, while genuinely the most consequential elected role in the country, is also genuinely transient on a timescale of years. Macklem’s profile is similar in shape but with a heavier constraint segment and a longer persistence tail, which is the regulatory-and-durable model of power: he has fewer direct levers than the Prime Minister but the levers he does have are locked in for his term and they constrain everyone else’s options. Sabia is, in profile, almost a Macklem analogue from a different angle, where the persistence comes from his decades-long career in a series of structurally important Canadian institutions rather than from a fixed term in a single office.

Then there are the capital-dominated bars, which look like a different kind of animal entirely. Flatt and Thomson and Weston and Teskey and Graham all have short office segments and long capital and persistence segments, and the message is: their power does not depend on holding any particular role, it depends on what they own and on how long they have owned it. Thomson’s bar in particular is almost a perfect inversion of Carney’s, with maximal capital and maximal persistence and a tiny office sliver, and is probably the most useful single visualisation in the entire post for understanding why visibility and power are not the same thing.

The two bars in the middle of the chart that don’t quite fit either pattern are Wagner and Carignan, both of whom carry institutional weight that is heavier on constraint than on influence proper, which is what you’d expect of a chief justice and a chief of defence staff. Doug Ford and Danielle Smith look like miniature Carneys, with the same office-plus-influence shape but at a smaller scale and with a less reliable legitimacy segment, because provincial elected legitimacy is more volatile than federal majority legitimacy in ways that show up clearly here.

The Long Walk Through The Tiers

This is the part of the post where the names get the prose treatment they deserve, or at least the prose treatment they are going to get, since I am writing this for free on a Saturday and there are fifty of them.

Tier 1: The People Who Actually Move The Country

Mark Carney (89.4) is Canada’s designated adult, hired specifically because he had spent his career being right about money in rooms where being wrong about money is expensive, and he won a fresh majority in April with the help of an economic crisis that he, conveniently, was already known as the man to call about. The One Canadian Economy Act, the Major Projects Office, the Canada Strong sovereign wealth fund, the trade file: all of it is Carney machinery, run out of an office that has consolidated more decision-making capacity than any peacetime PMO in modern memory. The caveat sits underneath all of this like a fault line, which is that his political popularity is contingent on tariff economics not normalising, and tariff economics will eventually normalise one way or the other, at which point what is left is an ex-central-banker with a Rolodex and a parliamentary majority, which is probably enough but not necessarily.

Tiff Macklem (84.0) holds the rate dial during a Middle Eastern war he didn’t start, in a federation he can’t directly govern, with a job he can’t be fired from until June 2027, which makes him, by a country mile, the most powerful Canadian no one outside finance ever cites. He is currently sitting at 2.25 percent and refusing to move while the oil price decides what kind of inflation he’s about to have, and if he does move, mortgages move, and if mortgages move, the political weather moves, and none of this is partisan because it doesn’t have to be. The Bank of Canada’s independence is one of the few institutional firewalls in this country that has never been seriously threatened by a sitting government, and that fact alone is worth more than most cabinet portfolios.

Michael Sabia (82.0) is, if you have never heard of him, congratulations, you have located the secret weapon, the Clerk of the Privy Council and Carney’s chosen instrument for what he keeps calling the largest transformation since the Second World War, with a CV that reads like the country’s nervous system, having run CDPQ and Hydro-Québec and Bell and CN and the Department of Finance before landing at the top of the federal public service, where roughly three hundred and seventy thousand civil servants now report up to him in some chain. The Major Projects Office runs through his shop, the public service reform agenda runs through his shop, and if Carney is the engine, Sabia is the gearbox, and engines without gearboxes do not, in fact, move anything anywhere.

Bruce Flatt (82.0) manages roughly a trillion dollars of other people’s money from an office in midtown Toronto, lives like a librarian, and has spent thirty years quietly accumulating a global asset-management empire that just landed a US$20B joint venture with Qatar and is pivoting hard into AI infrastructure. He stepped sideways from CEO to chair in February but didn’t step away, and the fact that the Carney government’s nation-building infrastructure-capital agenda has a natural counterparty already sitting in Toronto is not an accident. Brookfield’s pension-fund clients are, in significant part, Canadian pension-fund clients, which means the country’s retirement savings are riding on the success of the empire he runs.

