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.

In it, we praised Cristy Clark for her quick action on the minimum wage, announcing that it would move to $10.25/hour by May of next year. Of course, kudos should go to all those who have campaigned on this issue for a long time.  We did express concern about what happens after May 2012, emphasizing that ultimately, the minimum wage should be based on a a clear rationale, namely, tie it to the poverty line and index it, so that we can cease having this debate every couple years.

On a related point: some critics have said that increasing the minimum wage as Premier Clark has done won’t reduce poverty. Well, yes and no. If the minimum wage were now linked to the poverty line (such that a single person working full time, full year at the minimum wage would have an income at the Low Income Cut-Off), it would need to be about $11.50 in 2011. So if you are only increasing the minimum wage to $10.25 by next year, you are not going to see any noticeable reduction in the poverty rate (the breadth of poverty). However, this new increase will have an impact on the depth of poverty, bringing thousands of households and individuals closer to the poverty line. And that matters.

One other outstanding concern relates to the newly introduced lower minimum wage for people who serve liquor. Their minimum wage will only reach $9 in May 2012, based on the premise that they will make up the difference in tips. While there are certainly high-end bars where workers make great tips, there are also many lower-end and quiet ones where workers do not make $1/hour in tips. And personally, when I tip, I’d like to know that I’m paying someone extra (above a poverty wage).

BC Federation of Labour President Jim Sinclair also raises some important flags about this alcohol servers wage in another Vancouver Sun opinion piece (here).  Similar concerns were raised in a short report produced by the CCPA’s Manitoba office in 2001, available here. The CCPA report notes the following about a “tipping wage”:

The majority of those we interviewed do not believe a two-tiered tipping wage is a just or desirable policy. And many say that, based on their experience, such a policy would be almost unmanageable and very much open to abuse. A little less than half of our respondents receive an average of one dollar or more in tips each shift…

Many workers–both those who do and those who do not earn tips–feel that people deserve tips as a compliment to their wage…

Many workers do not have control of their tips even once the tips have been received. Many businesses divide tips evenly among the employees; often this is done after each shift by those who have worked the shift. But many workers receive their tips only every two weeks and must trust others, most commonly management, to fairly divide the money. To add to this, because of the variable nature of tips, there is no way of knowing how much one is entitled to over each bi-weekly period.

Minimally, having gone this route, this new policy will require careful enforcement and evaluation.

The Liberals made drastic changes to employment standards in the first few years after they were elected in 2001.  As a result, BC now has the weakest child labour law in North America.  Employers were relieved of the burden of posting a statement of employee rights under employment  standards legislation.  Enforcement was gutted through closing of offices and cutbacks in staffing.  Protections for agricultural workers were cut.  The rule that said if you were called into work you had to have four hours work paid for was reduced to a two hour “call in.”  And of course, the minimum wage was frozen at $8 with a sub minimum wage introduced targeting young people, immigrants and women re-entering the work force.

Basically, the business community got everything it wanted.

It now turns out that everything they wanted wasn’t enough.  The Coalition of BC Business has made a submission to the government calling for even fewer protections for working people.  The Coalition calls for:

• No pay for statutory holidays until someone has been employed for 90 days.
• Denying stat holiday pay unless the employee has worked both the scheduled day before and after the holiday.  Of course, employers are responsible for scheduling.
• Reduction in overtime pay for commission workers.
• Creating a “flexible” system in which overtime is determined over a multi week period.  Work seventy hours one week and possibly receive no overtime pay.
• Employers should be free to bargain individually with senior and technical employees on hours of work and compensation packages below the standards of the Act.  This could have an enormous impact on workers in the technology and film making sectors.  And, of course, there is no equality in bargaining between a corporation and an individual employee.

As recently as last summer the Coalition was still opposing any increase in the minimum wage.  Recognizing the inevitable, in its recent brief they grudgingly accepted increases but only if they  are delayed and spread out.  The first increase would not come until next January and then there would be no increase larger than 50 cents.  Minimum wage workers would wait until June 2013 to see their wages rise to $10 an hour.

