Dumb idea. This would just increase the cost of living for everyone as the price of goods would increase. Either that, or businesses would immediately lay-off a good portion of workers. I understand they’re trying to reduce poverty in BC, but this isn’t the appropriate way.

This must be driven by Vancouverites. If you can’t afford to live in the lower mainland… Don’t.

pgjohn: I agree to a point. The cost of living does go up as soon as there are wage increases, however if there isn’t some kind of limit on the cost of increased prices, it becomes a vicious circle.
For example: the prices farmers get for their beef and other products doesn’t even come close to what retail prices are for those products. Where are all these extra costs tacked on?
The prices we have to pay for fuel is make some people very rich beyond reason. We are a captive market.
We have to eat, we need fuel for heat and transportation of goods and people.
Necessities like these I think, should have some more investigation as to where the gouging is and be stopped.

Smart idea. The price of goods will keep going up even if you pay $10.00 or $15.00. At $15.00 maybe some families will be able to eat properly or have a decent place to stay. Time to start paying a living wage and at $15.00 that is barely enough to make it.

This would be a killer for small business. Many small businesses are hardly getting by as it is.

We elected a government, that gov set the min wage. Whats these other non elected people doing thinking they will get the min wage increased 50 % overnight? A lot of people would be laid off immediately.

I posted this on another thread but it also applies here/

Let’s say a person is working for minimum wage at the blue vest store. He keeps his ears open and learns that there is a position opening in the warehouse that pays $15/hr but it requires forklift training and a Transportatation of Dangerous Goods ticket. No sweat the DTG can be had in one evening and forklift after a few weeks. So he now makes 15 bucks but the entry level wage suddenly jumps to 15 so he now wants 17 and the person making 17 wants 20 etc etc…. To pay for the raises the prices rise and the entry level is back at the start line wanting $17 wash rinse repeat

An entry level position is meant to be the first rung on the ladder not a career. If a person wants to stand over a till, a grill or a shovel it should be with the understanding that low skills equate to low wages.

The problem you have is big companies like Jimmy P, Wal-mart, Can.Tire, Home Depot and other large companies can afford to pay a decent wage but they do not. The whole idea of these companies to keep their employees at the poverty level so they can control each of them. Many workers do not work fulltime and have no benefits and are at the mercy of the employer.

Is no one paying attention to Seattle and their 36% unemployent rate for young people after going to $15 minimum wage?

My sister-in-law always hired a student in the summer to watch the kids. How could anyone afford to pay a student $15/hr? On top of that you would still have to pay WCB, vacation pay etc and payroll costs. I think an increase like this would cut a lot of summer jobs for teenagers.

With the cut backs to the temporary foreign worker program a bunch of those employers will have to start paying decent wages to keep employees. Hopefully the job market will set the wage without govt intervention.

Yes we have 85000 TFWs in Alberta working for min.wage or less and 300000 in Canada. Now you know why it is hard to get an increase in wages and high youth unemployment. Thanks to Harper.

Unions have been signing 3,5,8, year contracts, with a raise every year.
Government employee’s, Teachers, Nurses, Health Workers, Doctors, Lawyers, etc; etc; etc; all get yearly increases.

Is it possible that all these Union Workers, or Associations, or Government Workers, are the cause of inflation. Their numbers far outweigh the numbers of people who work for minimum wage.

So don’t blame inflated prices on low income earners. Place it where it belongs, ie; those mentioned above.

Seniors on fixed incomes, and people making $15.00 per hour or less in this Country are facing some pretty hard times.

Do you think that anybody (especially Politicians) really gives a S..T.?

If anyone really thinks this is a good idea. It’s only because you make minimum wage and are too lazy to earn your way up the ladder to a better position. I understand there is extra ordinary cases like there is for everything. But when you talk about somthing such as minimum wage it affects everybody. Not just a few. Think of this from a business perspective. Small business”s won’t be able to afford it so they will go out of business forcing you to buy from bigger non local and non canadian companies hurting the local economy even more. And larger chains such as McDonald’s will just create more automated lines. There won’t be a need for a 16 yr old kid flipping burgers at a fast food place when a machine can do it for cheaper than 15$ an hour.
Truly it’s harsh to say but when u start out n have no skills ur not even worth 10$ an hour. But when u go to school n get ur degree or earn ur way up the company padded then u deserve ur 50$ an hour.

