MARK MACDONALD
BRITISH COLUMBIA – Congratulations, NDP Premier David Eby. You’ve just driven up the price of hamburgers.
That’s what you’ve really done by arbitrarily hiking the minimum wage by an astonishing 6.90 per cent, to $16.75 an hour. Up from the $15.65 current rate.
Which will give your supporters approximately six months “advance”, where they think they’re ahead, until they go to the grocery store or out for a sandwich and realize that the prices charged by any business employing workers at minimum wage have had to raise their prices just to keep the doors open.
It’s incredibly short-sighted. And with the NDP, incredibly predictable. They never, ever learn. It’s astonishing, really.
As is a provincial ministry statement claiming it will “benefit 150,000 workers, most of them food service staff, grocery store workers, retail workers and others who were essential workers during the pandemic.”
What a titanic spin, using these workers as human shields to somehow protect the NDP from verbal retaliation from a business community stunned by yet another increased cost.
If they wanted to tell the truth, the NDP could also announce that, once again, prices will rise shortly, which will affect those same 150,000 workers – and everyone else in the province.
Long-time Social Credit Premier W.A.C. Bennett used to cry that the NDP “couldn’t run a peanut stand”, and this proves it, once again. For if they were to run a peanut stand, they would put themselves consistently out of business, for what they were paying for wages would soon overtake what their patrons would be willing to shell out for peanuts. Which means bankruptcy.
As a former boss once told me when I lobbied to give one of my workers a raise at budget time: “You’re just trying to give everyone a raise.” I didn’t understand what he was saying, until he explained that the moment you raise the wages of someone at the bottom of the pay scale, you’ve automatically set the wheels in motion for everyone else above them to have their rates increase as well.
Which is exactly what has, and continues, to happen. Look at the outrageous salary demands by government union members – 20 percent raises in some cases – which are being granted by the governments they help elect. Conflict of interest? Just imagine the furor if a private sector company that helped elect a certain party was rewarded with a lucrative contract for their support. Hell hath no fury like a socialist outraged.
The NDP’s moves demonstrate that they have no clue about how to run an economy. They attempt to placate the masses by providing housing and affordable rebates to the “have-nots”, but what they’re handing out is borrowed money from the future. They’re already running deficits, so any more funding they distribute does not make things more affordable – it drives up inflation and doesn’t change any of the dynamics which have caused the cost of living to spike upward.
Thus, they add to the government debt, which is perilous for the next generation, which doesn’t yet realize the inevitable pain to the pocketbook. Another unfortunate byproduct is seniors who have socked money away for a comfortable retirement, only to watch it whittled away as investment yields fail to match rates of inflation that have surged to eight percent. That pain is due almost exclusively to government policies like ones the NDP is infamous for. And yes, unskilled labour will always feel great pain from inflation, no matter how high the government raises the lowest floor in the wage scale.
Corporations Raising Urgency To Address Homelessness
Corporations can make social change. We’ve seen that. Recent moves may prove to finally be providing politicians with enough motivation to properly address homelessness.
Watching Wal-Mart announce it is closing stores in Chicago and San Francisco. Popular restaurant Cracker Barrel is also pulling out of San Francisco. Major corporations are voting with their feet, and there will be huge consequences.
If local governments won’t protect their investments, buildings, staff and customers, then it’s a free world. They can leave. If governments want companies to offer their services and products in important downtown cores, then they must ensure those places are safe and not continually subject to theft and vandalism.
Businesses have been quick to cave to social pressures, often placing them in vulnerable, “can’t win” positions where they become de facto activists, albeit in a corporate sense. They believe if they don’t respond to the demands of the woke, there will be a trail of economic carnage in their wake.
They can fight back, however, and this departure from “social war zones” is the most subtle of ways.
Think for a moment how fast civic governments move if a large number of constituents who don’t have transportation can’t buy food from stores they can reach by foot. What would the downtowns of the Island’s larger centres be like without major food stores? No place to buy food? The outcry would be deafening.
Politicians and bureaucrats lack the will and/or skill to deal with this ongoing social problem, and have forfeited what has traditionally been the “go to” areas of each city – the downtown – to people who are gooned on free government drugs and walk around in a zombie-like state, or should be placed in institutions where they can be properly cared for. When are people going to start asking why, after more and more millions are spent on this problem, and it does virtually nothing to actually solve the problem?
Mark MacDonald is President of Communication Ink Media & Public Relations Ltd. and Author of the book “It Worked For Them, It Will Work For Me: The 8 Secrets of Small Business I Learned From Successful Friends”, which can be obtained by reaching him through: mark@communicationink.ca