What have other organizations like the BC Business Council had to say about possible changes to employment standards?  We don’t know.  The “consultation” has been closed and secret.

What we do know is that the last time BC’s business community got everything they asked for.  Now they want more.

With our minimum wage frozen at $8 per hour for nine years and three months now, it was about time!

The real questions in play now are how much to raise the minimum wage and over what timeframe. Different numbers have been thrown around in the media — anywhere from $9 per hour to $10 per hour immediately, with future increases up to $11 or even $12 proposed by some of the leadership candidates. Nice round numbers certainly make the math easier, but should we really be picking a number out of thin air?

In a recent piece published by the CCPA, we propose that the BC government develop a clear rationale for setting the minimum wage and stick to it. This requires making a decision about what it is that we want to achieve with the minimum wage and then setting it appropriately so that it meets the stated goals. We also recommend that the rationale be poverty reduction:

We propose that a single person working full-time year-round should earn (at least) enough to live above the poverty line. The idea that someone working full-time, full-year should be able to get out of poverty is a clear, transparent policy decision that should determine the minimum wage in BC and in other provinces.

This should be a pretty easy rationale to get behind — few people will argue in favour of maintaining a group of working poor.

Equally important is to legislate regularly scheduled increases tied to inflation, to ensure low-wage workers do not face what amounts to a pay cut as a result of rising prices.

Since poverty reduction is the goal, the minimum wage should be indexed to the consumer price index in order to maintain the purchasing power of workers.

The next question to settle would be what the appropriate poverty line measure is, and this is a legitimate question that I’d like to debated. Because I want working poverty to become a thing of the past in my province, I support picking the broadest measure of the poverty line so that no worker in any community would be left behind.

The most appropriate measure of the poverty line in this case is Statistics Canada’s before-tax low-income cutoff (LICO) for a single individual with no dependents living in a large city—which was $22,229 in 2009, the latest published LICO calculation. This is equivalent to a minimum wage of $11.11 per hour (at 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year).

Recognizing that going from $8 to $11.11 is a big jump, I would recommend staged increases to get the minimum wage to that level.

How much can business afford? Considering that they’ve been getting reductions in the minimum wage (in real or inflation-adjusted terms) over nine years now, they should be able to manage an increase that — at a minimum — brings us back to the real value of the minimum wage when it was set. I calculate that if we had annual April 1st increases to the minimum wage based on last year’s inflation in BC starting in 2002, this April we’d be setting the minimum wage at $9.48 per hour. So moving to $10 immediately would reflect a very small increase in the real value of the minimum wage compared to its 2001 level.

A government that’s serious about reducing poverty in this province, would raise the minimum wage to $10 immediately and then commit to 50 cent increases every six months until we reach the appropriate level to cover the LICO income (note that it’s a moving target). At that point, inflation-based annual increases would be all that’s required to maintain the value of the minimum wage. Such a policy will benefit employers by providing certainty and allowing them to plan ahead for labour costs.

Setting a poverty-based rationale for the minimum wage is not the only possibility. The minimum wage can also be set with inequality considerations in mind, for example by setting it at a certain percentage of the average (or median) industrial wage in the province, and then annually index it to keep up with increases in the industrial wage. Such a policy would embody the notion that we, as a society, would not allow any workers to get too far behind the rest of us in terms of earnings.

Arguments can be made for a number of other policy rationales as well, and while I personally favour poverty reduction as a rationale I’d welcome a broad public debate on these issues. I’m curious what the leadership contenders think.

A big part of the resistance to any increases seams to come from the commonly held — and untrue — belief that minimum wage hikes are a huge job killer. Why is this idea so pervasive in the media and in the minds of our legislators when it is not supported by the evidence? In fact, the empirical evidence hardly has anything to do with it since most people — including many trained economists — firmly believe that minimum wages increases kill jobs without having looked at any studies on the matter (if you want a quick summary of the state of the evidence, read this).