Free hand outs don’t help anyone.

The BC Federation of Labour doesn’t know what it’s doing. It was just this past spring that they were screaming for a minimum wage of $13/hr. and now all of a sudden they’ve jumped on the Seattle train to go to $15/hr.? Perhaps they should base their request in evidence and data instead of blindly following what people in another country are doing.

I don’t believe in grotesque income inequality, but what that means to me is that people at the top of the scale of incomes have gotten all out of proportion to the nature of reality. Some CEO who makes $10million a year, even if they work 16 hours a day 6 days a week are making over $2000/hour. That’s just stupid. Nobody is worthy of that kind of compensation unless they earn it themselves by growing a company from the ground up and that’s their earnings from the profit of the company annually.

Minimum wage is supposed to be just that, minimum. Want a living wage, earn one and for people who’re not capable, there are social programs for them to get healthcare, education and other supports they need. Has that fallen off under the Liberal government? Absolutely. Fix that though – don’t do this it doesn’t make sense. It’s a slap in the face to people who work hard and apply themselves to earn a few bucks more than minimum wage. This will hurt our flagging provincial economy.

In 2013, British Columbia experienced a net loss of jobs. We’re falling behind the rest of the country. 120,000 people are on minimum wage. So what? There are 2,348.6 employed people in BC as of October 2014, so the people on minimum wage account for 5% of the workforce. Seems reasonable to me. If you’re able bodied and have even a modicum of self-respect and creativity, there is no reason for you to stay on minimum wage. Pick yourself up. Or you can continue living on handouts for life.

That’s 2,348.6 k people employed in BC…

Firstly lets not denigrate people who have to work for minimum wage. Without them we would be pretty hard pressed to live high off the hog, which is really what this is all about.

Business’s that need workers on minimum wage to survive, are for all intents and purposes not a business. What they really are, are a business that survives because they are being subsidized by cheap labour.

Why should people work for a minimum wage so that so called business owners can get a good wage???

Its especially galling to hear all the BS about getting an education and thus getting a better job. People who make these inane statements obviously don’t know how to think. Lets assume that we all went to University, are we to believe that we would all get a high paying job? Not bloody likely.

There are hundreds of thousands of workers in this Country, with an education, especially those who work for the Government that go to work every day on what I refer to as **pretend jobs**. In actual fact they do nothing that could remotely be construed as productive, and at best they take up space. These people are the hidden welfare recipients.

Those business’s that rely on the minimum wage to keep them afloat are also welfare recipients. They rely on cheap labour to survive.

The reason we have a minimum wage is because some people would have others working for $5.00 per hours or less if they could get away with it.

So pay the $15.00 per hour and let the chips fall where they may.

“So pay the $15.00 per hour and let the chips fall where they may.”

Well, that gets my vote for the most unwise comment of the day.

Yes, by all means, let’s demonize entrepreneurs too while we’re at it, because these are the evil filthy slobs who generate jobs, wealth and economic activity in our society. British Columbians are very entrepreneurial and I for one am proud of that statistic. The labour market itself helps to sort out a lot of these wage rate issues. Lean economic times will depress the earnings of a people, and conversely high levels of economic activity and low unemployment will drive earnings higher. Nobody is holding a gun to these people’s heads. If they don’t want to work for the wage employers are offering and if employers are happy with the quality of labour they get for what they’re offering then who are you to say anything? These are arms length transactions. I’ve personally never worked for minimum wage. In most cases, it’s totally unnecessary as the 5% statistic seems to suggest. This is an unbelievably rich province, and the money is dripping down from everywhere. A little ingenuity, creative thinking, oh and of course some hard work and most people can live very well here.

