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It’s a little rich for the Alberta NDP and its allies to be lamenting the new expert panel that has been convened to study the evidence on minimum wage. After all, the NDP charged ahead with a zealous pursuit of an arbitrary minimum wage target without calling together any experts and without pausing to examine the impact of its policy.

The NDP could surely argue that it had a mandate to pursue such a policy but then, of course, the new government could claim an even stronger mandate to go in a much different direction. The accusation that the new government is hellbent on a certain policy direction here is undermined by the existence of the panel in the first place. Whatever quibbles one might have with the composition of this panel, there was never an obligation on the government to create one in the first place. That they did is to its credit.

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Moreover, it is unfair to the two esteemed academics named to this panel — Joseph Marchand and Anindya Sen — to suggest that they’ve been co-opted into a partisan scheme to create political window dressing for a pre-determined course of action. If we want governments to seek out expert opinion, we should perhaps refrain from smearing those experts who agree to do so (something both sides of the political spectrum are guilty of, unfortunately).