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May 30, 2024
On June 1, BC’s minimum wage is going up to $17.40 per hour. Despite this welcome pay raise for the 240,000 lowest-paid workers in the province, the minimum wage remains over $3 per hour lower than the lowest living wage in BC ($20.64 in Dawson Creek). In BC’s largest cities, Metro Vancouver and Greater Victoria, the gap between the minimum wage and the living wage is $8 per hour.
New data obtained by CCPA-BC from Statistics Canada reveals that one third of BC’s paid employees earn less than the living wage in their community—more than 740,000 people.
Over 400,000 people earn less than $20 per hour, a wage lower than the lowest living wage calculated in the province. Even with the minimum wage increase, far too many workers will remain trapped in the low wage gap, earning less than it costs to live in our province. These workers face impossible choices—buy groceries or heat the house, keep up with bills or pay the rent on time. The result can be spiraling debt, constant anxiety and long-term health problems. It often means working long hours, sometimes at multiple jobs, just to pay for necessities.
BC is in a serious affordability crisis. Renters continue to face rapidly increasing rents, especially when they have to move. The combination of sky-high rents, elevated food prices and low incomes explains the surge in demand for charitable services, with increasing numbers of workers forced to turn to food and rent banks.
The living wage is the hourly rate that full-time workers need to earn to support a family. It covers the necessities, offers an escape from severe financial stress and allows participation in the social, civic and cultural lives of their communities. It is based on the actual costs of living in a particular community and affords a decent, if still very modest, standard of living without the extras many of us take for granted. The living wage does not cover credit card, loan or other debt payments, savings for retirement, or for a downpayment on a home or the extra costs of caring for disabled, seriously ill or elderly family members. Across BC, the living wage ranges between $20.64 in Dawson Creek and $26.51 in Clayoquot Sound.
We examined the over 400,000 British Columbians who earn less than $20 per hour and the 650,000 people who earn less than the living wage in seven of the province’s largest urban areas using data obtained through a custom tabulation from Statistics Canada’s Labour Force Survey.
Our analysis reveals large wage inequalities based on gender and race in BC. Shockingly, half of the racialized women working in Metro Vancouver earn less than the region’s living wage of $25.68 per hour.
Who earns less than $20 per hour in BC?
413,100 BC workers earned less than $20 per hour in 2023 (18% of all paid employees in the province, or nearly 1 in 5).
The majority of workers earning less than $20 per hour are women.
244,700 workers earning less than $20 per hour are women (59%).
The majority of workers earning less than $20 per hour are 25 or older, not teenagers and young adults as often claimed.
183,800 workers earning less than $20 per hour are between 15 and 24 years old (44%).
229,400 workers earning less than $20 per hour are 25 or older (56%).
123,400 workers earning less than $20 per hour are between 25 and 44 years old (30%).
81,500 workers earning less than $20 per hour are between 45 and 64 years old (20%).
24,500 workers earning less than $20 per hour are 65 or older (6%).
More than half of workers earning less than $20 per hour are racialized although only 38% of paid employees in British Columbia are racialized.
213,800 workers earning less than $20 per hour are racialized (52%).
Racialized workers are more likely to be paid less than $20 per hour than their counterparts (22% of all racialized workers earn less than $20 per hour compared to only 15% of non-racialized workers)
6% of workers earning less than $20 per hour identify as Indigenous (22,900 people).
Low-wage work is widespread across the province. In most large urban communities, roughly 18% of all workers earn less than $20 per hour with the notable exception of Nanaimo and Chilliwack-Hope (Statistics Canada designation), where a larger share of workers earn less than $20 per hour and Greater Victoria, where a smaller share of workers earn less than $20 per hour.
Share and number of workers earning less than $20 per hour by city
Looking at BC’s seven economic regions, low-wage work (under $20/hour) was more prevalent in the Thompson/Okanagan and the Northeast than in other regions (20% of workers). The two regions with the lowest share of low wage workers were the Kootenays and the North Coast/Nechako (15% of workers).
Share and number of workers earning less than $20 per hour by economic region
Of course, $20 per hour is less than the living wage anywhere in BC and many more workers earn $20 per hour or more but still less than the living wage in their community. Across BC, more than 740,000 people earn less than the local living wage (32% or one in three workers).
Who earns less than the living wage in Metro Vancouver?
Nearly half a million workers in Metro Vancouver – 495,600 or 37% of all paid employees in the region – earn less than the living wage of $25.68 per hour.