David Thomson (79.0) owns Reuters, owns the Globe and Mail, owns Westlaw, the legal-research database the country’s lawyers depend on to function, and the family fortune is sitting around ninety-eight billion dollars at last estimate, which makes the Thomsons, by some measures, the richest family in the country by a multiple. Almost no one talks about him, and almost no one is supposed to, which is what infrastructure-level power looks like: it owns the rails, not the trains, and it is allergic to interviews. Bump durability up by three points in the methodology and he is in the top three; as things stand, the system rewards visible offices over invisible ownership, and his ranking is the single biggest under-call in this list.

John Graham (77.4) runs CPP Investments, sitting on $719 billion of Canadians’ retirement savings and allocating it across thirty countries with the kind of quiet competence that doesn’t make it onto cable news, and his decisions move global markets at the margin and matter at home because the CPP is the closest thing this country has to a sovereign wealth fund that already works. When the Carney government talks about Canada Strong they are partly talking about something that already exists, and Graham runs it. He, like many on the list, receive very little public attention, because that’s how a fiduciary of the infrastructure scale ought to operate. Like hydro facility, quiet, steady, often overlooked.

Galen Weston Jr. (76.4) appears in your wallet, daily, by debit, in the form of Loblaw, Shoppers, No Frills, Real Canadian Superstore, and sixteen million PC Optimum loyalty members, and the company touches more Canadian households per day than any other private actor. The grocery file has been a federal political issue continuously for the last three years, with Ottawa gesturing at price-fixing inquiries and competition reform while Loblaw keeps owning the loyalty card, and there is something genuinely uncomfortable about a single firm being able to set what a quarter of the country pays for milk on a Tuesday, paired with something even more uncomfortable about how rarely the politics of grocery oligopoly translates into action. He is here because the file matters, the company is dominant, and the family is durable, and none of those are compliments.

Connor Teskey (75.4) is the newly-minted CEO of BAM, age thirty-eight, with a life trajectory that makes the rest of us look like we are loitering on a corner waiting for someone to give us a clipboard. Day one of his tenure: a trillion dollars of allocation discretion. Day two: same. He took over from Flatt in February with the family’s blessing, which in this kind of firm is the only blessing that matters, and he will be defining where billions of Canadian and global capital go for the next decade if he doesn’t blow it, with a real possibility he will outrank Flatt within two years just by virtue of doing the actual day job.

Doug Ford (74.6) brings forty percent of the country’s GDP, the Ring of Fire fast-tracking files, the Reagan tariff ad most political consultants would have killed to invent, and a knack for being a natural counterparty at the federal-provincial table, and whatever else you say about the man, he is legible at scale, and that legibility is itself a form of power. The first two terms had a certain demolition-derby quality, but the third, against the tariff backdrop, has accidentally turned him into one of Carney’s more effective domestic allies on industrial policy.

Richard Wagner (74.4) holds the least-fired position in the country, presiding over the body that has the last word on what every other person on this list is allowed to do. The Court hears thirty-five charter cases a year and refuses leave on roughly six hundred others, which is in itself a form of power, and Wagner is at the end of his run with mandatory retirement in 2032, leaving behind a Court that has been quietly restructured by a generation of his appointments. None of his rulings are partisan, and all of them are, in their slow way, more lasting than most cabinet decisions will turn out to be.

Carolyn Rogers (72.4), the Senior Deputy Governor of the Bank of Canada, is the presumptive Macklem successor when his term ends in June 2027, which is the kind of thing that quietly moves money around boardrooms long before it becomes official, and she also chairs the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, which makes her one of perhaps three Canadians with global central-bank standing. If she gets the top job in 2027 she will be the first woman to hold it, and she would also be, by any measure, a very good Governor, which is a separate fact from the gender milestone but worth saying out loud.

François-Philippe Champagne (72.2) holds Finance, the most consequential file in cabinet after the Prime Minister’s own, and is currently dragging behind him a recusal scandal connected to private-equity shareholdings that has the press in a state of low-grade excitement about what may yet be a serious ethics file. He has the natural energy and Quebec networks to be a credible occupant of the portfolio, and he is a top-fifteen Canadian today; he could be a top-five Canadian or out of the cabinet entirely by the end of the calendar year, depending on how the file plays out.

Jennie Carignan (70.6) is the first female Chief of the Defence Staff, hired in mid-2024, currently overseeing the largest peacetime defence-spending ramp in Canadian history with NORAD modernisation, F-35 integration, and Arctic posture all sitting on her desk. The role is not as politically powerful as most of the people above her on this list, but the institutional weight is enormous and the symbolic weight of a first-female-CDS during a war-on-our-doorstep moment is non-trivial, and the durability is high because the Forces are a long-tenure shop where chiefs typically serve four-year terms and outlast the cabinets that appointed them.

