Not really; Frank’s post #103 was news to me.
Well, the government is not the legislative majority, is it? It is simply chosen from among them, right? So they should be able to find enough experienced (not necessarily experienced in the Legislative Assembly, but experienced) NDP members to form a competent one. Knock maple.
Has the new government even taken office yet?
Yeah, but, that’s in Canadian dollars, right? A total increase over three years of about, say, 75 cents in real money?
::d&r::
::d&r::
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The NDP have a majority goverrnment. The official opposition is made up of the Wildrose - diametrically opposed to the NDP philosophically. It’s going to be hard for them to work together without major compromises on both sides. Since the NDP doesn’t have to compromise with a large majority, I think they’re going to govern on their own.
What is likely to happen is that the federal NDP are going to parachute in a bunch of professional managers to help run things - The PC’s did it, and it’s fairly common. But it remains to be seen if a caucus made up of young, inexperienced activists and true believers are about to take orders from a collection of out-of-province establishment types. With that much inexperience and lack of education in that group, the Dunning-Kreuger effect could take over - they know so little they don’t know what they don’t know, so they think they know it all. It wouldn’t be the first time that inexperienced people thrust into power did not know their own limitations.
I actually hope they govern seriously and well, because I live in their sandbox. But experience tells me we’re in for at least a very bumpy first year, and whether the bumps continue will be determined by their collective willingness to learn from experience.
And this isn’t really a partisan thing - the PC’s troubles took a turn for the much worse when we elected Ed Stelmach as Premier, and he created a cabinet full of farmers and cronies with little relevant experience. The result was a mess and he eventually had to resign because the incompetence burned so badly.
We get very caught up in the partisan war, and sometimes it’s easy to forget that governments are like multi-billion dollar corporations and very difficult things to manage unless you have elected officials with serious managerial chops running the show. If the Republicans in the U.S. nominate Rand Paul or Mike Lee or another 1st term Senator with no executive experience, I"ll predict the same outcome.
Based on the American experience, neither are corporate CEOs nor RW career pols beholden to them. The lot you describe could hardly do more damage.
Nope. Notley is supposed to be sworn in on Sunday. And after they are officially in power I expect some time to pass while they settle in and learn the ropes before the craziness starts.
Oh, I’m sure she’ll prove very flexible.
Corporate CEOs don’t get to be CEO unless they have learned when to charge forward and when to back off. They are the kind of people I would most trust to be pragmatic. The knock on Mitt Romney on the right was that he was a guy who was more than willing to compromise with the other side.
It’s the ideologues with no experience you have to worry about. Guys like Ted Cruz or Barack Obama. The ones that aren’t there to manage, but to shake things up and demand change while not having the foggiest notion of how to do it or what the ramifications of their decisions might be.
(-:
The key sentence in that article:
In other words, most minimum wage hikes in the past have been very small. More on the order of 10% than 50%. Most of them happen when the economy is growing, where wages could be expected to lag. We’re in uncharted territory with such a large hike during an economic downturn. Or rather, we’re in exactly the same territory as the minimum wage increases in Seattle and San Francisco, and those are already demonstrating significant effects on unemployment.
Also, the ‘new minimum wage’ research seems to be coming straight out of left wing research centers and from people like Robert Reich, who has been a strong advocate for higher minimum wages for a long time. That doesn’t make it wrong, but it means that it should be treated like you would treat an economic study from The American Enterprise Institute or Cato - with skepticism.
Studies of larger minimum wage hikes have found pretty consistent unemployment effects on the order of 1% increase in unemployment for a 10% hike in wage. But even in the ones where there are no job-loss effects, the economists in question suggest that there are other ‘corrective pathways’, such as cutting benefits, training, delaying cost of living increases, forcing employees to work harder to justify their salaries, and raising the cost of goods.
I can imagine that in the U.S. where there are significant costs to employers for health care and such, there is some room to cut benefits to make up for increased pay. In Canada, not so much.
From the Ontario Labour government:
In fact, only those studies in the U.S. mentioned in your link have found ‘inconclusive’ results. Studies in Canada, the U.K, and the OECD in general have found pretty consistent negative effects on employment.
And this increase is huge. Alberta already has the highest minimum wage in Canada. With this increase, the minimum wage will be $4/hr higher than the next highest (Ontario). That’s going to put a lot of pressure to relocate on companies that may have high labour costs and a low-wage workforce. A 50% increase in labour costs over three years is extremely hard for any company to overcome if a significant portion of its costs come from a low-wage workforce.
