Very much so, and the reason is that I don't think people understand that employers have a certain wage bill. We saw this play out with the minimum wage hike in Ontario, and I suspect we will see the same thing play out in Alberta. Employers have a certain wage bill. One of the features of this economy is that....
As I drove in this morning, I was hearing on Bloomberg that people in the U.S. were talking about the fact that it remains a mystery why, with such low rates of unemployment, employers simply will not raise wages. There's a lot of speculation on that and there are a lot of reasons, but it is a fact that in North America, wages are not increasing. Therefore, in this current environment, for whatever reason, if you increase wages or costs in one area of labour or wages—i.e., you raise the minimum wage—employers react by saying, “Okay, I now have to pay these people $14 an hour when I was paying them $10. I will do that. I will employ fewer of them. I will also cut back on what I'm paying other workers.”
They have to control their overall wage bill. I think that's what the CFIB is addressing, and I think that's what gets lost in this. I think there are a lot of good intentions here, but as an economist I'm honour bound to point out the unintended consequences. The unintended consequences of a lot of these well-intended policies will cost some people jobs. You can't create money where it doesn't exist in the first place.
I think that was very much the point I was trying to make in my opening presentation. We can't lose sight of the fact that social improvement will only happen in an economy that's prosperous and flourishing. If we ignore those basics, if we undertake policies that undercut those basics, it will not end well for anybody.