I am convinced that it’s those Intro to Economics classes that are to blame. Most media commentators and politicians have taken one, and they’ve all seen the following supply-and-demand diagram that shows the hypothetical effects of the minimum wage (or an increase of the minimum wage) in the labour market.

This simple diagram, which is staple of the introductory economics textbooks, is as misleading as it is powerful.

It makes you believe that that the minimum wage is set far above what a free-market wage would be in the labour market, which hardly ever happens. Because of that, the minimum wage is predicted to lead to a large increase in unemployment, which is defined as the number of people who have looked for work in the two weeks prior to being surveyed and who were not able to find work. By extension, any minimum wage increases would only move us into even higher unemployment territory. It makes sense intuitively and most people just accept that this is what actually happens in the real world without thinking twice.

But here’s what’s wrong with this graph in the words of Princeton University Professor of Economics Uwe Reinhardt, whose tongue-in-cheek essay The Art of Siffing Among Seasoned Adults: Can Economists be Trusted is an excellent read and must make for a highly satisfying first lecture:

In fact, however, the proposed minimum wage typically is just a shade above the prevailing free-market wage, or proposed increases are quite small relative to prevailing wage levels. In fact, they typically are so small as to have no perceptible effect on employment at all. Yet thousands of legislators, when confronted with minimum wage legislation, will automatically think back to their college economics courses and conjure up in their minds the dramatic illustration shown below.

A crucial detail about this graph that is often lost on unsuspecting economics learners is that the wage on that y-axis is expressed in real terms (i.e. adjusted for inflation) and not in straight up dollars. This means that if we’re looking at minimum wage policy over time, the only increases of the minimum wage that could be hypothesized to have any effects on unemployment are the increases after adjusting for inflation. In other words, regularly scheduled minimum wage increases to offset inflation would have no effect on the level of unemployment in equilibrium.

For the record, if BC had a policy of annually adjusting the minimum wage for inflation, we’d now be sitting at a minimum wage of $9.31.

Another big problem of the standard economics 101 approach to minimum wages is that the textbooks too often forget to tell students why governments would want to introduce regulations and constraints on the labour market in the first place. It is surprising how often the historical and political context is stripped out of the teaching of economics which makes both for poor education and for poor policy-making, once students try to apply these textbook graphs directly to the real world we live in.

It should be remembered that BC first introduced minimum wages (which at that time only applied to women) in 1918 because legislators wanted to protect vulnerable workers (in that case, women) from being exploited by employers. The reason why we have a complex system of employment standards and regulations is to promote fairer treatment of employees who don’t seem to do so well in the unconstrained markets (sweatshops, anyone?).

A decent minimum wage is a useful tool for addressing the huge disparities in the wage distribution that have emerged over the last 30 years in our province. Ensuring that minimum wage work pays enough to keep full-time, full-year workers out of poverty will make for a fairer BC and should be top priority for BC’s next Premier.

The next day he quickly called a press conference on the driveway of a Whistler hotel to “clarify” his remarks.  He really just meant to say the government would consider raising Canada’s lowest minimum wage “in the future.”

 While other provinces (actually all other provinces) had raised their minimum wages in the last 10 years, he said, BC had helped low income people by reducing their income taxes. Some people would argue this is really more of a subsidy for business, but that is another issue.

So how does after tax income for minimum wage workers in BC compare to after tax income for minimum wage workers in the other nine provinces?  The following table looks at total income taxes, both federal and provincial.  Since federal income tax in every province is the same, the difference reflects provincial income taxes.  The following table assumes someone is working 35 hours a week for 52 weeks a year.

It turns out that the level of the minimum wage is way more important than the level of taxation.  Before or after taxes, minimum wage workers in BC take home less than anyone else in the country.  And of course, BC is the most expensive place to live. 

Sorry Minister Coell, your after tax argument just doesn’t hold water. 

Note: I obtained the income tax information from this website.

But now comes news earlier this month that an all-party committee of the Alberta legislature recommends that that province adopt a poverty reduction plan, including increases to the minimum wage (which at $8.80 in Alberta is already higher than BC’s, where it has been frozen at $8 since 2001). According to a report in the Edmonton Journal, the Alberta Standing Committee on the Economy called on the provincial government to “implement a province-wide poverty reduction strategy similar to the 10-year plan to end homelessness.”