Dominic LeBlanc (70.2) is Carney’s right hand on the US trade file, the most politically experienced person in cabinet, with the longest set of personal relationships in Washington and the natural lead negotiator on the CUSMA renewal that is going to define the back half of this Parliament. If you are wondering why a non-Finance, non-Foreign-Affairs minister is in the top fifteen, the answer is that the trade file is the file, and LeBlanc is the trade file, full stop.

Danielle Smith (70.0) is the architect of the October 19 sovereignty referendum, and the Alberta government has been, for the last twelve months, the single most consequential subnational political force in the country, with Smith driving the agenda through a combination of constitutional brinksmanship, energy-sector politics, and a personal media presence that is genuinely distinct from any other premier’s. The referendum is unlikely to pass on current polling, but the political consequences of having held it will be enormous regardless, which is why she is in Tier 1 today on the basis of what she is doing rather than what she might still do or simply her baseline stats. Because it’s not just who you are, it’s about what you’re willing to do…

Tier 2: Major National Power, In Thematic Clusters

The corporate-and-dynastic block. Pierre Karl Péladeau (16, 69.4) is a peculiar Canadian creature, the only sovereigntist with his own television network and a perpetual political itch that has been simmering for thirty years and that Quebecor’s revenues quietly subsidize, which makes his power something genuinely hybrid, half corporate and half political and never quite fully either. Tobi Lütke (17, 69.2) runs Shopify out of Ottawa for reasons that increasingly look like stubbornness rather than tax efficiency, and he represents the most globally significant Canadian platform builder of the last two decades, although his decision to keep weighing in on every culture-war issue from his X account costs him a couple of points on legitimacy that I do not think he has fully internalised the cost of. Edward Rogers III (18, 69.0) continues to demonstrate that nepotism is, all things considered, a more durable corporate strategy than most MBA curricula will ever admit, with the family trust mechanics keeping him at the head of a telecom empire that nobody outside his immediate family seems particularly enthusiastic about him running. Mirko Bibic (29, 64.4), his counterpart at BCE, is the technocrat to Edward Rogers’s heir, running a roughly comparable empire from a Montreal office with a roughly comparable amount of regulatory exposure, and is here mostly on portfolio rather than personal capacity.

The financial complex outside the top fifteen. Charles Emond (20, 68.6) runs CDPQ, Quebec’s pension giant, with somewhere north of $450 billion in assets, and is the natural Quebec counterparty to Graham at CPP Investments. The two of them, between them, allocate roughly a trillion dollars of Canadian retirement capital, which is the kind of thing it’s easy to forget when you’re watching question period and watching the cabinet argue about figures one or two orders of magnitude smaller. Goldy Hyder (19, 68.6), head of the Business Council of Canada, is power’s plumbing rather than its faucet, but the fact that anyone running for federal office returns his calls within the day is itself a kind of power, and the BCC’s quiet ability to set the bounds of what counts as a serious economic policy proposal is, frankly, more consequential than most of the policy debates that ever make it onto the front page.

Energy as a portfolio and a sector. Greg Ebel (22, 68.0) runs Enbridge, the country’s largest pipeline operator, at a moment when energy infrastructure is back at the political centre after a decade of being treated as a national embarrassment, and he is the first call for any government wanting to know whether something can actually be built. Tim Hodgson (25, 66.6), the new Energy minister, is technically Carney’s man on this file and will define federal energy strategy for the next several years, although he is in his first cabinet role and the entire energy portfolio still has the vibe of a job that hasn’t fully decided whose lane it’s in.

The other premiers, who collectively run more of the country than the federal cabinet often gets credit for. Christine Fréchette (26, 65.4) took over Quebec in April after the CAQ’s internal restructuring and is, on current polling, going to lose her election by October to the PQ, which makes her power both real and fragile in a way that puts most of the rest of this list to shame. Wab Kinew (30, 63.6) at sixty-three is the most popular elected official in the country, with a sixty-one-percent approval rating and a Manitoba government that is actually governing rather than just managing decline, and he is therefore badly under-rated in this list relative to where the structural model puts him, although his federal profile is not yet what his provincial competence would warrant. David Eby (32, 63.0) in BC is sitting at thirty-seven percent approval and a DRIPA implementation crisis that is making him visibly tired in his press appearances, but he still runs a major economy and the structural authority is what it is. Scott Moe (37, 60.6) in Saskatchewan continues to do the job of Saskatchewan premier with the steady non-flamboyance the role seems to call for, which I suppose is its own kind of competence even when many might disagree with the policy.

