The absolute minimum that employers can pay people to work is the most basic labour rule we have.

And the Canadian government doesn’t even bother to make that decision for the million or so workers who are covered by federal labour laws. That includes banking, telecommunications, rail travel, trucking and one of the nation’s largest workplaces — Pearson Airport.

Ottawa used to set a national minimum wage but it allowed the rate to fall so far behind rising provincial minimums that it became utterly meaningless. In 1996, Ottawa abandoned it entirely. Since then, federal-sector employees have been entitled to whatever the minimum wage is in their respective provinces.

It’s time for Canada to reinstate a minimum wage for employees under the federal domain. And this time it should lead, not follow, provincial governments.

At a minimum Ottawa should adopt a $15-an-hour minimum wage indexed to inflation, as labour groups pushed for during the 2017 and 2018 federal consultations on improving labour standards.

Better still would be to begin there and then move towards following the advice of Harry Arthurs, who led a federal commission on updating labour laws for the 21st century.

“The government should accept the principle that no Canadian worker should work full-time for a year and still live in poverty,” he wrote in that 2006 report.

As Arthurs also pointed out, there’s no sound rationale for Ottawa to rely on provincial minimum wages since they don’t even reflect the differences in the local cost of living. “Rather,” he wrote, “provincial rates reflect philosophical differences among governments.”

Indeed that’s why Ontario’s current minimum wage is $14 — a full dollar lower that it would have been if Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives had not been elected last year.

The Ford government cancelled the planned minimum wage bump to $15 an hour, and hasn’t even said when it will rise next, only that it “may increase” in October 2020.

This setback for low-wage workers in Canada’s largest province has, no doubt, helped drive interest in the possibility of reviving a federal minimum wage.

That’s one of the issues the expert panel on modernizing federal labour standards has been studying and its report is expected to be released publicly this month.

While government action on any of their recommendations would directly impact only the approximately 1 million workers across the country in federally regulated workplaces, it could indirectly help raise the bar for many more vulnerable workers in other industries.

Right now, a worker earning minimum wage at Pearson Airport, for example, falls well below the poverty line that Canada set last year.

Business groups, conservative politicians and others who routinely oppose minimum wage hikes like to point to the fact that it’s often young people who earn minimum wage and they may still be living at home. In short, they’re not living on it and so it doesn’t really need to be anything approaching a living wage.

But the research paper prepared for the expert panel shows that’s not the case in the federal domain, at least. It found more than half of those earning a minimum wage were 25 to 54 years of age, and a further quarter were over 55.

It’s hard to argue that much of that demographic isn’t looking to pay rent or a monthly mortgage with their paycheque. And, of course, workers who make a low wage also tend to be those with few or no benefits, which only adds to the difficulty of escaping poverty through work.

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Last year the federal government passed legislation that, once it all comes into effect, will improve job security for federally regulated workers through scheduling rights, equal pay for temporary employment agency workers and protections against contract flipping that lower wages.

Now it’s time for the next step: a decent minimum wage.

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