How long can BC hold out?

Six provinces now have poverty reduction plans, although most are still fairly new, and therefore we don’t yet have data to tell us what kind of success they are meeting with, the exceptions being Quebec and Newfoundland. What their plans and results tell us is that poverty isn’t inevitable – that policy matters.

The example of Newfoundland is particularly instructive. There, the Conservative government of Danny Williams has made poverty reduction one of its overarching goals. Back in 2004, Newfoundland’s poverty rate was the second highest in Canada after BC’s. It is now 6.5 per cent, the third lowest in Canada. Their plan has led to concrete policy changes: welfare benefit rates have gone up (and were already higher than BC’s relative to the LICO) and they have been indexed (they go up every year according to the CPI); the minimum wage has been increased to $10; and the province followed Quebec and made dental care universal for children.

Ontario now also has a plan. Indeed, their plan is legislated, with a 25% reduction in 5 years. And notably, that legislation, the Ontario Poverty Reduction Act, was passed with unanimous all-party support, one week before BC’s provincial election last May, at the height of the recession. Like Newfoundland, they have a cross-ministerial secretariat, with a lead minister. And their lead minister must present annual progress reports. They have struck a welfare review panel, undertaking a comprehensive review of all the social assistance rates and rules. And they have gone the route of introducing an Ontario Child Tax Credit (like the federal one) worth $1,300 a year (another policy vehicle for increasing the incomes of low-income families, whether their income comes from welfare or paid employment).

More recently, New Brunswick has tabled their plan. The government there has fundamentally altered the tone of the debate, particularly about welfare. They too have legislated their plan in what they call the Economic and Social Inclusion Act. They too have all-party support. They have enacted some very large increases in welfare benefit rates, and indicated that this is only the start. And they have increased and indexed the minimum wage. And they too have a secretariat to coordinate plans.

The key common features of these plans are these:

• They have been advanced with all-party support
• They have specific targets and timelines, which in most cases are embedded in legislation.
• They are comprehensive (meaning they deal with income – both social assistance and other government income supports, as well as measures to boost labour market income; but they also address the social infrastructure on which low and modest income families depend, such as housing, education, child care, and community health care; and they have specific measures to address poverty among those populations where poverty is most acute, such as Aboriginal people, recent immigrants, people with disabilities and metal illness, and single parents).
• They have accountability mechanisms, such as public consultations, funding for independent monitoring groups, and obligations to report annually on progress. A key need is for timeline benchmarks that are frequent enough that a government can be held accountable within the life of each mandate.
• There is a cross-ministry secretariat to coordinate and integrate plans, and to ensure that policies do not act at cross-purposes.

(The preceding was part of my recent presentation to the BC Legislature’s Standing Committee on Children and Youth. For the full presentation, click here

And to join the call for a BC poverty reduction plan, click here

The after-tax dollars for someone at minimum wage in this province is quite good compared to some of the other provinces that have a higher minimum wage.

This isn’t the first time that the government has used the low taxes argument to dismiss calls for higher minimum wages, but has anybody bothered to check whether their logic is correct? Do BC’s low taxes make up for the low minimum wages we pay?

There are reasons to be skeptical of the Minister’s assertions: previous CCPA research has documented that BC’s personal income tax cuts disproportionately benefited higher income taxpayers.

A back of the envelope calculation to check how much tax would a full-time, full-year minimum wage worker owe in each province reveals that minimum wage workers in other provinces have more money left in their pocket after paying provincial taxes than a BC minimum wage worker would be able to earn in one working year (with the possible exception of PEI).

To make this graph, I used the provincial personal income tax comparison published in the 2010 BC Budget (appendix table A3). The income levels compared start at $10,000 and go up in $10,000 increments, so I wasn’t able to get at the tax level for the exact minimum wage incomes. I used the tax payable at income of $20,000, which is more than what the minimum wage worker would owe in all provinces except Ontario (because they earn less than $20,000). Even at these overestimated tax levels, the extra income that higher minimum wages bring more than offsets the extra taxes owing, leaving workers better off (see table).