The cabinet beyond the front bench. Anita Anand (27, 65.0) at Foreign Affairs is the senior diplomat at a moment when the trade file dominates everything, which has pushed her down a few slots compared to where her portfolio would normally rank, and her actual influence is heavy on the structural side and lighter on the agenda-setting side. Mélanie Joly (28, 64.4) at Industry has the Innovation file, which is a portfolio that contains more loose change in funding announcements than any other in cabinet, and is also a portfolio that often translates that money into less-than-the-sum-of-its-parts outcomes. Both of them are first-rank cabinet ministers on a Liberal bench that is genuinely stronger than most opposition observers will give it credit for.

The opposition and the constitutional officers. Pierre Poilievre (24, 66.8) is the highest-profile and most-televised politician on this list outside the Prime Minister, and he is also, I think, the most over-rated in pure power terms, because Carney’s majority means his question-period theatrics function essentially as performance art rather than as legislative leverage, and that is not nothing but it is also not what most people who watch him on the news think it is. Louise Arbour (23, 68.0) as the Governor General-designate is a gloss on a role that is more ceremonial than meaningful most years, but Arbour herself is one of the most respected legal figures in the country, with a real CV at the ICTY and the Supreme Court of Canada, and her stewardship of the office at this particular constitutional moment, with Alberta voting on October 19, matters more than the office usually does.

Indigenous national leadership and labour. Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak (21, 68.4) is in the upper half of Tier 2 and probably belongs higher than that, because Indigenous national leadership has been one of the most consistently under-counted power centres in Canadian politics for thirty years and is finally, under her tenure, in a posture where it acts as a genuine federal counterparty rather than a delegated consultative body. Bea Bruske (31, 63.6) at the CLC represents roughly three million Canadian workers, Mark Hancock (38, 60.0) at CUPE represents another three quarters of a million, and the labour movement is one of the most consistently under-counted blocs in any list like this, with the fact that none of them have the megaphone of a finance minister being part of the reason they collectively have less power than they should given the membership.

The security state and the media institutions. Daniel Rogers (33, 61.6) runs CSIS, Mike Duheme (34, 61.0) runs the RCMP, and the fact that neither of them is famous is by design, because intelligence and federal policing chiefs who become famous are almost always doing it wrong. David Walmsley (35, 60.6) as Editor-in-Chief of the Globe and Mail and Marie-Philippe Bouchard (36, 60.6) as President and CEO of CBC/Radio-Canada are the two most institutionally important media figures in the country, with Walmsley setting the elite-Anglophone news consensus most weekdays and Bouchard responsible for the country’s only national broadcaster of consequence at a moment when the federal funding model for it is under sustained political pressure.

Tier 3: Sectoral Power, Briefly

The smaller-province premiers. Susan Holt (39, 59.6) in New Brunswick and Tim Houston (42, 59.0) in Nova Scotia run smaller economies and have a smaller share of national agenda-setting than the Tier 2 premiers, but both are legitimately effective operators within their files, and Houston in particular has been one of the more interesting Conservative provincial leaders of the last several years, in that he is a Conservative who governs like one but talks like a person who has met other people before.

The bureaucratic and Indigenous specialists. Natan Obed (40, 59.6) at ITK runs the most effective Inuit national policy shop in the country and is responsible for a portfolio that touches on Arctic sovereignty, climate adaptation, and the ongoing reconciliation file, all of which are nationally significant in ways that should put him higher on a model that took Arctic geopolitics more seriously. Janice Charette (41, 59.3) as Chief Trade Negotiator, sixty years old, two-time former Clerk of the Privy Council, is the kind of long-tenured bureaucratic veteran whose name should be more widely known than it is and whose technical work on the CUSMA renegotiation will, in the long run, matter more than three quarters of the things that actually got headlines this year.

The energy CEOs collectively. François Poirier (44, 58.6) at TC Energy, Rich Kruger (45, 58.4) at Suncor, and Brad Corson (48, 55.6) at Imperial Oil run three of the country’s largest energy companies, and the three of them collectively have more direct influence on Canada’s emissions trajectory than any minister of the environment will ever have. The energy file dominates federal-provincial relations in a way nobody who watches Question Period will entirely understand, and they sit at the operational heart of it, which is part of the reason the climate conversation in this country always feels like it’s happening one room over from the conversation about what the country actually does with itself.

