First, over just over 100 candidates have responded to the Open Letter issued by the Living Wage for Families campaign, covering almost every Lower Mainland municipality. Almost all have expressed support for this proposal or at least indicated interest in exploring the implications for their city.

In Vancouver, COPE has said it is supportive of undertaking a city study to investigate the feasibility of passing a living wage policy. Vision Vancouver and the NPA are a little more cautious, saying they are interested, but want to find out more before deciding how to proceed.

In Burnaby, both main parties have expressed a clear interest in exploring the possibilities of a living wage policy. Both Richmond and Surrey have a number of candidates running on a living wage platform, while the City of North Vancouver has already unanimously agreed to study this issue.

In the outer suburbs of Maple Ridge, Pitt Meadows and Coquitlam a large number of candidates have expressed an interest in pursuing this issue.

You can see all the candidate responses here.

Second, today our friends at the Columbia Institute Centre for Civic Governance released some very interesting poll results related to the municipal elections. Among the results: 67.1% of respondents asked about a Living Wage said they would favour their municipality adopting a bylaw. You can read more results here.

Hopefully we will see new activity on this front after Saturday.

The Living Wage for Families Campaign, along with 54 organizations representing over 300,000 British Columbians, recently issued an Open Letter calling on all municipal election candidates to help low-income families in their cities by passing a Living Wage policy if they are elected (available here).

Many families are struggling to get by; they are working hard but just can’t keep up with ever rising living expenses. Despite the recent increase in the minimum wage, it is estimated that at least 25% of families with children in the Lower Mainland still earn less than a living wage income, that is, a wage that allows them to cover their basic living expenses (calculated at $18.81/hour in Metro Vancouver). Fifty percent of single parents with children don’t earn a living wage. This is especially true of the ‘hidden workers’ who support the work of our cities; the people who clean our buildings, who provide our security services, or who serve us our food.

Why should municipal governments care about this? Because it is municipal governments themselves that end up paying a large price for these low wages.   Families earning low wages mean there is less money circulating in the local economy, and parents (forced to take on more hours or a second job to make ends meet) have less time to spend with their children. Municipal governments and school boards consequently end up filling the gaps by paying for additional services and policing costs.

Some business leaders are concerned about the living wage. They claim that it will negatively affect the private sector. Yet leading businesses around the world are voluntarily agreeing to become living wage employers. Businesses like KPMG and LUSH in the UK, and now Vancity credit union here at home. These employers commit to pay the living wage, not only to their direct staff, but also to contracted staff in traditionally low-paying sectors. And here’s the big surprise – they have all determined that doing so is good business practice.

The call for a living wage has also been falsely labeled as a “union” demand. In fact, most people earning less than the living wage are not unionized. Moreover, the call for a living wage has come from a broad cross-section of organizations – faith groups, parents groups, immigrant groups and community organizations such as the United Way of the Lower Mainland and the Health Officers Council of BC. They understand that a living wage is key to ensuring healthy childhood development and community cohesion.

Opponents of the living wage have claimed that small businesses will go bankrupt, that cities will face huge cost increases, and that even your granny will be negatively affected. Yet these attacks conveniently forget to mention that countless studies have shown that the cost to cities of living wage policies are minimal – New Westminster’s Living Wage Policy is costing less than a quarter of one percent of their budget – or that families who earn living wages have more money in their pockets to spend in local businesses.

Wherever you stand on the political spectrum, nobody can deny the fact that many families are struggling to get by. The data indicates that child poverty in BC is mainly a low-wage story; the vast majority of the 100,000 children living in poverty have at least one parent in a low wage job, with a third working full time in the paid labour force.

This is an area where municipal governments can and should lead. In doing so, BC cities will be joining 140 US cities who already have living wage ordinances of some form.

Will living wage policies result in a slight increase in costs for municipal taxpayers. The short answer is “Yes, but only slightly.” But the real question is this: do we as municipal taxpayers want people employed –– on our dime –– at a wage rate that cannot ensure healthy childhood development or allow parents the time to be with their children and participate in the social and civic lives of our communities?

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Michael McCarthy Flynn is an organizer with Metro Vancouver Living Wage for Families campaign. Seth Klein is BC Director of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and a co-author of Working for a Living Wage.

The living wage calculation includes basic expenses for a two-earner family with two young children, as well as government taxes, credits, deductions and subsidies. It finds that each parent would need to work full-time at an hourly wage of $18.17 in Metro Vancouver in order to pay for necessities, support the healthy development of their children and participate in the social and civil life of their communities.

The announcement follows last week’s news that New Westminster’s city council voted unanimously to adopt a living family wage for city and contract employees, making it the first municipality in Canada to do so.

I’ll be on BC Almanac at 12:30 PM today, and CTV, Global and CBC TV will be covering the story on the evening news. Exciting times!

Last night (April 26), New Westminster City Council voted unanimously to adopt the first municipal Living Wage policy in Canada. They have used the broad definition of the family living wage, developed two years ago by CCPA, First Call and the Victoria Community Council (meaning, modelled on a family of four with two young children), and applied the policy to both direct staff and contractors, which is fantastic, as it means this now sets a national standard/precedent for similar policies/bylaws. Hopefully, other cities will follow soon.

The motion was as follows:

That the City establish a Living Wage Policy that is tied to an hourly rate established each year by the Living Wage for Families Campaign; and,

That the Living Wage policy will apply to both full time and part time employees; and,

That there be no threshold in terms of dollar value of a contract or number of employees; and,

That the policy apply to persons that perform physical work on City premises and properties; and,

That staff bring back information to Council regarding implications of the Living Wage on contracted services.”