BC may be home of the lowest tax rates, but it’s also home of the highest after-tax poverty rate in the country – 11.1% of British Columbians lived on after-tax incomes below Statistics Canada’s low income cut off rate in 2007.

Minister Coell, take note: even if you don’t tax low wage workers at all, they only earn so much. There are many low wage workers in BC who would be much better off if they could earn higher wages even if they had to pay slightly higher taxes on them.

While Ontario and these other provinces have a reason to celebrate, British Columbians should be embarrassed by our government’s inaction on the minimum wage front. Here a complete minimum wage freeze has been the name of the game for over eight years now. As Jim Stanford aptly summarizes in his column in the Globe and Mail:

Since taking office, B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell has taken his province from champ to chump in the low-wage sweepstakes. In 2001, B.C. had Canada’s highest minimum wage ($8). Today, it’s the lowest – still $8. In that time, inflation eroded the purchasing power of B.C. minimum wage workers by almost 20 per cent; Mr. Campbell made things worse with a new super-low minimum of $6 for new hires.

Our $8 minimum wage now is 22% lower than Ontario’s, which means that the annual income of a full-time, full-year minimum wage worker in BC is more than one fifth smaller than the income they could be earning working a minimum wage job in Ontario. And the cost of living here is on par, if not higher than Ontario. Consider, for example, average housing prices which are 30% higher in BC than in Ontario. I haven’t seen comparisons of rental costs between the two provinces, but I doubt the difference is any less striking.

It’s time to raise the minimum wage in BC. Not just because other provinces are doing it, but because it is the right thing to do. One simply cannot live on $8 per hour in this province in 2010.

Can small business afford it on the heels of the recession? Small businesses in the rest of Canada are able to pay higher wages and BC businesses are no less profitable or creative, so they should be able to afford them too.

For those worried about potential unemployment arising from a minimum wage increase – rest assured; there is no evidence that increased minimum wages in the rest of Canada has had significant disemployment effects. On the flip side, there is also no evidence to suggest that BC has done better in terms of youth employment as a result of keeping our minimum wage so low for years. As Jim Stanford explains:

In free-market theory, this should have made B.C. a nirvana for low-wage workers (especially young people). In reality, B.C.’s tight-fisted approach didn’t stop youth employment from falling faster, and the youth unemployment rate from rising further, than any other province as the recession hit in 2009. So much for the virtues of a flexible “free market.”

A minimum wage increase in BC is much needed and the provincial government is running out excuses for denying our lowest-paid workers a raise. The rest of Canada is leading by example, it’s time for the BC government to follow suit.

New Brunswick’s decision to increase their minimum wage is part of a larger poverty-reduction plan adopted last November. This move shows that New Brunswick is committed to ensuring a decent standard of living for all workers not just on paper but through action as well.

It’s worth noting that this time last year, New Brunswick’s minimum wage was $7.75, putting it in last place among all Canadian provinces. How much difference a year can make!

Closer to home,  our Premier’s latest excuse for inaction on minimum wages has been the poor economic conditions (most recently used in a mid-December interview on the Bill Good show, see here). That is despite the fact that we’re among the provinces least harmed by the recession and that other, worse affected provinces are managing just fine with higher minimum wages. Now that I think of it, the boom wasn’t the right time to increase minimum wages either, according to our government. Hmm.

As a result, minimum wages remain frozen at $8 per hour, well below where they need to be to ensure that full-time, full-year work is a ticket out of poverty.

Kudos to New Brunswick’s government for showing us that it is possible to maintain one’s social conscience during a recession, and confirming that public policy is, essentially, a matter of choice and not something dictated by “the economy.”

That’s why British Columbians should be concerned about a report released earlier this week by the Dieticians of Canada — The Cost of Eating in BC 2009.