The grocery duopoly’s deputies. Eric La Flèche (46, 57.0) at Metro and Michael Medline (47, 56.0) at Empire (Sobeys) round out the grocery oligopoly with Weston, and the fact that all three of them combined attract less than half the political pressure that Loblaw alone does is something I find genuinely puzzling and a little unfair, since the structural problem is the oligopoly itself and not specifically the most recognisable name in it.

The remaining labour and federal political figures. Lana Payne (43, 58.6) at Unifor represents about three hundred thousand workers and is an effective political voice for the manufacturing labour movement at a moment when manufacturing labour is, mercifully, back in the political conversation. Yves-François Blanchet (49, 55.6) leads the Bloc Québécois, an institution that exists in a kind of perpetual readiness to become much more powerful than it currently is depending on what happens to Quebec sovereignty in the next two election cycles, and if Fréchette loses to the PQ in October he immediately moves up several slots regardless of anything he personally does or does not do. Avi Lewis (50, 54.2) at fiftieth is honestly a charity inclusion based on the residual brand of a federal NDP that no longer holds official party status, and he is famous, articulate, and well-connected, but he is for the moment not politically powerful in any rigorous sense, and the reason he is on the list at all is that I felt the list looked weird without a single figure from the centre-left activist tradition, which is a confession about the methodology more than a defence of his ranking.

Just Outside The List

A handful of people who could legitimately have been on it: Naheed Nenshi as Alberta NDP leader, Olivia Chow as Mayor of Toronto, Tony Wakeham of Newfoundland, the four other Big Six bank CEOs not specifically called out (each clustered around 65 points on the model and arguably belonging in Tier 2), Lino Saputo Jr. on dairy and dynastic capital, Darren Entwistle at TELUS, and Jim Pattison, who I left off mostly because his power is genuinely bizarre and resists scoring on this particular framework, sitting as he does at age ninety-six on a private holding company that owns a startling fraction of British Columbia and refusing, with some consistency, to be photographed. None of these people are powerless, all of them have legitimate claims on a top-fifty ranking, and the cutoff is genuinely arbitrary at this resolution.

Where The Power Comes From

One of the more useful things to do with a list like this is to step back and look at the institutional sources of the power on it, weighted by score rather than just by headcount, because two people from the same sector at very different ranks tell you something about where the heavyweights actually concentrate.

Roughly a third of the power on this list sits in elected politics, federal and provincial combined, which is honestly less than I would have guessed before I made the chart, and it is a useful corrective for anyone reading the news and assuming democracy is the only game in town. Another fifth sits in the appointed public service and the courts, which is an institutional layer most people barely think about until they need a passport renewed, but which collectively has more durable, inertial weight than any cabinet table. Capital, broken into its three flavours of pension-and-asset-management and dynastic family ownership and other corporate, accounts for another third and change, and that third is in some ways the most under-rated piece of the picture because almost none of it is publicly accountable in the way the political layer is. Civil society, by which I mean labour and Indigenous national leadership and the institutional media, accounts for the remainder, sitting at roughly one-eighth of the total, which feels low given how much these institutions actually shape the country, and which is part of why I think the methodology under-weights durability and indirect influence relative to where they should sit.

State Money And Capital Money

A useful way to see what kind of country you’re actually living in is to plot the people on this list against two axes that are usually treated as the same thing in casual conversation but really aren’t, which is public budget authority on the one hand and private capital control on the other. The horizontal axis below is roughly how much of the federal or provincial fisc a person can move, and the vertical axis is roughly how much private capital they sit on top of, with bubble size scaled to total power score and colour indicating sector. The gridlines at the midpoints are doing a kind of two-by-two job, separating the state actors on the right from the capital actors on top, with most of the list sitting in the bottom-left quadrant simply because most powerful people, even on a list of fifty, are not actually deploying tens of billions of dollars personally on a Tuesday morning.

