According to MIT Economics Professor Daron Acemoglu, a bountiful supply of good jobs is the best way to generate shared prosperity and also to cultivate civic and political participation from the broad cross-section of society. But organizations that regularly appear in corporate media are paid to oppose the concept of shared prosperity.
The Fraser Institute has relied on funding from billionaires and those who aspire to gain that label. Of course, if a society has a few winners, it needs far more losers. Oxfam reported that since 2020, the world’s five wealthiest billionaires added to their fortunes at a rate of $14 million per hour, while nearly five billion people have been made poorer. Fraser Institute exists to explain why results like this are good.
During Gordon Campbell’s time as Premier, BC Liberals said that raising the $8 minimum hourly wage would be a job-killing policy. In 2010, late in his time as Minister of Labour, Liberal Murray Coell suggested that a decade-long freeze of the wage rate paid to society’s least powerful workers was not good public policy.
A day later, Coell publicly backtracked on that idea. A month later, Coell was removed as Minister of Labour.
Shortly after Coell offended the Liberal hierarchy by speaking truthfully, the Fraser Institute provided its “analysis” of why the minimum wage ought to remain frozen. The Vancouver Sun dutifully published their screed.
| What the Fraser Institute said: | Commentary |
| The majority of workers paid minimum wage were under 25 and most lived at home with their families. | Of course. But how could young adults afford to pay for their own meals and housing while earning $8 an hour? |
| Many of the remaining individuals earning minimum wages are adults supplementing their family income with part-time work during child-rearing years or after retirement. | Supplementing family income, or working to keep the little ones clothed and fed? I sense the Fraser Institute viewed childcare providers and old folks as non-contributors who did not deserve a fair share of Canadian prosperity. |
| Employers respond to minimum wage increases by reducing the number of workers they employ and/or the number of hours their employees work. | Check the chart below and consider if minimum wage increases after the freeze was lifted in 2011 devastated the economy of British Columbia. |
| A review of academic studies from Canada and around the world demonstrates convincingly that high minimum wages lead to lower employment levels. | The academic studies originate largely from groups financially dependent on wealthy business interests. |
| A Fraser Institute study estimated that if the B.C. government succumbs to calls from unions and other activists to increase the minimum wage rate to $10 an hour from the current rate of $8, the province would shed upwards of 52,000 jobs. | No need to say anything more than look at the jobs chart shown below. The dip in 2020-2021 is attributed to COVID-19, not minimum wage increases. |
| Minimum wage increases will rob young and unskilled workers of the chance to work and gain needed skills. | In fact, paying young and unskilled workers a living wage and providing apprenticeships and other effective job-training is a far better way of building competency and productivity in our workplaces. |
Following are excerpts from the 2019 IN-SIGHTS article Wacky world of minimum wages:
Said Chilliwack MLA John Martin, the BC Liberal labour critic:
Overall it’s a pretty frightening time for small and medium-sized businesses. We’ve seen in Alberta the job losses that now are being specifically associated with a rapid increase in the minimum wage.
Incidentally, Martin is the guy who worried that regulations aimed at protecting children from workplace injury and exploitation would make it impossible for 13-year-olds to save up for new bicycles.
Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, University of California, Berkeley, examined concerns about negative impacts of paying more to workers at the bottom margin. IRLE published a paper this month titled Minimum Wage Effects in Low-Wage Areas:
We find positive wage effects but do not detect adverse effects on employment, weekly hours or annual weeks worked. We do not find negative employment effects among women, blacks and/or Hispanics. We do find substantial declines in household and child poverty.
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Categories: Economics, Fraser Institute
in-sights.ca 
A report your readers might like to know about Norm.
A reviewed report dated September 17,2014 and titled “Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century” by Anne Case and Angus Deaton.
This was the first report I was aware of that focused on “Deaths of Despair”.
The existence of this research is a stunner given we all want to believe we are living in “fair” democracies. This was indirectly the topic of the Carter Royal Commission on income tax unfairness in Canada , done in the late 1960s. After delivery of the Carter Report the Canadian government and establishment went to great lengths to delete its existence.
The recent record of “deaths of despair” shows it to be a growing reality both in the USA and Canada. Erik
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