People who tend to scoff at education as a path to improved economic viability, in my experience, are those that don’t have higher education typically. There is a direct relationship between levels of education and income levels in most cases. It still holds true, especially in a buyers market. Are there unemployed or underemployed educated people, you bet, but my experience there too is that there is often a good reason for that as well and it has little to do with their credentials and more to do with them as people.

Bitter people often cry foul and that society owes them a living, but pandering to that self-pity is never productive in my experience.

A few months ago I read an article in the Politico Magazine, written by Nick Hanauer, a self made billionaire.

He’s totally in favour of raising the minimum wage, and spells out why. For all of those who feel it would be a disaster in the making, it’s worth a read.

Lets remember a raise was just given out to minimum wage workers not long ago. They increased from $8 to 10.25… I would love to see who else, even unions, getting a 50% increase in pay. Include an employers EI, and CPP contribution on behalf of the employee, and WCB… suddenly your favourite locally owned business is closed, or running with bare bones staff.

Palpou says,

“Its especially galling to hear all the BS about getting an education and thus getting a better job. People who make these inane statements obviously don’t know how to think.”

WOW. That has get to be one of the stupidist comments you have made and that says a lot. It is obvious you are the one who dosen’t know “how to think”. Go to bed.

In my opinion if it was increased to $15.00 per hour then the “P. B. burger flipping training wage” of $6.00 per hour would be brought back. But this time the “training period” would be extended to a point in time when the employer deemed the trainee to be trained. ☻

“The problem you have is big companies like Jimmy P, Wal-mart, Can.Tire, Home Depot and other large companies can afford to pay a decent wage but they do not.”

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No, the problem is that the consumer continues to shop at these places because they like the lower prices. If the consumer really cared about the wages at those places they would shop elsewhere; at a shop that pays more and where the goods cost more.

Palopu says,

“Its especially galling to hear all the BS about getting an education and thus getting a better job. People who make these inane statements obviously don’t know how to think.”

dow7501 replies, “WOW. That has get to be one of the stupidist comments you have made and that says a lot. It is obvious you are the one who dosen’t know “how to think”. Go to bed.”
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It is far from being a stupid comment, dow7501. The simple FACT of the matter is that there is, and has been, and will be, continual job displacement as technology constantly advances. And if anything that advancement is accelerating. To hold the notion that this country needs to have 100% of its working population employed to provide 100% of the goods and services we all require or desire is absolute inanity. Any such country that ‘needs’ to do that is a country that is riddled with inefficiency. The same kind of inefficiency that existed in the former Soviet Union and its communist satellite states. Where ‘work’, instead of being as it properly should be, a mere ‘means to an end’, became the desired ‘end’ in itself.

But lets not get too far into that. Lets talk instead about the usual mantra of how getting a good education is going to be the ticket to moving up in the world of employment and look at a couple of cases.

A number of years ago Northern Telecom was the darling of Bay Street, and Canada was going to ‘lead the world’ into a new age of telecommunications technology. To do so we would need to graduate more electrical engineers. It was an up and coming field, so the story went.

A young lady I know graduated high school with excellent marks in math and science and figured this was where the future would be. She enrolled in UBC, along with, that year, 36 others who were accepted into their electrical engineering program.

Six years later 13 of the 36 graduated. She was one of those who’d been able to stick it out. Of those 13, 3 ended up getting jobs in the field they were trained for.

She went to work for NorTel. The other 10 were told, in effect, that they’d made a poor career choice, (and this was BEFORE the later meltdown of NorTel ~ well before it), that electrical engineers were now in surplus. And they’d be well advised to go back and get trained for something else.

She was thousands of dollars in debt from student loans, even though she’d been ultra conservative with her spending in those six years. We can assume her unlucky fellow grads were similarly indebted. And now were being told to go further into the hole again?

She worked for NorTel long enough before it tanked to pay off her debts, but to do so meant essentially putting the rest of her life on hold. Then that Company failed, electrical engineers became even more in surplus, so she was back to square one. That’s not an isolated case, dow7501, there are thousands just like her out there.