The majority of workers earning less than $25.68 per hour in Metro Vancouver are women.
283,100 workers earning less than $25.68 per hour are women (57%).
The majority of workers earning less than $25.68 per hour in Metro Vancouver are 25 or older.
163,600 workers earning less than $25.68 per hour are between 15 and 24 years old (33%).
331,900 workers earning less than $25.68 per hour are 25 or older (67%).
184,900 workers earning less than $25.68 per hour are between 25 and 44 years old (37%).
125,000 workers earning less than $25.68 per hour are between 45 and 64 years old (25%).
22,000 workers earning less than $25.68 per hour are 65 or older (4%).
Nearly two thirds of Metro Vancouver workers earning less than $25.68 per hour in Metro Vancouver are racialized although only 55% of paid employees are racialized.
317,200 workers earning less than $25.68 per hour in Metro Vancouver are racialized (64%).
Racialized workers are more likely to be paid less than $25.68 per hour than their counterparts (44% of all racialized workers earn less than the living wage compared to only 30% of non-racialized workers)
Half of all racialized women working in Metro Vancouver earn less than the living wage of $25.68 per hour.
49% of racialized women working in Metro Vancouver earn less than the living wage, 181,500 people. In contrast, 38% of racialized men earn less than the living wage, as do 35% of white women and 25% of white men.
BC can and should close the gap between the minimum and living wages. Here’s how:
Despite the minimum wage increase to $17.40 per hour, a strikingly large gap remains between the minimum wage and living wages in communities across BC. This gap has grown significantly in the last few years, leaving hundreds of thousands of workers struggling to make ends meet in every part of the province. Closing this gap is key to address the affordability crisis that workers face across BC.
Over 400 BC businesses have stepped up to be living wage employers, paying both direct and contract employees a living wage. We commend these employers for doing their part to reduce working poverty and encourage others to follow their lead.
However, voluntary action alone cannot solve the affordability crisis. The BC government needs to take steps to both lift wages and lower the cost pressures people face so that all workers can thrive.
The large gap between the living and the minimum wages represents a challenge for everyone. For employers who want to do the right thing, paying living wages that are much higher than the minimum wage their competitors pay can be challenging, which unfortunately incentivizes competition based on low wages.
A strikingly large gap remains between the minimum wage and living wages in communities across BC.
The BC government should raise the minimum wage to $20 per hour to narrow the gap between the minimum wage and the living wage, benefitting over 400,000 people of all ages, working in every region of the province. A $20 minimum wage would also help to reduce BC’s large gender and racial pay inequities.
Boosting the earnings of low wage workers will stimulate the local economy because these workers are likely to spend almost all of their extra income in their communities, for example, supporting local businesses by eating out once in a while and participating more actively in community activities.
The BC government should also follow the example of many businesses and municipalities and become a living wage employer, embedding living wage policies in its own procurement systems.
In addition to higher minimum wages, BC workers need pay equity legislation, stronger protections from wage theft and other workplace rights violations, and meaningful access to collective bargaining so they can exercise the right to come together to negotiate better wages and benefits if they so choose.
Of course, at $20 per hour the minimum wage would remain lower than the lowest living wage in any BC community, and living wages will continue to outpace inflation unless we get a handle on runaway rent costs, the most expensive item in most household budgets.
Recently, the federal and provincial governments have made efforts to address the shortage of homes, especially affordable ones. Public investments to create affordable housing must be scaled up and coupled with stronger rent controls because easing the overall housing shortage will take time and current sky-high rent increases between tenancies are putting an increasing number of lower-income renters at risk of homelessness (read more in Time to scale up: next steps for non-market housing in BC and Vacancy control: taking the next step on housing affordability).
Additionally, BC needs to tackle the growing issue of food unaffordability and food insecurity, for example through an affordable food strategy combined with more generous income supports to alleviate financial pressure on low- and middle-income earners.
An expansion of BC’s transit network to provide publicly operated, low-cost transit options in rural areas, an inter-community express bus service and free transit to youth 18 and under would significantly reduce transportation costs for many households (read more in Connecting BC: A 10-year vision for public transit throughout BC). This would build on recent public investments in services that make life more affordable for everyone, such as expanding access to low-cost child care, and the introduction of a public dental care plan and pharmacare.
Far too many workers struggle to make ends meet. As the next provincial election looms, it is imperative that all political parties put forward tangible strategies in response to the affordability crisis that workers continue to face across BC.
