Raising Ontario's Minimum Wage Was Followed By Rising Employment & Here's Who Benefited

Just as the Ford government announced its plans to increase Ontario's minimum wage in the fall, a recent study has found that more people have been employed after minimum wage increases.

On April 5, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, a non-partisan research institute, shared its findings of what happened when Ontario bumped up its minimum wage back in 2018.

According to the report, more people became employed across all industries with lower-than-average wages, with the exception of manufacturing and agriculture.

Funded by the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, the study noted a 1.7% increase in employment in 2018 and a rise of 2.8% in 2019, contrary to predictions that raising the minimum wage would be a "job-killer."

"When the $14-per-hour minimum wage was implemented in 2018, business lobbyists made dire predictions that it would lead to massive job losses. That simply didn't happen," CCPA said in the study.

They even found that it reduced the racialized wage gap, especially for women.

"The results are clear: raising the floor benefited all workers and reduced the racialized wage gap—especially for Black women—without lowering employment levels," said Grace-Edward Galabuzi, coauthor of the study and associate professor of politics and public administration at X University in Toronto.

And it's not just teens who stood to gain from higher salaries, the study noted.

"Seventy per cent of minimum-wage workers benefiting from a raise were adults, contradicting the notion that these workers are mostly teenagers at the start of their working lives," CCPA said.

"There was a sharp increase in the share of minimum-wage workers 25 years of age or older between 2017 and 2018, from 41 per cent to 50 per cent. This illustrates the large number of these adult workers just above the minimum wage who benefited from this increase."

The Ford government is looking to raise Ontario's minimum wage to $15.50 an hour, which is scheduled to kick in on October 1. This follows the recent increase to $15 per hour in January.