But lets look at something else that springs from your oft repeated mantra. Governments are embarrassed somewhat by this state of affairs. It doesn’t ‘look good’ to have scores of new university grads reduced to doing menial jobs a high school drop out could do. Makes a mockery of the way things were supposed to be.

So what does government do? It hires them, that’s what. It turns them into bureaucrats. And sends them out into the workaday world to enforce inane ‘rules’ of all manner that only governments could ever dream up to justify someone’s continued employment.

Not rules that make any particular sense in enhancing safety, say, or environmental protection. But ones that are designed to make every productive workplace as unproductive as possible. The big companies can get around this by doing the same as government does. Nothing like having someone on the payroll who’s ‘educated’ to argue with a similarly ‘educated’ government bureaucrat. They can both busy themselves ‘documenting’ all they know. For each other, and their respective employers. But the smaller employers? The ‘backbone of the community’? Their backs are broken under the oppressiveness of this set-up. But not to worry, they can all go get ‘educated’. That’ll solve everything, won’t it?

Think of this from a business perspective. Small business”s won’t be able to afford it so they will go out of business forcing you to buy from bigger non local and non canadian companies hurting the local economy even more. And larger chains such as McDonald’s will just create more automated lines. There won’t be a need for a 16 yr old kid flipping burgers at a fast food place when a machine can do it for cheaper than 15$ an hour.

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I've noticed this position usually comes up when discussing minimum wage increases, the poor small business will not be able to afford it.

The question that arises is IF you raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour…where do those now generously paid employees spend that additional income? Perhaps more than a few of these 'small businesses' will now have more 'cash carrying customers'?

The minimum wage is just fine where it is and in line with the rest of the country. Businesses would just pass the increased cost of wages down to their customers… they will not eat the cost, whether it’s a mom and pop business or Walmart. Anyone who thinks otherwise is dreaming.

Jim13136:-“The question that arises is IF you raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour…where do those now generously paid employees spend that additional income? Perhaps more than a few of these ‘small businesses’ will now have more ‘cash carrying customers’?”

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First of all, Jim, there is going to be a more substantial difference between $ 15 gross the employee earns and the substantially less net pay he actually receives.

This is partly because our Income Tax system is ‘graduated’. The more gross one receives the greater the PERCENTAGE of it the government removes in taxes. Just take a look at the income tax tables sometime and see whether a 50% raise in the minimum wage leads to a 50% rise in net pay received. I think you’ll find it doesn’t.

But that’s just the start of it. For now the employer’s portion of EI, which is $ 1.40 off him for every $ 1.00 deducted from his employees, plus his portion of the CPP which is another $ 1.00 off him for every $ 1.00 off you, plus his contribution to WCB which is entirely employer funded, also rise. Those are just the mandatory basics. Holiday Pay for statutory holidays and annual vacation also rise.

ALL this additional taking has to be costed into the price of goods or services the employer sells the public. Those prices cannot help but rise MORE than just the actual increase in additional wage the employee receives. So how are employees REALLY advantaged? They might get to feel good that they’re ‘working with bigger figures’, for awhile. But in terms of what each dollar they’re earning will actually buy they’re losing ground. But hey, why stop at $ 15 per hour? Make it $ 30. Or $ 40. Or any figure you want. And see what happens.

“Business’s that need workers on minimum wage to survive, are for all intents and purposes not a business. What they really are, are a business that survives because they are being subsidized by cheap labour.

Why should people work for a minimum wage so that so called business owners can get a good wage???”

1) Risk- You own the business, you have all the risk. You make minimum wage, you get a better offer somewhere, you can walk. The business owner can’t.
2) I challenge you to put your money where your mouth is. Stop going to business that pay minimum wage, since, they aren’t really businesses anyways but just slave masters stopping on the little man.
3) To answer your last question: Because that is what the job pays. Don’t think it is worth it? Then don’t do it.