The most striking feature of this chart, once you have looked at it for a few seconds, is how empty the upper-right quadrant is, and how few people in the country meaningfully combine state authority with private capital. The closest you get to the upper-right is the pension-fund executives, Graham at CPP Investments and Emond at CDPQ, who sit roughly halfway up both axes because they are technically deploying public-purpose capital under public-statute mandates, which makes them an awkward category that the chart, fairly enough, refuses to file neatly. The bottom-right cluster is where the country’s politicians live, and it is dense, because there are many of them and they are the most legible kind of power, but the height of that cluster is, by design, very short, because politicians in this country are generally not personally wealthy and that is, if you stop to think about it, one of the more underappreciated stabilizing features of Canadian political life. The top-left cluster is where the dynasties and the asset managers live, and the gap between them and everything else on the vertical axis is genuinely vertiginous, with Thomson and Flatt and Weston and Teskey sitting a full two-thirds of the way up a chart that no politician on this list comes within hailing distance of, which is, more or less, the empirical version of the conventional wisdom that capital outlasts cabinets.

Office Versus Self

The next pair of axes worth considering is the question of how much of someone’s power is attached to their current job, and how much of it would survive losing that job, which is essentially a question about durability and personal capital and is the most useful single way I have found to think about the difference between, say, a cabinet minister and a billionaire who happens to also chair things. The horizontal axis below is personal and durable power, the kind that survives losing your office, and the vertical axis is office power, the kind that depends on the chair you currently occupy. The most powerful people on the list are the ones in the upper-right corner, who have both, but the chart is more interesting at the edges than at the centre.

The upper-right is where the most genuinely dominant figures cluster, with Sabia leading the inhabitable territory because his career has accumulated a kind of reputational capital that genuinely transfers between offices, where if he resigned tomorrow he would be on a major board the day after, whereas Carney sits at the very top of the office axis but slightly lower on the personal axis because his personal political brand, while real, is roughly five years old as a public-facing thing and has not yet had time to weather a full political cycle. The right edge of the chart, where personal power dominates, is where the dynasts and the asset managers live, and the lower-right specifically is where you find the people whose power is essentially biographical, the Tobi Lütkes and the Pierre Karl Péladeaus whose offices are real but whose personal capital long predates whatever current chair they happen to occupy. The upper-left is the territory of cabinet ministers and senior bureaucrats whose power is overwhelmingly office-bound and would mostly evaporate within a year of leaving the chair, which is by no means a criticism, since the country needs that kind of role-bound talent and pays them to be exactly what they are, but it is a kind of power with a fixed expiry date stamped on it.

The Most Useful Chart In The Whole Post

If you remember only one chart from this entire exercise, make it this one, which plots the same set of people against two axes that almost everyone gets backwards in casual conversation, namely public visibility on the horizontal axis and material control on the vertical axis. The premise that being famous and being powerful are the same thing is so widely held that most people don’t notice they’re holding it, and this chart is designed to make the noticing inescapable.

The single most important pattern in the chart is the dense cluster in the upper-left, which is the territory of the people I have been calling, mostly to amuse myself, the hidden giants, and which contains every single one of Sabia, Macklem, Flatt, Thomson, Graham, Carolyn Rogers, and Connor Teskey, who collectively have a more material grip on the country’s institutions and capital than the entire upper-right cluster combined and yet the average Canadian has confidently heard of, generously, two of them. The upper-right is real and important, with Carney and Ford and Weston and Smith all scoring genuinely high on both axes because their power is the kind of power that demands attention and gets it, but it is not where most of the country’s actual operational power lives. The lower-right, in the meantime, contains Pierre Poilievre, who is in many ways the most televised non-Carney politician in the country, and whose position on the chart is almost the inverse of the position of someone like Bruce Flatt, in the sense that Poilievre is famous, has a real political following, and has, until and unless the next election turns, very modest direct control over the actual machinery of state, while Flatt has minimal name recognition and could move trillions before lunch. Avi Lewis sits roughly where you would expect him to sit, in a similar but smaller version of the same territory, with a public profile that exceeds his current institutional grip by a substantial margin.

The argument the chart wants you to take away is not that the visible giants don’t matter, because they obviously do. The argument is that the assumption that what you see on television is a faithful map of where the levers actually are is not just wrong, it is roughly upside-down for half the people on it, and the country has a measurable interest in fixing this asymmetry, because a population that does not know who the Clerk of the Privy Council is, or who runs CPP Investments, or who chairs Brookfield, is a population whose democracy has a kind of permanent informational handicap that no amount of voting can correct on its own.

Where The Money Actually Lives

The wealth chart is its own thing, and I am keeping it focused, because trying to plot fifty net worths on a single linear bar reduces the bottom forty-five of them to invisibility. Here are the eight largest fortunes on the list, in Canadian dollars, with the Prime Minister appended at the end for perspective.