Regional fact sheets
Click on the regions below to download their respective fact sheets:
Metro Vancouver
Greater Victoria
Kelowna
Nanaimo
Prince George
Abbotsford-Mission
Chilliwack Hope
This research is co-published by Living Wage for Families BC. Funding was also received from CUPE Metro.
It is also part of Understanding Precarity in BC (UP-BC), a research and public engagement initiative investigating precarious work and multi-dimensional precarity in British Columbia. UP-BC is jointly led by Simon Fraser University’s Morgan Centre for Labour Research and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives BC Office, and brings together four BC universities, 26 community-based organizations and more than 80 academic and community researchers and collaborators. The partnership is supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). For more information about UP-BC visit understandingprecarity.ca.
Topics: Economy, Employment & labour, Poverty, inequality & welfare

Trapped in the wage gap

Jun 18, 2024
Source: made using Canva stock images
On June 3, 2024, Immigration Minister Marc Miller announced new migrant care worker pilot programs, which take important steps to address some of the concerns raised by workers and advocates. Unfortunately, Canada has a long track record of broken promises to migrant care workers and it is not clear how the new pilot programs would accomplish what they set out to do when previous rounds of pilots did not.
When the federal Home Care Provider Pilot and Home Support Worker Pilot programs were launched in 2019, they were supposed to provide a “clear, direct pathway to permanent residence”.
Unfortunately, the pilot programs that ended on June 17, 2024 have largely not delivered on their promises, failing thousands of migrant care workers and their families in the process.
Far from offering a clear or direct pathway to permanent residence (PR), these programs have achieved the opposite. Migrant care workers find themselves ensnared in a slow, unnecessarily convoluted bureaucratic maze. Even after years of living and working in Canada, a path to PR remains unclear for most who applied.
Amid the changes to the migrant care worker programs since 2014, including the introduction of two rounds of pilot programs, many care workers have been unable to transition into these pilot programs due to shifting program and PR application requirements. As a result, many migrant care workers have fallen out of regular status and become undocumented.
Unfortunately, the pilot programs have largely not delivered on their promises.
According to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada’s (IRCC) most-recent announcement, only 5,700 care workers and their families have become permanent residents in the program’s five-year existence. The pilot programs were supposed to provide a path to PR for 5,500 workers per year or 27,500 workers over their five-year span.
The announcement also indicates that approximately 600 applications remain in the current backlog from the Live-in-Caregiver Program, which closed ten years ago. This means 600 families, including many workers’ children, have been in limbo for over a decade. The children of these workers age out of the dependent category for immigration purposes at age 22, which can be devastating for separated families who lose hope of a long-awaited reunification. While these migrant care workers attend to Canadian families, they cannot physically be with their own.
The IRCC has much work to do to ensure the most-recent announcement is not simply the latest in a series of failed pilot programs. After all, in 2019, the announcement also sounded like an improvement, promising permanent residence to 5,500 workers per year with a processing time of 12 months. Five years later, those promises have not been delivered upon.
Unprocessed Applications, Long Wait Times
Our investigation into the 2019-2024 federal care worker pilot programs uncovered startling delays within Canada’s immigration system. Despite committing to a 12-month processing service standard at the outset, data accessed through Access to Information requests reveal that the IRCC has processed a shockingly small percentage of PR applications submitted by care workers and their dependents. Of the applications received between the launch of the programs on June 18, 2019 to January 31, 2023, only 6,125 out of 37,568—just 16%—were processed by March 21, 2023 (see Table 1).
In addition to slow processing, these pilot programs had relatively high rates of refusal. IRCC data show that of all processed PR applications as of March 21, 2023 (excluding withdrawals), only 57% were approved.
Based on data supplied to us from the IRCC, from January 1, 2019 to January 31, 2023, only 2,581 PR applications were approved under the care workers pilot programs, representing about 7% of the 37,568 applications received. In June 2024, the IRCC announced that as of April 30, 2024, it granted permanent residency to “nearly 5,700” workers and their families across the five years of the pilot programs. This figure is astonishingly low, amounting to just one-fifth of the annual 5,500 application cap initially proposed upon announcement of the 2019-2024 pilots. Both numbers suggest that the IRCC has consistently failed to meet its targets and promises.
