QS calls on the Quebec government to increase minimum wage to $20 per hour

Québec Solidaire is urging the Quebec government to raise the minimum wage from $15.75 to $20 per hour.

The party’s new co-spokesperson, Ruba Ghazal, and Solidaire MNA Alexandre Leduc emphasized in a press release published Sunday that such an increase is justified by the growing use of food banks.

HungerCount 2024, published at the end of October, shows that the total number of requests for assistance from food banks per month in Quebec is 2.9 million. That’s 55 per cent more than in 2021. And the share of households whose main income comes from a job represents 19.6 per cent of the beneficiaries of their services this year. A figure that is up from previous years.

Ghazal exclaims in the press release that it is “outrageous that in 2024, people who work full time cannot feed themselves properly and must go to food banks. This is proof that the social contract is broken.”

For his part, Leduc argues that the increase in food prices is greater than the increase in the minimum wage and therefore prevents “people from eating properly.”

The QS press release states that the 2024 HungerCount indicates that the number of workers using food bank services has doubled since 2019. Such a figure does not appear in this year’s report, which compares the figures for 2024, at the latest, with those for 2021. However, in 2023, the report already highlighted a 37 per cent increase compared to 2019.

For the Moisson Montréal organization alone, the 2019 and 2024 reports show that the number of households whose main income comes from employment has increased from 2,846 to 9,774. Enough to blow all the counters out of the water.

“With the current minimum wage, families can no longer afford it,” Ghazal said in an interview with The Canadian Press. I’m not talking about people who don’t have work, families who sometimes have two jobs, two salaries, with children, are forced, even when working full-time at minimum wage, to go to food banks because everything is extremely expensive.”

Leduc added that: “There is no perfect scientific method for determining a minimum wage. The one the government has been using for decades, regardless of colour, is what is called 50 per cent of the average salary, but that does not determine a salary that allows us to keep our heads above water.”

The two MNAs warn of the shadow that workers’ use of food banks casts on the record of CAQ Premier François Legault.

Ghazal added that: “We talk a lot about Quebec values. Well, one of Quebec’s values ​​is to have a significant social safety net to help families and children not go hungry. It’s the bare minimum in our society.”

As a reminder, families with children represent 47 per cent of households helped by food banks and, children alone make up 35 per cent of the banks’ beneficiaries according to the HungerCount 2024.

Minimum wage and living wage

A study by the Institut de recherche et d’informations socioéconomies (IRIS) supports the amount put forward by Québec solidaire (QS). According to the 10th Living Income published by IRIS, the minimum wage that a single person needs in 2024 to live with dignity should be $20 in Quebec.

IRIS researcher Eve-Lyne Couturier explained in a press release when the study was published in April that this gap with the current minimum wage is due, among other things, to the functioning of the Quebec economy, which “creates a category of poor workers who, even if they work 50 hours a week, struggle to meet their needs.”

According to the researcher, a viable wage allows people to have a choice when it comes to spending and to be able to cope with unexpected events.

In Quebec, the latest available data showed that approximately 4 per cent of the payroll received the minimum wage in 2023, less than in our Ontario neighbours (7.6 per cent). Nevertheless, the two Solidarity MPs point out that minimum wage does not mean low wage and that, even with 10 cents more than the permitted hourly wage of $15.75 per hour, the “wage reality is quite similar”, but not the volume of people concerned.

“The reality of low wages, if we just take the nominal minimum wage, it is limited. Because sometimes, there are about double the number of people when we add 10 or 20 cents,” points out Leduc.

He adds that it is this category of the population that elected officials must think about when increasing the minimum wage “to get away from this deficient methodology of saying ‘we are half the average wage and if the average wage increases, if there are stronger wage increases in Quebec this year, bravo, those at the bottom of the scale will have more wage increases just because of the 50 per cent’.” The MNA maintains that all of these people often have non-unionized jobs and that facilitating access to unionization would allow them to negotiate better wages and allow their employers to have a better retention rate.

Québec solidaire had already raised the idea of ​​raising the minimum wage to $20 at its annual convention in November 2023. The proposal was poorly received by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB), which argued that, according to its calculations, such an increase would involve additional direct costs of $1.09 billion for Quebec employers and would put strong pressure on the increase in consumer prices.

The CFIB instead advocated the adoption of tax measures to directly support workers. The federation cited in particular an increase in the basic personal amount, work bonuses or targeted tax credits.

To this, Ghazal and Leduc respond that the surplus earned by those at the bottom of the scale will be reinvested in the local economy by going out, eating out, or simply buying something of higher quality. According to them, this would therefore be a measure that would help the financial health of small businesses.

The Labor Ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

-With information from Jean-Philippe Denoncourt

–This report by La Presse Canadienne was translated by CityNews