Top CEOs have already made average Canadian’s salary in 2020: report “There’s a real golden cushion for a lot of these CEOs, who have seen years of outrageous pay, this will cushion them and their wealth in a sense, but for many of them they will actually see an increase in their pay because their stock has done fairly well during the pandemic,” said David Macdonald, the report’s author and senior economist for the CCPA.According to Macdonald, most CEO pay is not in salary, but is handed out to them in bonuses and that because of this, it wouldn’t be possible yet to calculate how much they made in the most recent year.