QS call on Quebec government to raise minimum wage to $20/hour

Québec Solidaire co-spokesperson Ruba Ghazal at question period on Oct. 29, 2024. (Jacques Boissinot/The Canadian Press)

Québec Solidaire is urging the Quebec government to raise the minimum wage to $20 an hour.

The party's new co-spokesperson, Ruba Ghazal, and MNA Alexandre Leduc pointed out in a news release issued Sunday that such an increase was justified by the growing use of food banks.

HungerCount 2024, published at the end of October, shows that the total number of requests for food aid per month in Quebec is 2.9 million. That's 55 per cent more than in 2021. The proportion of households whose main income comes from employment represents 19.6 per cent of the recipients of their services this year, higher than in previous years.

Ghazal said it was “scandalous that in 2024, people in full-time employment will not be able to feed themselves properly and will have to go to food banks. This is proof that the social contract has broken down.”

For his part, Leduc argues that the increase in food prices is greater than the increase in the minimum wage and is therefore making it “impossible to feed oneself properly.”

The QS press release states that HungerCount 2024 shows 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 an increase of 37 per cent compared with 2019.

For Moisson Montréal alone, the figures for 2019 and 2024 show that the number of households whose main income comes from employment rose from 2,846 to 9,774. That's enough to blow everyone away.

"With the current minimum wage, families can no longer manage," Ghazal said in an interview with The Canadian Press. "I'm not talking about people who don't have a job, I'm talking about families who sometimes have two jobs, two salaries, with children, who are obliged, even if they are working full-time at the minimum wage, to go to food banks because everything is extremely expensive."

Leduc added: "There is no perfect scientific method for determining a minimum wage. The one that the government has been using for decades, whatever its colour, is what's called 50 per cent of the average wage, but that doesn't determine a wage that allows us to get our heads above water."

The two MNAs warn of the shadow that workers' use of food banks casts over the record of Premier François Legault.

Ghazal added: "We talk a lot about Quebec values. Well, one of Quebec's values is to have a substantial social safety net to help families and children avoid going hungry. That's the bare minimum in our society."

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

Minimum wage and living wage

A study by the Institut de recherche et d'informations socioéconomiques (IRIS) supports the figure put forward by Québec solidaire (QS). According to the 10th Viable Income published by IRIS, the minimum wage needed by a single person in 2024 to live in 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 way the Quebec economy works, which "creates a category of working poor who, even if they work 50 hours a week, struggle to meet their needs."

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

In Quebec, the latest data available showed that around 4 per cent of the wage bill was paid the minimum wage in 2023, less than in neighbouring Ontario (7.6 per cent). Nevertheless, the two MNAs 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 number of people concerned.

"The reality of low pay, if we just take the nominal minimum wage, is limited. Because sometimes there are almost twice as many people when you add a 10 or 20 cent," points out Leduc.

He adds that it is this category of the population that elected representatives need to think about when it comes to increasing the minimum wage "to get away from this flawed methodology of saying 'we're at half the average wage and if the average wage goes up, if there are higher wage increases in Quebec this year, bravo, those at the bottom will get a bigger pay rise just because of the 50 per cent.'"

The MNA maintains that all these people often hold non-union jobs and that facilitating access to union membership would enable them to negotiate better wages and would allow their employers to have a better retention rate.

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

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

This report by The Canadian Press was first published in French Dec. 15, 2024.

With files from Jean-Philippe Denoncourt