Roundup: About those federal minimum wage claims

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I got a householder from my MP, Paul Dewar, the other day, and the figure he cited on it bothered me – that raising minimum wage for federally-regulated workers would benefit “tens of thousands.”

I remember this being fact-checked when the NDP first announced this policy, and shortly after I tweeted the photo of the mailer, one of my followers found the reference – that there are currently 416 federally-regulated workers earning minimum wage.

And let’s also be clear – federally-regulated workers are paid the prevailing provincial minimum wage, which keeps them in line with their local counterparts, and is in line with other jurisprudence regarding federally-regulated workplaces and provincial workers compensation regimes – jurisprudence that has been upheld at the Supreme Court level. It was later pointed out to me that the number of federally-regulated workers who earn between the local minimum wage and $15 may indeed be in the thousands.

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Fair enough. It may well be that the intent of the NDP policy is to encourage the provinces to raise their own provincial minimum wage rates, but no province with an NDP government has bothered to make such a move, so that may be a telling sign. The bigger issue, however, is that this $15/hour minimum wage issue is a gimmicky policy that will actually do nothing to raise anyone out of poverty, and in fact seems to be yet another case of a political party lifting talking points from American sources without bothering to check the Canadian data or context, and if you talk to any credible Canadian economist, they will tell you that you may as well advocate raising the minimum wage to $20 even $20,000/hour, because raising the minimum wage is terrible policy for poverty reduction. What does work, however, are cash transfers to the poor by means of things like the GST rebate mechanisms that are already in place. But it’s populist to say that people “deserve a raise,” even if it’s terrible policy, and it deserves to be pointed out. Context is as important to journalism as repeating facts in isolation.

Good reads:

  • Peter MacKay wrote to the Ottawa Citizen to sulk about how he’s been treated over his definition of terrorism comments, and then had to clarify remarks from the letter.
  • Justin Trudeau says that Harper is pandering to fear of Muslims with his comments around terrorism and the niqab issue.
  • What’s that? The federal government’s plans to cut landlines in favour of mobile devices isn’t producing the savings they’d hoped for? You don’t say!
  • Government spokesdrone parliamentary secretary Roxanne James insisted that the child exploitation centre lapsing funds is just an accounting issue, and then kept accusing everyone of characterising the lapse as cuts, which nobody did.
  • Chris Hall shows how SIRC doesn’t have the resources to provide the kind of oversight the government claims it does.
  • Susan Delacourt writes about the Conservatives distancing themselves from Bay Street as part of their anti-elite narrative, despite NDP taunts about “Bay Street Buddies.”

Odds and ends:

Former Conservative MP Lee Richardson, who resigned to work for Alison Redford, is looking to run for federal election yet again.

The government is introducing new measures around ensuring rail companies carry more insurance in the event of more catastrophic derailments.

Here’s the Ottawa Citizen’s Gargoyle round-up of the week’s smaller stories.