* not on the top-fifty list (excluded for various reasons of public role and analytical scoping); included here for perspective.

The Thomson bar is so much longer than every other bar in the chart that I had to truncate the chart’s logical visual range just to keep the page readable, and that truncation is itself a kind of argument: the gap between the largest Canadian fortune and the second-largest Canadian fortune is a multiple of more than six, which is unusual among major economies and which says something about how the country’s wealth is actually structured, even before you ask the more interesting question of what this kind of dynastic concentration translates into politically. The Prime Minister’s net worth, sitting at roughly eight million dollars after a long career in central banking, is a rounding error on this chart, and that, again, says something about Canada’s political class that I think most Canadians intuit but rarely state out loud, which is that the country has historically been governed by people who are well-off rather than by people who are wealthy in the dynastic sense, and that the rare exceptions to this rule have been controversial for reasons that probably should have been controversial.

The Scale Shock

The single most useful exercise to undertake while writing a list like this is to put the numbers next to each other on a common scale, because the human mind has a tendency to flatten orders of magnitude when they aren’t visualized, and the difference between a hundred billion and a trillion sounds, in casual conversation, like a difference of a couple of zeros that surely cannot be that meaningful, when in fact one of those numbers is ten times the other and represents a genuinely different kind of economic actor. Here are the principal pools of money that the people on this list either control, deploy, or operate within, in Canadian dollars, ordered by size, with company revenue and personal wealth at the end for the shock.

The first thing the chart does to you, if you have been reading the news a certain way for a certain length of time, is shake loose a frame you may have been holding without realising you were holding it, which is the implicit assumption that the federal budget is the largest financial number that matters in Canada. It is not. It is, in fact, less than a third of the assets that Brookfield Asset Management manages, less than one-sixth of the assets that RBC has on its balance sheet, and only about seventy percent of what the CPP Investments Board allocates on behalf of Canadian workers. Provincial budgets are smaller still, and in the provincial case the gap between, say, what Doug Ford’s government spends in a year and what David Thomson’s family is worth in a moment is roughly a factor of two, which you could argue is the single most underdiscussed political fact in Ontario.

The last two bars, Shopify’s annual revenue and Mark Carney’s personal wealth, are essentially invisible at the chart’s scale, because Shopify is a globally significant tech firm with a genuinely small revenue line by financial-system standards, and the Prime Minister is, as we have already noted, a normal upper-middle-class person by the standards of the people on this list. The combined effect, when you take in the chart as a whole, is that the country’s actual financial gravity sits in private and quasi-public capital pools, not in elected budgets, and the politicians who appear to be the most powerful people in the country are, by raw scale of money under their control, in roughly the middle of the pack of the institutions that actually run the country’s economic life.

Why I Spent Several Evenings On This

The honest answer is curiosity, which is not a particularly dignified justification but it is the actual one. I went looking, because I was genuinely curious about the country I live in, for a list of the most powerful Canadians, the way I had seen lists of powerful Americans floating around for as long as I have been on the internet, and I could not really find one that did the job. I found a few, scattered, which is more than nothing, but they tended to be thin or out of date or limited to a single sector or, most often, basically just lists of net worth, which is one piece of the picture but is, as the wealth chart up there should make clear, not the whole picture and not even necessarily the most interesting piece of it. There is a real and noticeable absence in the publicly-available Canadian internet of the kind of analysis you take for granted exists about American power, where you can find well-researched lists of the hundred most influential lobbyists or the fifty most powerful tech executives or whatever niche of the American ruling class you happen to care about, complete with backgrounders and links and arguments about who got snubbed, and the equivalent for Canada just is not there in the same way, or anywhere close to it, and I find this genuinely strange when you stop to think about it.

Some of the absence is structural. We are a smaller country, the journalism economics are worse, the analytical infrastructure is thinner, the universities are less prestigious in the kind of way that produces think-tank ecosystems, and the outlets that used to do this kind of synthesis have spent the last fifteen years getting hollowed out by a media business model that everyone agrees is broken and nobody seems able to fix. The result is that any Canadian who wants a clear picture of how their own country actually works ends up reading a lot of American analysis by default and then trying to figure out what does and does not port north, which is a frustrating and often inaccurate way to live, especially given how much of what is true about American institutions is genuinely not true about ours, the differences between executive-branch authority and parliamentary cabinet authority being one of the more obvious examples, and the existence of a serious central-bank tradition with actual independence being another one, and the dramatically different structure of capital concentration here being a third.

