Being first is hard, and being last makes things difficult as well. But you wouldn’t think staying in the middle of the pack would be all that demanding.
Still, the B.C. government is struggling to stay in that sweet spot when it comes to a minimum wage. It wouldn’t take much to tape a chart to the wall of the cabinet room and keep track across Canada. Somehow, that job didn’t get done.
Which leaves the B.C. Liberals in the embarrassing position today of having the lowest minimum wage in the country. Apart from all the implications for the wage-earners, it’s curious why the Liberals would fumble something so simple and leave themselves so needlessly exposed. Particularly when the minimum wage was a pet project of Premier Christy Clark just five years ago when she ran for the party’s leadership.
Clark was an early adopter of the promise to hike the minimum wage, a stance that nearly every candidate in that race also took. It had been frozen at $8 for a decade by that point, so absurdly low that even the chamber of commerce was endorsing a raise.
After winning the leadership, Clark bumped it incrementally to the $10 range in fairly short order. There were three hikes in 12 months up to May 2012, that put it at $10.25. There were corresponding hikes to piecework and live-in rates to keep them roughly comparable. There were also indications at the time that small regular increases would be a fact of life from that point on.
“We consulted with stakeholders and economic experts on their views about increasing the minimum wage,” said the minister responsible at the time. “As a result of those discussions, it was determined that job impacts are minimized when minimum-wage increases are done incrementally over time.”
Clark’s government marked Labour Day in 2012 by congratulating itself for having one of the highest minimum wages in the country, “ensuring that workers in minimum-wage positions bring in a fair salary for the hard work they do, and can continue to support their families.”
It calculated then that the hikes had added $4,000 to a minimum-wage earner’s annual pay.
But after all the consultations that led to the determination that incremental raises were the way to go, the government quickly lost interest in that approach.
The rate stayed at $10.25 for three years. In March 2015, the government announced the minimum wage was going to be indexed to inflation, and indexed retroactively, starting later that year. So it bumped up to $10.45 by September.
By last month, it dawned on the cabinet that B.C. was lagging behind everyone again. So Jobs Minister Shirley Bond announced last week the inflation increase later this year will be augmented by an additional raise, based on strong economic growth.
The scheduled increase, which would have amounted to about a dime, “does not reflect the economic circumstances of the province.”
So they’ll bump that rate up an additional amount and announce it soon. But it still may not take effect until September, so B.C. will remain in last place until then.
It’s a function of doing it in fits and starts, rather than the incremental approach the government originally embraced.
While that was playing out, the push for a substantial increase far higher than the dimes and quarters now on the table has gained ground. There is a solid trend toward a $15 minimum wage that is being embraced in New York, California and Seattle. Moves there don’t directly affect B.C., but they set a tone that the B.C. Federation of Labour is keen to advance.
The counterweight to minimum-wage hikes is the argument that it kills jobs by prompting employers to curtail hours or hiring. But the government increased the minimum wage 25 per cent in one year three years ago. If there’s any indication that killed jobs, it isn’t reflected in labour statistics. The Liberals seem to have established that the downside isn’t as bad as feared.
The nickel-and-dime increases don’t do anything for anybody. They’re just for the optics in the cross-country standings. A significant boost could make a real difference to some people.
