I'm not an economist, so I don't know how to make it happen. But the minimum wage being so low means that people earning the minimum wage are living in poverty in our country. So that means that even the people who are working and meeting that sometimes unspoken standard of our society, that being employed is the all-important thing, aren't able to make ends meet.
Certainly I've heard a lot of talk in the circles I travel in about a guaranteed liveable income--a guaranteed annual income; it's called different things. That's probably even a harder sell than supplements of some kind. But it recognizes that people need a certain amount of money to live on. And people who are in these minimum wage jobs, or precarious employment where they might lose their job any day, or are only working part-time and don't have any benefits to go along with their job are not able to make ends meet. They're not making enough money to maintain themselves above the poverty line. And I'm not sure how to make that work better. If minimum wage were raised, that would certainly be a help. But it doesn't necessarily address the people in precarious employment. I think it's a broad picture. A lot of the employment that has come to Nova Scotia recently is a call centre kind of job, and many large employers like that prefer part-time workers to full-time workers because it's more cost-effective for them. But that has an effect on the workers as well who aren't able to get full-time employment and are stuck in this system that doesn't allow them to pull themselves out of poverty to make a decent living.
I don't know what the answer is. But I think it's just a recognition that even people who are in the labour force and are working hard are struggling because of all these factors we're talking about. It would be great if somehow we as Canadians made a commitment to address that issue in some way, be it with a guaranteed liveable income, supplements for people who are poor and working, transitional funds when moving off social assistance into paid employment, that kind of thing.