Some of the absence, though, is because the people on this list, particularly the ones with the most actual power, would rather you didn’t have a clear picture of who they are. The Thomsons, the Westons, the Pattisons, the Irvings, the Saputos, even most of the Brookfield people: they have spent a lot of money over a long time being slightly less visible than they could be, hiring slightly fewer publicists than they could afford, declining slightly more interviews than seems reasonable for people of their scale, donating quietly rather than loudly, and generally cultivating the kind of anonymity that money buys when money is genuinely paying attention to what it wants. There is, I think, a quiet and consistent preference among the actually powerful for not being visibly powerful, and once you start looking for it you see it everywhere, in the way you can name half the pundits on cable news and have never heard the name of the woman who sits one chair away from the rate dial at the Bank of Canada, in the way that everyone has an opinion on the leader of the opposition and almost no one has an opinion on the Clerk of the Privy Council, in the way that the loudest voices on a given file are almost never the ones the file actually turns on. The needle hunt for who is genuinely powerful in this country is harder than it should be in a democracy that supposedly values transparency, and that fact is itself a small data point about how the country is actually set up rather than how we like to talk about it being set up, and the work of identifying them is, partly, the entire point.

The other part of the point is just that I wanted to know, for my own sake, who runs the place where I live, because I think it is worth knowing, the way it is worth knowing the names of the streets in your neighbourhood and the species of the trees on them and the histories of the local roads and how the water gets to your house. It is your country. You should have an opinion on who is shaping it. And if no one else has assembled the data in a way that lets you have one, then you assemble it yourself, on a Saturday, between loads of laundry, with a cup of coffee getting steadily colder beside the keyboard, knowing full well that you will be wrong about some of it and that strangers on the internet will tell you as much within hours of publishing and that this is, in a small way, exactly the kind of public-square exchange the country could use a great deal more of.

What This Sort Of Thing Does To A Person

What it does to a person to spend a few evenings forcing eleven dimensions onto fifty people is, mostly, sharpen the tools. By the end of the exercise you have a more useful vocabulary for talking about any kind of power, not just the Canadian kind, you have internalised the difference between visibility and influence in a way that is hard to undo, and you find yourself, for the next several weeks, automatically reading the news in a slightly different register, where every story about a deal or an appointment or an investigation prompts the half-conscious follow-up question of who actually has the levers here and which of them is being wielded and to what end. You also become a slightly more annoying person at parties for about a month, but this is a price I am personally willing to pay, and most of the people I argue with about this stuff are too polite to mention it, or possibly just too tired.

The other thing it does to a person, less expectedly, is make you slightly more optimistic, which is not the direction I would have predicted before I started. There is something genuinely steadying about remembering that a country runs on people, on specific named finite people who have phone numbers and lower-back pain and weekend plans they keep cancelling, and not on vague systemic inevitabilities that are too big and too distant to do anything about. The country can run differently if different people get the levers, which is an obvious thing as soon as you say it out loud but is somehow easy to lose sight of when the news cycle is doing its thing and everybody seems to be reacting to forces rather than holding them, and a list like this, even with its small inevitable mistakes and its under-counted dynasties and its category-error inclusions, is at least a way of remembering that the levers exist and that they have hands attached to them, which is more than half the battle of taking democracy seriously in any given week.

Half the names on this list will be different in five years. That is normal. That is, in a way, the entire mechanism, and the part of the exercise I find genuinely hopeful, because a country in which the same fifty people are at the top of the list ten years from now is a country in which something has gone quietly and badly wrong, and a country in which the list churns at a healthy rate, where new names appear and old names retire and the dynastic positions get gently nudged by changing taxes and changing markets and changing public attention, is a country that is alive and adjustable in the way democracies are supposed to be. Which is, when I think about it for long enough, the actual reason this kind of work feels worth doing on a Saturday afternoon, even when the answer to the question of whether any of it is useful in any narrow professional sense is honestly mostly no, and the answer to whether any of it is interesting in some broader sense of mapping the place where I happen to live is, I think, almost emphatically yes.

If you have made it this far, you are exactly the kind of reader I was hoping would. The full data is in a spreadsheet that I will share if you ask me nicely. The methodology will hold up to anything you want to throw at it. The comments are open, mostly. Tell me who I have under-rated, who I have over-rated, who I have missed entirely, and who you think the next list ought to focus on.