It’s a great win for the Metro Vancouver Living Wage for Families campaign (which includes First Call, CCPA, ACORN, HEU, and many others). Special recognition should go to the lead city councillor on this, Jaimie McEvoy, and to BC ACORN which initiated this effort in New West.

And while we’re at it, how about a commitment to an affordable, universal child care program ala Quebec, so more parents, especially women, can join or stay in the workforce?

These would be two of the best investments and economic recovery policies, if we’re thinking long term. Any takers candidates?

We’ve had a lot of budgets like this in B.C., so this one is in keeping with its right wing predecessors. During the 1980s, for example, the never-ending Social Credit government used to table budgets that gave the boot to working people in general, unions in particular, the poor, women, youth and, their favourite target, public sector workers. While they slashed services Socred ministers reassured everyone that the public would never notice the difference despite the fact that fewer people would be there to deliver them and that those who remained looked increasingly haggard and exhausted.

The Liberals are continuing this tacky boondoggle. This week’s budget boosted health care more than any other sector, which gives you some idea of how poorly everything else fared. Finance minister Colin Hansen claimed that the $4.8 billion for the health sector over the next three years constitutes 90% of all “new spending”. But as Marc Lee pointed out in his excellent post, very little of what’s gone to health actually is new money — last year’s allocation was brought forward to this year’s budget, with a dash of $25 million on top.

But this budget’s spending reflects a more general malaise in the provincial government when it comes to health care. As with many of the policies it pursues, all of the evidence should have pointed to a decidedly different direction in regard to the budget.

Take, for example, evidence about the social determinants of health, those factors that can prevent things like cardiovascular disease and Type 2 diabetes, the latter of which is now described as an epidemic. These social determinants play a greater role in preventing disease than biomedical or lifestyle behaviour modification. A 2006 paper by Dennis Raphael identified 11 key social determinants of health: Aboriginal status, early life, education, employment and working conditions, food security, health care services, housing, income and its distribution, social safety net, social exclusion, and unemployment and employment security.

David Gordon’s sensible Ten Tips for Better Health put these in language we can all understand:

THE SOCIAL DETERMINANTS TEN TIPS FOR BETTER HEALTH

1. Don’t be poor. If you can, stop. If you can’t, try not to be poor for long.
2. Don’t have poor parents.
3. Own a car.
4. Don’t work in a stressful, low paid manual job.
5. Don’t live in damp, low quality housing.
6. Be able to afford to go on a foreign holiday and sunbathe.
7. Practice not losing your job and don’t become unemployed.
8. Take up all benefits you are entitled to, if you are unemployed, retired or sick or disabled.
9. Don’t live next to a busy major road or near a polluting factory.
10. Learn how to fill in the complex housing benefit/ asylum application forms before you become homeless and destitute.

Gordon, D., Posting (April, 1999) Spirit of 1848 listserv.

The increase in the incidence of Type 2 diabetes in Canada — 69% between 1997 and 2007 — can be linked to the rising number of people who aren’t able to act on these good suggestions. People who are poor are not only more likely to get Type 2 diabetes than their wealthier counterparts, but they are also more likely to hospitalized with complications related to the disease. This has been shown to be the case by Canadian and international researchers, including those associated with the World Health Organization and the Pan-American Health Organization.

According to a 2007 study published by Ontario’s Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences,for example, Toronto neighbourhoods where poor people live also have much higher rates of Type 2 diabetes and obesity. “Areas with lower socioeconomic status (SES),” the report said, “had…higher diabetes rates. These neighbourhoods clustered in the northwest and eastern parts of the city. Conversely, neighbourhoods with a more advantaged SES profile tended to be clustered in the centre of the city and had lower diabetes rates.” In January 2006, the New York Times reported that in East Harlem, where incomes average $20,000 a year and the poverty rate is 38.2%, between 16 and 20 percent of residents have Type 2 diabetes. That compares to the Upper East Side, where the average income is $75,000, the poverty rate is about 6.2% and an estimated 1% of residents have the chronic condition. Like Clyde Hertzman (UBC) and others in Canada and internationally, Raphael has argued that the most important policy options for governments are ones aimed at reducing poverty. Poverty reduction is not just a human right, not just a moral and ethical obligation of government, but strategies to achieve that goal would reduce the strain on our health care system as well.

Does the budget have anything to do with the growing mountain of evidence about what people need to be healthy?

Hmmm… let’s see. The $8 minimum wage is frozen at $8 an hour, well below the “living wage” of $16.74 an hour. Wages in the public sector are to be frozen for the next couple of years and there is no strategy to raise wages in the private sector. The budget projects unemployment at 6.2% but by last month it had already reached 6.1% and the “up to” 88,000 new jobs it projects are clearly inadequate. The social safety net? The only reference to safety that I could find was in reference to policing and roads. Housing? The housing budget has been cut and market housing prices are 55% above the average family’s ability to pay. Those on income assistance will see an increase of one-half of one percent, while the ministry of Children & Families got only a one percent boost in the budget.

I would say the budget failed to ensure that the determinants of health are more accessible in these looming tough times — a 100% percent failure rate, in fact. But don’t worry! While the budget fails on health determinants side, the government has engaged the pharmaceutical industry in public-private partnerships to deliver chronic disease management (CDM) programs. So British Columbians with Type 2 diabetes and other chronic conditions — if they can afford to do so — will be able to dip in to the medicine chest to heal the wounds inflicted by this budget.

A policy to make sure all government contractors pay a living wage to their employees would mean hundreds of parents could afford to afford have just one job, rather than running between 2 and even 3 jobs, and never having time to see their children.

Families want the dignity to buy their own shoes. They should be able to. Income inequality is growing and charity isn’t the answer.