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Alberta’s minimum wage was tied for Canada’s lowest when Rachel Notley became premier in May 2015. On Oct. 1 it will rise to $15 an hour — a 47-per-cent hike over three years.

In 2015, the Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses (CFIB) claimed that Alberta’s increase would cost the province “between 53,500 and 195,000 jobs.”

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In other words, the CFIB believed that as many as two-thirds of the 300,000 Alberta workers making less than $15 an hour could lose their jobs. In 2017, the C.D. Howe Institute claimed the increase to $15 by 2018 “could lead to the loss of roughly 25,000 jobs.”

History, however, doesn’t back up critics’ sky-is-falling claims. In 2009, Hristos Doucouliagos and T.D. Stanley published a meta-study of 64 U.S. minimum wage studies between 1972 and 2007.

They concluded that minimum-wage increases have no or near-zero effect on employment. In 2016, with the provincial economy still in recession, Alberta’s accommodation and food-service sector and wholesale and retail trade sector, where low-wage jobs are concentrated, added 7,600 jobs.