Minimum-wage hike will cost Ontario taxpayers

A higher minimum wage as proposed for Ontario offers clear benefits for millions of workers in the province.

The problems the recentlyannounced wage increase create for small businesses also are clear.

What has been murky in all this is the cost to the taxpayers of Ontario. Last week Premier Kathleen Wynne began to clear that up.

The premier said her government will announce help for small businesses facing devastating consequences from the increase.

The premier didn’t make this announcement with a tweet, a la Donald Trump. Instead she made it on a Toronto radio station.

It’s unclear how that’s a better way to communicate government policy. But I digress.

Anyway, here’s part of what the premier said: “We’re going to work with small businesses and in the fall, we’ll bring forward some initiatives that will help business to get through this transition.”

Any such help for business will cost the taxpayers of the province. A province that has a debt heading towards $320 billion.

The whole minimum-wage fiasco illustrates the problem with governing by polls.

The backroom folks at Queen’s Park have been coming up with strategies to appeal to voter blocks to battle low poll numbers. These include sweetheart deals for publicservice unions, free medical care for young Ontarians and the minimum wage hike from $11.40 an hour to $15 by Jan. 1, 2019.

Whoever put up the pro-business arguments in these discussions didn’t do much of a job, so now survival for the government means help for the business community.

It’s like the big pill chase in our health-care system. Pill A helps to cure the patient’s disease but also creates a new problem. That’s then solved with Pill B. And so on.

The big difference to the minimum wage discussion is the fact that in medicine, Pill A was required to relieve suffering and even perhaps prolong life.

Not so in governing by polls. It’s easy and nearly meaningless to sit behind a huge desk at Queens Park and justify a minimum-wage hike with numbers.

Anyone can figure out how much money it takes to survive in this world based on supposition, rather than real-life experience.

These scenarios mean nothing since each individual is unique and shops, saves, extends, reuses, etc. at a different rate.

What’s more difficult is governing inclusively by considering all the players that will be affected by your move.

Businesses will be stressed by the wage hike. In fact, the owners of one small business in our area want to retire but the wage hike scared off potential buyers, so the business will close.

It’s beyond me how that helps people looking for work, or how it helps a community’s business district thrive so all businesses can afford to give their employees a raise.

The role of small business in driving the economy has never been given anything more than lip service by this or most other governments.

But that role is critical. These are the people who put it all out there, working long hours with supreme effort and often risking life savings to start something that could provide work for others and might grow into a large business in time.

The government is a day late and a dollar short in just now beginning to consider this critically important segment of the economy.

So now there has to be a plan to help small business at our expense.