The Canadian figures seem insanely low. 11.5% total? When I lived in BC making an approximately average income, my effective tax rate alone was 21% [EDIT: originally put 23%]. I paid pension, health insurance, and unemployment deductions on top of that. And that only counts the employee side of deductions. This example is "married with two kids", so it's possible that there are massive offsets that I didn't have acce…
You might have a skewed sense of what median Canadian income is. And your job might be further above that median than you realize. 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 seem…
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....