The recent Canadian studies indicating a drop of 3-6% in employment of young people after a 10% minimum wage increase are terrifying when you’re about to increase minimum wages by 50%.
Alberta has the lowest minimum wage in Canada outside of the NWT, though admittedly the provinces are all pretty close coming in between $10.20 and $11.00.
So what does it tell you that Albertans would rather trust their governance to a bunch of noobs rather than a bunch of experienced conservative politicians? The entitlement mentality of the old crew really seems to have rubbed Albertans the wrong way, and a left-wing party, however inexperienced, would be preferable to the same old same old. That’s quite a slap in the face to all the “seasoned politicians.”
Sorry, I was thinking of the ‘effective’ minimum wage, which at its peak in Alberta was the highest in Canada. It has since dropped because of the economic downturn. But the rest is true - if we increase the minimum wage to $15, it will be the highest minimum wage in Canada by a very large margin $4/hr more than the next highest in Ontario. An increase this large is pretty unprecedented. On the good side, it’s so large that it will probably make for a very good case study - the employment effects should be large enough to measure, or if they aren’t that will be very interesting data as well.
Alberta’s minimum wage is $10.20/hr, which is the same as Saskatchewan’s and only .05/hr lower than BC’s - the two provinces most likely to compete for workers. It’s anyone’s guess what will happen to jobs when we’re sitting between two provinces that have a minimum wage almost 50% lower than ours. The NDP is basically going to be conducting a large labour experiment with our province.
Mitigating this might be the fact that Alberta has the smallest percentage of minimum wage employees in the workforce of any province, and by a pretty good margin. Or at least we did in 2013, when the economy was red-hot. Only 1.5% of our workers then were earning minimum wage (because of that higher effective minimum wage). If that’s still the case, the economic impact for the province as a whole may be low even if the impact on minimum wage workers is devastating.
BTW, contrary to the NDP’s assertion that many minimum wage workers are trying to feed families, Alberta’s stats show that 35.3% of minimum wage earners are under 19 years of age, and another 17.1% are between 19 and 24 years of age. Slightly more than half have been in their job for less than a year, and 35% of them do not have high school diplomas.
This is the profile listed inthis cite:
15-19 years old
employed full-time
in permanent employment
non-union employee
less than one year job experience
in Accommodation and Food Services
in Sales and service occupations,
some high school
female
Females are slightly more represented than males - I’m guessing because there are more opportunities for higher paying jobs in construction and the like in Alberta - at least until recently.
These are entry level jobs for young people with not much education. If their productivity doesn’t justify $15/hr, it’s going to cause a lot of unemployment in that cohort. And since these are the very definition of entry level jobs, it’s hard to see how they will ever find employment if we’ve cut the bottom rung off the ladder.
This is a very stupid policy. We’d be better off just identifying the non-transient minimum wage workers and give them a wage subsidy through tax credits. A 15 year old high school student does not need a $15/hr job, but he or she does need to be able to get that first job despite not having a diploma or any job experience. The people we want to help are the small number of full-time minimum wage employees who are actually trying to live on the salary and who have no options or prospects for better jobs in the future.
Absolutely. But don’t make the mistake that this was some serious shift to the left by Albertans. What essentially happened is that the Wildrose leadership and the PC’s tried to manoever the election, and the voters got really pissed off and voted for the only other alternative.
Most of the NDP candidates did not get elected on their merits - apparently some of them were really just placeholder candidates who didn’t even bother campaigning and didn’t dream that they would actually win. The voters just went to the polls and checked the ‘not PC or Wildrose’ box.
If the NDP thinks they have a mandate to govern from the left, they’re going to get a big surprise in the next election unless a miracle happens and their ideas turn out to improve the economic performance of the province.
Indeed it is. It’s beautiful! 
I guess we’ll know in a few years.
If minimum wage increases don’t cause unemployment, why not increase it to $20? Hell, why not make it $50? I’m sure nothing bad will ever happen. Because everyone knows you can increase wealth with a stroke of a government pen.
Ragtags who fought, killed, and buried one of the two biggest, organized, and entrenched political threats to the existence our country; while you mock then as ‘unprepared’ they have, for the last four years, faithfully served their constituents with enough aplomb and goodwill to currently soar the NDP to remarkable heights in Quebec.