Unfortunately, the Dietitian’s report received virtually no media coverage. But it makes a vital point — British Columbians on social assistance and those working for minimum wage cannot afford a healthy diet. For them, meeting the Premier’s great goal is simply out of reach.

Here’s the report in its own words:

Dietitians publish the report to bring attention to the fact that not all British Columbians have enough money to buy healthy food.  While shelter and food costs have risen significantly over the past decade, income assistance rates have remained virtually unchanged and minimum wage, once the highest in the country, has remained at $8.00/hour. For those receiving income assistance or earning minimum wage there simply is not enough money to pay for housing and food, let alone other necessities. Unemployment is up and more people are relying on assistance.  There are too many living in poverty in BC and too many lined up at food banks. Dietitians are calling for the provincial government to take some additional action to address poverty in this province. Other provinces are taking action.  Quebec and Ontario have anti-poverty legislation, while Newfoundland & Labrador, Nova Scotia, Manitoba and New Brunswick all have poverty reduction plans.  Common to them are significant changes to income assistance and increases to minimum wage.

The report contains important calculations, comparing the cost of basic necessities (including a healthy diet), set against the income provided by welfare or a minimum wage job. For example, a family of four on income assistance would need more than 100% of their income for shelter and food alone, leaving nothing for anything else.

The core finding of this report isn’t just of concern to those families caught in this untenable situation. In truth, we all pay for this policy failure. A poor diet means poor health, and we all pick up the tab for that. That’s why the Dietitians have joined the call for a comprehensive poverty reduction plan for BC

You see, as an economist and public interest researcher at the CCPA, I occasionally get invitations from talk radio to discuss or debate the economic and social policy questions of the day. And since our minimum wages in BC have been frozen for eight full years now, the debate around whether we should increase the minimum wage comes up every so often. Usually, it’s around some auspicious date, such as the day that we took the rock-bottom place in Canada (that was September 1st, 2009) or the anniversary of our embarrassingly low $8 minimum wage (November 1st).

But I just can’t get airtime to discuss the minimum wage on talk radio. Typically, I get bumped off the list in favour of another guest, usually Jim Sinclair from the BC Fed. Ok, I get it: I’m a policy wonk somewhat removed from the proverbial real world while he’s right in there representing the workers, and listeners are more interested to hear from the people directly involved, not just from analysts. Fair enough.

This time around, however, something different happened. My Monday morning TALK 1410 live radio debate on the minimum wage was canceled, period. The reality is that, as of today, Vancouver has one fewer talk radio stations, as TALK 1410 rebranded itself as an all-sports station and became TEAM 1410.

The global recession has not been kind to traditional media. Sadly, this has impacts that go beyond direct job losses and reduced consumer spending to the much more important issues of media democracy as more and more voices are excluded from the mainstream media.

So this coming Monday at 7am, you won’t hear me discuss what we should do about our low minimum wages. But you can stay tuned for extensive coverage of the latest most-crucial-must-win game.

As if you needed one more reason to go to Media Democracy Day at the Vancouver Public Library this Saturday.

Meanwhile, BC’s government has repeatedly refused to increase the minimum wage here, claiming that the increase in costs for employers would kill jobs in the service sector (although apparently service sector jobs were not a big concern when the government decided to introduce the HST, bringing in a 7% increase in the cost of restaurant meals).

The best place on earth?

Not for those trying to eke out a living on a minimum wage.

NB raised its minimum wage today and now BC, with the highest cost of living in Canada, is tied with two provinces with the lowest cost of living in Canada, New Brunswick and PEI. New Brunswick has said it is raising the minimum wage again this fall.

Here are some comments from the New Brunswick press release today:

Post-Secondary Education, Training and Labour Minister Donald Arseneault said that while the province’s economy is slowing, it is important to continue to give individuals and families the opportunity to have a better standard of living, and help them build a better future here in New Brunswick.

“We want New Brunswickers to work in this province and be successful,” said Arseneault.

This attitude towards people at the bottom end of the income scale is a refreshing difference from the government in our own province whose attitude can be best described as, “the devil take the hindmost.”