Not only was the number of approvals extraordinarily small, but processing times also lengthened each year. The IRCC currently reports an average wait time of 31-36 months for care worker PR, about triple the target processing time of 12 months set for these pilot programs. The sole exception is applications submitted under the Home Child Care Provider Pilot by workers who had already completed the required months of work experience at the time of application. These workers can expect an average 26 months processing time.
The wait times for care workers are currently longer than those for any other economic class of immigration applications with the exception of the start-up visa program (37 months) and the Quebec business class program for investors and entrepreneurs (48 months).
The result is an overwhelming majority of care workers who applied did not see PR within the lifetime of the pilots.
“So, I’m confused when I will get PR. It’s been so long. It took three years. And they said processing is sometimes 12 months, and then it became 24 [months] and then it became 36 [months] and now it’s the three-year anniversary this August for the application. Today is the 37th month of my [submitted] PR [application] and now it’s difficult because…it’s very limited what you’re able to do here if you’re just a live-in caregiver.”
The incredibly low processing rates of PR applications, coupled with the relatively high rate of denials and prolonged wait times starkly contradict the consistent demands of care worker activists for permanent residency for these workers. This situation also falls far short of the “clear direct pathway to permanent residence” that the federal government promised in 2019.
As of January 2023, over 30,000 people remained in “inventory”. As the government celebrates another new pilot program, we still do not know what will happen to those left in processing limbo or those who have become undocumented.
Care Workers Still Caught in a Familiar Cycle of Exploitation
The devaluation of migrant women care workers can be traced through white supremacist systems of “empire settlement” (Tungohan 2023, 22). White European women were granted permanent residency for their care work in the early twentieth century, but beginning in the 1950s, Caribbean and Asian women have largely been denied this recognition and security, entering Canada temporarily to perform work deemed “low-skilled” and low-waged.
Despite the government’s promise to offer permanent residency to migrant care workers applying to the new pilot programs, there currently remains a large number of unprocessed applications from migrant care workers who will continue to be drawn from the Global South and classified as temporary labour. Canada’s care worker programs have largely drawn from the Philippines in the past two decades. Exacerbated by long PR processing times, these workers face chronic uncertainty, prolonged family separation, continual precarious employment and economic insecurity.
Our investigation found that despite the elimination of the live-in requirement in 2014, many migrant care workers who arrived under the 2019 pilot programs are still economically compelled to reside with their employers.
In regions like BC’s Lower Mainland, where the median wage for these workers hovers barely above minimum wage and rents are sky-high, workers have little choice but to live with their employers and often find themselves trapped in cycles of underpayment and mistreatment. This is reminiscent of the former Live-In Caregiver Program that care worker advocates and their allies fought so hard to overhaul. For example, workers told us about employers promising to meet the legal wage requirements on paper but paid less behind closed doors, and contract violations including not being appropriately compensated for overtime or being asked to do unpaid overtime.
“I try to find a family [to employ me] and I talk to many family… It’s hard when they offered me, they want to hire me but you know what? They say like, ‘If I hire you…I’m going to show to the government like minimum wage but I can pay you less than minimum wage.’ So tricky.”
Care workers who are fired or who quit abusive employment told us they have found it challenging to secure new positions under fair conditions that recognize their worker rights.
The enforcement of employment standards—ensuring workers are paid at least the minimum wage for all their hours of work, that overtime work is paid appropriately, that working hours are not excessive and that other basic rights are followed—is notoriously lax in this sector. Without adequate enforcement, employment standards violations often go unnoticed due to the isolated nature of the work in a private home, the power imbalance between employers and employees, the lack of education among care worker employers about their responsibilities and the precarious immigration status of the workers.
Two Paths Forward
Combined, painfully slow processing times and persistently poor working conditions underscore the systematic failure of Canada’s 2019 care worker pilot programs. The recently announced 2025 migrant care worker pilot programs could be a major step forward in eliminating PR application barriers, but it remains to be seen whether these changes will produce equitable improvements or if these programs will continue, by design, to abandon care workers.
Canadians’ need for at-home care is only increasing with our aging population. In light of the failures of the last ten years of migrant care worker pilot programs, we offer the following recommendations to ensure the failures of the past are not repeated for the newly proposed programs. Our recommendations align with the government’s stated intention to provide a one-step PR upon-arrival process—an approach we strongly support as both necessary and overdue.
1) Expediting processing PR applications for all care workers, and their family members, who applied for PR through any prior care worker program.
2) Ensure that applicants to the new migrant care worker pilot programs are processed and approved in a timely manner, before arrival in Canada.
