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Christina Gray argues that there are 300,000 Albertans currently earning less than $15 per hour and that “many” of them rely on the food bank. However, she does not quantify that in any way, nor does she offer any evidence linking minimum wage to food bank usage. For that matter, other groups have pegged the so-called “living wage” in Calgary at much higher than $15 per hour, so it’s hard to see how this is any sort of panacea.

She throws in an observation that “over 60 per cent of those 300,000 people are women.” It is true, for example, that approximately 60 per cent of minimum wage earners are women, but Minister Gray seems to be implying that these are all single working mothers.

Premier Notley herself last week went even further with the same theme. She said it was “not appropriate for a single parent to work 50 or 60 hours a week and have to stop at the food bank.”

Notley and Gray, though, are ignoring many facts. Alberta has the lowest percentage of workers in the country earning minimum wage, which works out to about 38,000 people. According to Statistics Canada, single parents represent less than four per cent of minimum wage earners, and that includes fathers, too.

If the Alberta government’s objective is to provide support to single parents who have to rely on the food bank, then raising the minimum wage is one of the worst ways of addressing that problem.

Statistics Canada also estimates that about 60 per cent of minimum wage earners live with their parents or another family member and that more than half of those were studying at least part-time. The Alberta government’s own numbers show that about half of minimum wage earners are between the ages of 15 and 24.