Madam Speaker, I want to probe my colleague's comments about the minimum wage. He sees that a higher minimum wage would provide benefits. Many economists believe that a higher minimum wage leads to increased unemployment and it is not hard to understand intuitively why that would be. If the cost of something is increased, people will purchase less of it. If the cost of labour is increased, people will hire fewer people.
There are things the government could do that would help people in that same situation. It could raise the base exemption people can earn before paying tax, like we did. It could lower the lowest marginal tax rate, not the middle rate, which is also something that we did when we were in government.
Would the member not agree that those types of measures would have more of a benefit and less of an economic cost because they would not increase unemployment?