Here, I will spell it out for you. These are the minimum wages from 2010-2018 in Ontario in 2014 Canadian dollars.
He's fighting back because you refuse to admit that both the real and nominal definitions of minimum wage are in use, you're telling people they're wrong because you reject the nominal definition that they're using, and you're doing it because you're trying to remind us that the Liberals are Satan who will corruptly steal your money and piss it away on boondoggles while you huddle around burning firewood trying not to freeze to death in the battleground of World War Ontario.
If you had framed your argument by saying "Despite apparent increases in the minimum wage, minimum wage workers actually have less purchasing power than ever before, and not enough is being done to support them." no one would be arguing with you at all. In the mean time, all of North America has experienced real minimum wage erosion and largely no one has both the influence and desire to pass real minimum wage increases; progressives have typically aimed to at least use nominal increases to keep wages on track with inflation, and the most audacious progressives have floated inflation indexing. This is not a problem where Glorious Not Ontario has a solution and LIBERAL HELLHOLE ONTARIO is falling behind.
Newfoundland's real minimum wage has dropped about 75 cents an hour since the last increase in 2010. Most other provinces have a more recent raise, but still: Saskatchewan down a quarter. PEI no change. New Brunswick down 25 cents. Manitoba down a nickel. Alberta down a nickel. BC down more than a quarter.
You want my suggestion? Bare minimum a basic income package (negative income tax, more rigorous social benefits, cradle to grave welfare, direct subsidy of wages by the state, whatever I don't really want to get into the method here) + a $15-ish target minimum wage indexed to inflation, and calculating inflation using a real metric that includes food and fuel costs. So we can safely say I'm not disagreeing with the nature of the problem. But if I have a choice, I'm going to vote for a party that supports incremental nominal minimum wage increases and looking at tying it to inflation rather than a party that supports no increase, nominal or real.
The party context of the debate in this thread is further:
PCs: You voted for a party that opposed even nominal minimum wage increases and opposed indexing the minimum wage to inflation, which would prevent the real minimum wage increase you're talking about. You think this party had a stronger vision for addressing this problem than the other two. Their plan was to leave the minimum wage as is.
Liberals: You are opposing a party has passed nominal minimum wage increases and you're arguing that they don't count because, simultaneously, someone from another party championed the increase to begin with, and because perfect should be the enemy of good. Their plan was CPI indexing.
NDP: You seem to recognize that the party most likely to take this issue seriously also has no chance to govern in the province, so you implicitly accept that pragmatism has to be a part of the discussion, but the pragmatic middle is the position you're arguing against, not for. Their plan was a 0.50 raise a year for the next 2 years and CPI indexing.
Stated policies:
http://business.financialpost.com/2...andidates-are-promising-for-small-businesses/
