It's a more internationalized, less dynastic, more ruthlessly competitive sort of group today. Of the 75 or so Canadian billionaires she identified, she described 55 as "self-made". Twenty-seven are immigrants. Only 7 made their wealth in the city in which they were raised. There are now a few women in the bunch. While there are more Canadian billionaires today, they control a smaller share of the Canadian economy, and have more foreign holdings. There's been a deconcentration ("democratization") of investment and capital ownership.
Many of these people made their fortunes by taking advantage of low interest rates to gobble up Mom and Pop's across the country and consolidate them into monopolies or near-monopolies. E.g. Shaw Communications and Rogers who between them now control cable TV outside of Quebec.
Of course, this being the CBC, the author had to blather about how "our" billionaires aren't like the show-offs and cowboys down south - as if being private and media-shy makes them quintessentially Canadian and not like rich folk everywhere.
Perhaps most interesting is the first bullet point from her publisher's blurb below.
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Who Owns Canada Now? Old Money, New Money and the Future of Canadian Business
http://www.amazon.ca/Canada-Money-Future-Canadian-Business/dp/0002007053
"Back in 1986, Diane Francis's hard-hitting Controlling Interest revealed the startling fact that one-third of Canada's wealth was in the hands of just 32 families and five conglomerates. At the time, Bernie Ghert, president of Cadillac Fairview, prophesized, "In a number of years, there will be six groups running the country." Was he right? Media coverage would have us believe that the last two decades have only increased the concentration of power. Diane Francis disagrees, and she's here to deliver some good news: a positive transformation has taken place in Canada, with both free trade and tough competition legislation creating a new and better nation ....
- Of the 32 families who were profiled in Controlling Interest, fewer than half remain major players. - Of the five conglomerates profiled, only one remains intact. - Canadians have been successful at building world-class businesses and investing globally. - A look at 70 of the most successful Canadians, most of whom are billionaires, shows that many are self-made; 11 were still in school or in foreign countries when Francis wrote Controlling Interest in 1986. - Financial reforms have shifted the balance away from an old boys' network of risk-averse investors towards daring Canadian innovators."