3) Provide PR to migrant care workers who have become undocumented due to the overly stringent and/or shifting PR application requirements over the course of their time providing care work in Canada.
4) Coordinate with provincial governments to improve enforcement of employment standards and protections for migrant care workers.
5) Transition the migrant care worker pilot programs to a permanent immigration program by 2025, preventing changing immigration policies from unduly burdening migrant care workers.
Granting permanent status upon arrival for all migrant workers recognizes the decades-long call from organizations like the Vancouver Committee for Domestic Workers’ and Caregivers’ Rights (CDWCR), Toronto’s Caregiver Connections Education and Support Organization (CCESO), Migrant Workers Alliance for Change (MWAC), Migrante Canada, Gabriela-Ontario and other migrant-led organizations in the cross-Canada migrant justice alliance called the Migrant Rights Network (MRN). Referred to as “status for all,” this type of immigration reform is the most-effective policy change to reduce precarity for migrant care workers while enhancing stability and availability of valued workers to meet important labour needs in Canada.
As the federal government looks to implement its new migrant care worker pilot programs strategy, we call upon the IRCC to meaningfully follow through by implementing the recommendations of the Migrant Rights Network and live up to its own “commitment to improve the lives of caregivers and their families who come from around the world to care for our loved ones.”
This brief is based on the research project, “Exploring the Intersections of Immigration Policy, Racism, and Precarity for Migrant Care Workers”, undertaken as part of the Understanding Precarity in BC Partnership. We analyzed thousands of pages of IRCC internal documents and statistics to understand the operational dynamics behind the federal care worker pilot programs. Requests for 2023-2024 statistics were not fulfilled by IRCC in time for this publication. The qualitative research portion of the project included interviews with 30 care workers in BC to understand their experiences with the care worker pilot programs. We found that not only had old problems familiar from the now-defunct live-in caregiver program persisted, but new ones emerged. Our full research report is forthcoming in summer 2024.
Noemi Rosario Martinez, Rincy Dominic Calamba, Kassandra Cordero, Alice Mũrage and Cenen Bagon contributed to this article.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful for research funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada through the Understanding Precarity in BC partnership grant.
Further Reading
Caregivers’ Action Centre. 2020. “Behind Closed Doors: Exposing Migrant Care Worker Exploitation during COVID-19.”
Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. 2019. “Canada Caring for Caregivers.” News release. June 15, 2019.
Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. 2024. “Canada announces new pilot programs to support caregivers and Canadian families, intends to make the caregivers program permanent.” News release. June 3, 2024.
Tungohan, Ethel. 2023. Care Activism: Migrant Domestic Workers, Movement-Building, and Communities of Care. First Edition. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
This article is part of Understanding Precarity in BC (UP-BC), a research and public engagement initiative investigating precarious work and multi-dimensional precarity in British Columbia. UP-BC is jointly led by Simon Fraser University’s Morgan Centre for Labour Research and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives BC Office, and brings together four BC universities, 26 community-based organizations and more than 80 academic and community researchers and collaborators. The partnership is supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). For more information about UP-BC visit understandingprecarity.ca.
Topics: Economy, Employment & labour, Immigrants & refugees, Law & legal issues, Racism & racial justice, UP–BC, Women

Canada’s broken promises to migrant care workers

Nov 20, 2024
The 2024 living wage for Metro Vancouver has risen to $27.05 per hour, a 5.3% increase from last year. This significant increase highlights the region’s deepening affordability crisis fuelled by sky-high housing costs.
Living wages are also going up across the province as our new report shows.
While inflation has eased from record highs, essential costs like rent and food continue to rise faster than general inflation.
Government initiatives such as increases to key income-tested government benefits, ongoing child care affordability improvements and the roll-out of the Canadian Dental Care Plan have provided some relief. The savings, however, have been entirely consumed by soaring prices—especially for housing and food—leaving many households struggling to make ends meet.
What is a living wage?
The living wage is the hourly rate that each of two parents working full-time must earn to support a family of four in Metro Vancouver. It ensures a family can afford necessities, support the healthy development of their children, escape severe financial stress and participate in the social, civic and cultural lives of their communities.
People who work for low wages face impossible choices—buy groceries or heat the house, keep up with bills or pay the rent on time. The result can be spiraling debt, constant anxiety and long-term health problems. In many cases it means working long hours, often at multiple jobs, just to pay for basic necessities. Parents end up having little time to spend with their family, much less to help their children with school work or participate in community activities and we are all poorer for it.
