At the October 7 all-candidates meeting where Powell River-Sunshine Coast MLA hopefuls answered questions in Evergreen Theatre, the riding’s seat seekers in the upcoming provincial election were asked for their perspectives on how the rising minimum wage is affecting businesses.
In order of responses, here's what the candidates had to say in the one minute they were given to answer the following question from moderator and Powell River Chamber of Commerce director Taran Brown:
"It's repeatedly said small business is the backbone of the economy. The basic minimum wage continues to go up each year. By law, this basic policy can be a detriment to small business and an inflation contributor. If elected, what would you do to support looking at changes to this legislation, if any?"
Chris Hergesheimer (Green Party of BC)
At the end of the day this is about affordability and we cannot ask businesses to shoulder the cost of these rising living wages that have to do with the way we are designing our communities to be unaffordable.
Without affordable housing, without public transit, those are driving costs up. I talked to tons of business owners, and you know what they say, we can take care of business. Can you guys take care of this affordability issue?
Businesses are not asking for subsidies, okay, but we cannot keep chasing this climbing living wage while not addressing the affordability issues in our community. There was a study that said 75,000 businesses in British Columbia would be at risk of closing if we went to $20 an hour.
We cannot expect small businesses to shoulder that, and the wages keep climbing, because affordability keeps rising. We need to address the affordability issues, not the wage issue.
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Randene Neill (BC NDP)
When the BC NDP came into power in 2017 we had the lowest minimum wage in the country, and now today, we have the highest minimum wage in the country.
We have a declining number of people coming to the Sunshine Coast because they can't afford to live here, and if they can't afford to live here, our small businesses are going to suffer.
It's a tough paradigm, and there is a happy spot where we can encourage good paying jobs for people to come here and raise their families and make this a really dynamic, vibrant community, to support our small businesses and continue to ensure that they are successful, because they are absolutely the backbone of Powell River, Sunshine Coast.
We need to support them in as many ways as possible, but we also need to support workers to have a good wage.
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Greg Reid (Independent)
It's a difficult situation. It's basically having a job that provides you with enough money to buy all the things you want.
But more and more we're seeing people are falling off the scale of affordability. They can't do that.
Sometimes they're in a position where they have to decide whether they're going to eat well or pay the rent, and these are families. These are people who are being pushed off the scale.
There's a lot of wealth in this province, but a lot of the wealth that's being made has been funnelled into hands as fewer and fewer people. It's something that we have to consider.
How can we address this? We need to be kind to one another, and government has to be able to provide a method of making sure that all people receive money.
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Chris Moore (Conservative Party of BC)
Everybody's talking about part of the equation. So we talk about affordability, absolutely. Affordability is over-controlled.
We talk about small businesses and what we need to do with small businesses, if you truly believe that your small businesses are the spirit and the backbone of your local economy, which I do.
I had lunch with 12 business owners this afternoon and listened to all 12 of them talk about challenges they're all facing, and the challenges they're facing are no different than the small business people down at Sechelt, Gibsons and all through the province.
There's two things. Taxation on small business is out of control in this province, it’s absolutely nuts. When I talk and see people in heavy credit card debt, I can tell you 80 per cent of them are small business people using their credit cards to pay themselves and pay their employees.
Tax is number one, and number two is they're overregulated. Let small businesses run in this province.
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