It wasn’t that long ago that having a steady job equated to a decent and respectable standard of living. However, as more Ontarians are working to be poor while chained to low-paying and unskilled jobs, the concept of a hard day’s work for a good day’s pay is abruptly fleeing from workers’ wallets across the province.
A report released late last month by Statistics Canada, highlights how the gap between Canada’s rich and poor has steadily widened. Since 1986, Canada’s best-paid two-parent families have seen their income skyrocket by nearly $50,000 a year, while the lowest income earners have seen little or no change.
Such statistics, in part, illustrate how the rich have gotten richer, while the poor have gotten poorer. In Ontario, the math is simple: while the cost of living has steadily increased, the standard minimum wage has lagged behind.
In 1995, under Mike Harris’s diabolical regime, the minimum wage was frozen at $6.85 and it was not until the 2003 provincial election that Liberal Leader Dalton McGuinty promised to fix that inequity. During those years, the scope and breadth of poverty grew widely, as the purchasing power of a minimum wage salary shrank by nearly 20 per cent.
McGuinty has raised the standard minimum wage to its current $7.75 and promised to raise it to an even $8 an hour next February. However, as reported by the Toronto Star, had the minimum wage earner stayed in line with the growing average hourly salary of other Ontario workers since 1995, the minimum wage would now be more than $9 per hour.
Clearly, much more needs to be done to ensure the economic equality amongst Ontario’s workforce. Thus, come February, McGuinty must raise the minimum wage to $10 an hour and tie it to inflation. This would be a quick way to help many low-income earners to slow the cycle of poverty and achieve some form of pay equity.
In Ontario, the idea of a “Living Wage” has yet to garner much political interest outside of anti-poverty organizations and some economists. Though not a panacea, when coupled with income subsidies, social housing, formal child-care and skills-development programs, an increased minimum wage will enable Ontario’s minimum wage workers to end up with more money in their pockets, encouraging spending to help keep the economy churning.
However, as the onus of responsibility to increase the minimum wage and the social safety net is determined by the political will of bourgeois leaders and economic insiders, this faceless issue will continue to remain on the government backburners. As government inertia and public choice politics have shown, poverty is not the focus of glitzy election campaigns. Leaders align themselves with more “voter rich” topics in an act of political self-preservation. Ultimately, the question is this: is Ontario failing its obligation to its people?
Until provincial politicians take more notice of the plight of the working poor, income inequity will cause band-aid solutions such as food banks being stretched to their maximum.
Poverty is a stain on our social fabric and demonstrates that our sense of collectivism has been slowly eroded by a free-market approach to social welfare. The working poor in Ontario have been held back long enough. They deserve a raise. They need it now.
–Brent T. Jolly