“Money Talks,” a 1906 political cartoon by Udo Keppler, published in Puck magazine. Image courtesy the Library of Congress.

It’s déjà vu all over again. We’re into a new year, and once again, Statistics Canada data shows that corporate profits hit a record $677 billion in 2025. This new peak exceeds even the levels reached during the rampant profiteering and price gouging we saw during the pandemic. Much of this growth came from the financial sector, which recorded over $200 billion in annual profits for the first time.

Although profits naturally rise over time with inflation, last year’s record can’t be explained by inflation alone. Instead, the corporate profit rate—the share of revenue left after covering operating costs—has been steadily climbing. In 2025, it reached 10.7 percent, the third highest in the past 30 years, after 2021 and 2022.

Over the past two decades, the corporate profit rate has grown steadily. In the 2000s, it averaged around six percent, rising to roughly eight percent in the 2010s. Since 2021, however, it has jumped into double digits and hasn’t fallen below 10 percent.

During the pandemic and the years that followed, large corporations leveraged their market power, supply chain disruptions, and public expectations of inflation to permanently boost their profit margins. With those changes now entrenched, the biggest, most profitable companies in Canada and worldwide have established a new norm: capturing a larger share of the prices we pay for nearly everything.

If you took Econ 101 and have been living........

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