146 – Why Minimum Wage is not a Living Wage

As Licensed Insolvency Trustees, our clients tell us how difficult it is to live on minimum wage. That's why they often have no choice but to use debt to survive. The average person we help file a consumer proposal or bankruptcy has an income that is almost 40% less than the median income in Ontario; in many cases our clients are working minimum wage jobs.

Our clients don't have a debt problem; they have an income problem.

If minimum wage isn't enough to survive, the solution would appear to be quite simple: raise the minimum wage. That's exactly what the Ontario government is proposing to do, raising the general minimum wage from $11.40 per hour to $15 per hour on January 1, 2019.

So won't that big increase in the minimum wage solve all of our problems?

No, because, unfortunately, a minimum wage is not a living wage.

On today's show we explore the reasons why a government-mandated minimum wage is likely to do more harm than good, and we propose a more effective solution to our income problem.