(This blog post is a response to James Sun’s post “An Even Higher Minimum Wage”)

After reading the article in question, I agree to a certain extent with what James Sun said, that by increasing the minimum wage, the rate of unemployment should increase right along side it. However, if Tom Mulcair goes along with this plan and does it over the course of the next five years rather than all at once, then this idea has the potential to be less harmful to the employment rate rather than if it all happened at once.

Also, I find the fact that the article says that in 2005, female workers from ages 15-24 provided around 60% of the minimum wage workers within the country. By now this statistic is likely to have changed somewhat; however, it is impossible to change a figure that large to a more reasonable size in such a short amount of time, we can therefore assume that young female workers are still representing a large portion of the minimum wage workers within Canada. This does not go exactly along the lines with what the new NDP was fighting for, as they were vying to stand for the thousands of families that lived with an income at this line. Since a large section of these people are new people entering the labor market, they will not likely have a high paying job in the first place anyway, and possibly still live with family or with their family’s help and are not as affected by the effects of the minimum wage as are perhaps workers with 2 to 3 small children.
I agree that the minimum wage could be increased. However, I do not think that doing so would necessarily benefit everyone involved, since a large majority of the people with salaries at that line are potentially still students or living with relatives and are not as affected by the negative effects of the minimum wage as are perhaps stated in these articles.

link to James Sun’s post https://blogs.ubc.ca/fesd78/2014/10/04/an-even-higher-minimum-wage/

link to article http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/tom-mulcair-says-he-will-propose-15-federal-minimum-wage-1.2765515

Image taken from: http://www.cija.ca/canadian-politics/statement-by-ndp-leader-tom-mulcair-on-rosh-hashanah/