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Which brings us to the point: Why is the NDP adopting an ideologically driven policy that fails to address any of the problems the province actually has?

Only about 2 per cent of Albertans — 59,000 — earn the minimum wage. That figure is 7 per cent nationally.

About 10 per cent of workers here earn less than $15 per hour.

In fact, the average retail wage in this province is $16.09 already.

It’s certainly plausible that the hike will raise a relatively small number of people out of poverty — at the expense of, potentially, thousands of jobs that sustain those very same people

It’s certainly plausible that the hike will raise a relatively small number of people out of poverty — at the expense of, potentially, thousands of jobs that sustain those very same people. But it’s also a broad-based hike that doesn’t do much to really help the working poor specifically. All governance is a matter of setting priorities; why should Alberta focus on ensuring teenagers who live at home have more pin money instead of, say, addressing this province’s low educational achievement by encouraging drop outs to attain more credentials during a recession? Why not focus instead on investments in affordable housing or food banks? How about increasing the Assured Income for the Severely Handicapped? Why not more jobs training?

Surely there are better ways to target the ill effects of poverty than by adopting the sort of rhetoric chanted on the streets of Seattle and New York.

That is not to say that the minimum wage hike will necessarily be catastrophic; it’s just that it’s difficult to imagine how it’s going to help much, either. And it only reinforces the claim that premier Rachel Notley is, indeed, indifferent to the plight of business and fatally weak on economic matters.