The living wage is a powerful tool to ensure paid work results in a decent standard of living and enables a life that is about more than a constant struggle to get by. For low-wage workers, earning a living wage is a game changer. It means freedom from constant financial stress and an opportunity to plan for the future.
Gap between living wage and minimum wage widens
A strikingly large gap exists between the 2024 Metro Vancouver living wage and BC’s current minimum wage of $17.40 per hour.
The Metro Vancouver living wage has always been higher than BC’s minimum wage, but the gap narrowed considerably between 2018 and 2021 thanks to policy changes such as substantial minimum wage increases, the elimination of Medical Services Plan (MSP) premiums, introduction of the BC Family Benefit and significant new federal and provincial child care investments.
However, since 2021, soaring costs of living—especially for housing—have outpaced these affordability improvements. The gap has widened again, leaving many families earning less than it takes to get by.
Recent increases to the minimum wage have been welcome, but clearly far from sufficient and more must be done urgently to better support the nearly half a million workers in Metro Vancouver who earn less than the living wage (37% of all paid employees in the region).
What about other family types?
While the Metro Vancouver living wage calculation is based on the needs of two-parent families with young children, it is also meant to support all workers so that young adults are not discouraged from having children because of low wages and older workers have extra income as they age. This was the case when the BC living wage methodology was originally developed in 2008.
However, as governments have taken important steps to better support families with children in the last eight years, questions have arisen about whether this wage is sufficient for other groups.
This year, we produced preliminary estimates of living wages for two additional family types: a single working-aged adult and a single parent with a young child. These preliminary estimates suggest that the living wage for Metro Vancouver may not be sufficient to support a single person (who would need a wage of $27.36) or a single parent ($30.63).
However, in other communities with a lower cost of living, the living wage may be sufficient for other family types. Over the next year, we will refine these calculations in consultation with community partners, academic and policy experts, low-wage workers, unions and living wage employers to ensure a more inclusive methodology.
Getting to a living wage for all BC workers
The living wage movement calls on employers to pay wages sufficient to support families. And a growing number of BC employers are stepping up. Over 450 employers, including many small businesses, 10 municipalities, three First Nation Councils and three school boards have committed to pay their employees and contractors a living wage. In 2022, YVR became Canada’s first living wage airport.
However, voluntary action alone cannot solve BC’s serious affordability crisis. Coordinated government efforts at all levels are needed to both lift wages and lower the cost pressures people face so that all workers can thrive.
As a start, the BC government should raise the minimum wage to $20 per hour to narrow the gap between the minimum wage and the living wage. This would benefit over 400,000 people of all ages, working in every region of the province.
In addition to higher minimum wages, BC workers need pay equity legislation, stronger protections from wage theft and other workplace rights violations and meaningful access to collective bargaining so they can exercise the right to come together to negotiate better wages and benefits if they so choose.
The provincial government should also establish a living wage policy for both its direct employees and contractors and encourage all public bodies to follow suit (e.g., universities, hospitals, school boards).
Affordability depends not only on our earnings, but also on the benefits and government income supports we receive and the public services we can access.
More-generous government transfers can put money directly into the pockets of low- and middle-income households, as provincial and federal child benefits do for families with children.
Government benefits could do more to moderate the increase in the living wage amid a sharply rising cost of living. Many benefits, however, are clawed back steeply or eliminated at family income levels close to the Metro Vancouver living wage ($85,000 to $100,000 per year), which is considered too high for government support, yet in reality can barely provide a decent standard of living in BC’s largest urban centre.
Provincial and the federal governments must review all low-income transfers and credits regularly to ensure they are not clawed back at income levels that leave many families struggling.
In addition to direct government transfers, accessible public services and infrastructure can reduce out-of-pocket costs for families and thus lower the wage needed to afford a decent standard of living. These include affordable housing, universal access to low-cost child care, free transit for youth 18 and under and an expansion of publicly funded pharmacare and mental health services.
Without urgent government action to address the affordability crisis, the living wage will continue to climb. This means many BC employers will be unable to pay their workers a living wage, leading to thousands trapped with low wages and earning less than it actually costs to live in our province.
A coordinated effort to raise wages, expand public services and adjust government supports is essential to ensuring all BC workers can thrive, not just survive.
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Topics: Economy, Employment & labour
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Trapped in the wage gap

Canada’s broken promises to migrant care workers