Median Canadian individual income is ~$35,000 [0].
In B.C., your average 2019 tax rate would be 13.34% not including non-refundable tax credits (and so the effective rate would likely be a point or two lower). [1]
A median tax rate of 11.5% against a median Canadian individual income seems entirely reasonable.
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0: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=111002...
1: https://www.ey.com/ca/en/services/tax/tax-calculators-2019-p...
The median income for 45-54 year olds from that site seems to be $49,100. Median for 35-44 is 48,000. It's not $60-80k as you say below, but not $35k either.
One other interesting note is that there is a pretty big difference by gender. Median income for _males_ 35-44 is $56,300 while females are at $41,400. For 45-54 year olds those numbers are $58,000 and $42,400 respectively.
Those differences are big enough that I wonder whether this is being affected by the relative incidence of part-time vs full-time work. The statistics here seem to be looking at people with any income at all (including investment income), not "salaries"... Depending on the demographics of the people you talk to (full-time jobs, 35-55 years old, maybe toss in "male"), $60k is not an unreasonable thing for them to feel a "typical" experience is.
I agree that people with educations and in "good" jobs tend to over-estimate the median income, but I also think that once you account for lifecycle effects the median income of what people think of as a "typical worker" (which is not a 17-year old nor a 70-year old) is higher than the summary statistics suggest. And of course the thing that can really hurt is if you can't find full-time work at all....
Lessons: 1) I have no concept of the median experience in my country, 2) a single number can't answer the question "does this country have high taxes".
I spent my 20s far below median (which I knew), and my 30s far above median (which I didn't realize, at least not at first). Very different lived experiences :)
And I know many folks around me (friends, family, colleagues) look around (confirmation bias & availability heuristic, amongst others) and believe that $60k-$80k (or more) represents a "typical" lived Canadian experience. They are, to a person, universally surprised to see the actual median income (as was I when first tracking it down).
It certainly is viewpoint-shifting. Cheers!
Who knows, 11% still seems incorrect.
This example is "married with two kids", so it's possible that there are massive offsets that I didn't have access to as a single person, but 11.5% still seems very low.
I would expect Canada to fare favourably in this comparison, though. The taxes are not as bad as most Americans think. Although they do ramp up very quickly for higher earners, which was an incentive for moving to the states as my income increased. Also, pay is higher in the US (by a factor of about 2 or 3) for the same job.