The gap between the rich and the poor continues to rise at an extraordinary pace. Just 56,000 ultra-wealthy individuals—the world’s richest 0.001%—now control more wealth than the poorest 4 billion people on Earth combined, according to UBS’s 2026 Global Wealth Report.
For Bill Holland, the former CEO of Canadian financial services giant CI Financial, that growing concentration of wealth comes with a responsibility to give back. The self-made multimillionaire has donated more than $100 million of his own fortune and personally raised another $50 million for charitable causes. But he argued that many of his wealthy peers in Canada haven’t embraced the same ethos.
“If you are rich in the U.S., you give money away, but I could name you 100 very rich Canadians who give no money away,” he told the Financial Post, adding that philanthropy is a societal necessity—but Canadians are generally “terrible” at it.
His criticism is sweeping, but the numbers suggest Americans do give considerably more than Canadians.
Americans donated a record $617 billion to charity last year—and they’ve historically donated more than twice the rate of Canadians
