No thank you to wage jump

The only one to benefit from an $11 an hour wage on P.E.I. is the finance minister. If my bosses were to tell me they would give me a dollar per hour raise I would say “thanks but no thanks.” If you put more money in our hands each week we would spend it. The bills that now are left dragging might be paid on time but at the end of the year we would be wondering where we would get the money to send back to the “government”. Because any increase is nothing but an extra tax, plus eleven dollars per hour will cost each business on P.E.I. seventeen dollars by the time they put in their share of the deductions. So if a business has 10 workers they have to bring in one hundred and seventy dollars just to keep their staff and the basic exemption is still $7.35 per hour. During the election campaign both parties promised they would increase the basic exemption by 20 per cent, but since the election we haven’t heard a word about it, Pat Binns was premier the last time it was increased. So any increase in wages will only cause more problems for business and anyone working for a living on P.E.I. Unless the basic exemption is increased. We are the highest taxed province in Canada. It is quite discouraging when more money makes it harder to survive. It isn’t that we do not have enough money to survive. It is a fact that we are not left enough of it for what we make. Last week I put one hundred dollars worth of fuel in my truck and almost forty dollars of it was tax. Glen MacDonald, Grandview