Minimum Wage Paradise - live large in Seacow Pond

In what is more or less a paean to the marvels of unbridled immigration, David Parkinson has a multi-page feature in the Globe and Mail today about the economic boom in PEI. The caption to one of the pictures tells us that "...Royal Star Foods has increasingly been forced to rely on temporary foreign workers..."

We know that scenario intimately. Employers are "forced" to hire foreign workers because they offer shit jobs for shit wages, end of story. Pay a decent wage and your labour shortage will disappear, you greedy bastards.

Just to confirm my suspicions, I took a quick trip to Tignish on the Canada Job Bank. Sure enough, Royal Star Foods has a job listing still posted from last October looking for 50 workers for their lobster processing plant. The pay? $12.50 an hour.

That's a full $1.25 an hour above the PEI minimum wage. So maybe they're not the greediest greedbags in the biz, but still... what kind of a life can you live on $12.50 an hour?

Fired up the googlator to do some investigating. The single most debilitating expense for low income workers anywhere in Canada is the cost of housing. The average cost of a single family home nationwide hovers around the half-million mark. How does Seacow Pond stack up?

If you're used to Toronto prices you're in for a shock. Check out this two-bedroom charmer in downtown Tignish with a $34,700 asking price. That's the full price of the house and lot - not the amount of the deposit cheque or the down payment.

In case you don't have the headroom on your Mastercard to buy the place outright, I ran the numbers through the TD mortgage calculator. TD tells me that a $30,000 mortgage at their three year fixed rate of 3.34% is going to run me $152.36.

Per month!

The lobster gig runs roughly April to December. That's more than enough to accumulate the 910 hours of work to qualify for EI for the other three or four months. A typical fisheries worker can easily make $30k/yr. The big banks don't want you spending more than 30% of your annual gross on mortgage and taxes. Looks to me like virtually anybody working, including at minimum wage, can afford to buy their own place in this corner of PEI.

Go east, young man!

We need lots more immigration to keep wages low

What's the difference between "fake" news and just telling an incomplete story?

This question popped into my head as I was perusing the cover story in today's Report on Business, wherein reporter David Parkinson allegedly "makes the case for immigration as an unbeatable strategy for economic growth."

The story gets three pages and focuses on Meridian Manufacturing in Winkler, Manitoba. Meridian is a division of Westman Group, an interesting enough Canadian success story in its own right, but in this article it merely serves as a foil for the thesis that Canada's working class has gone AWOL and desperate measures are required to keep our manufacturing sector afloat.

Desperate as in flooding the country with hundreds of thousands of desperate immigrants.

Oddly enough, nowhere in the story is there any mention of what kind of wages are on offer at Meridian. That would seem to be a critical piece of information in a story that is ostensibly about a labour shortage. I'm always skeptical about this labour shortage theme when we have a million and a half officially unemployed and millions more underemployed.

The best I could do was find this item at Glass Door; Meridian Manufacturing, great product but rock bottom wages. Is it any wonder that two thirds of Meridian's workforce are recent immigrants and temporary foreign workers?

Parkinson even provides a "case study" of Brooks, Alberta, where a quarter of the workforce are immigrants and TFWs, toiling for a whiff over minimum wage at the giant industrial abattoir in that town. Any context in terms of what's happened in the history of the meat processing industry since the time of the Gainer's lock-out would no doubt soil the depiction of Brooks as some utopian global village, so Mr. Parkinson thoughtfully spares us the burden.

So is this story "fake" news? No, it's worse than that, because it tells but one side of a multi-faceted story.

Dropping the ball(s) on gender parity

It's Saturday, and you know what that means - I hit the road bright and early and head into town to fetch my Saturday edition of Canada's newspaper of record. That's a purchase that's up to $4.75 now, and I've taken to berating the Korean guy with a "holy shit! there better be some good news in here for that kinda money!" as I hand him a fiver.

Can't say if the news is particularly good or bad, as I'm only into the business section so far, but it didn't take long to find five dollars worth of irony. Tavia Grant and David Parkinson have a feature story called Work in Progress; The global struggle for gender parity about the shocking lack of women in economics, if you can imagine such a thing in this enlightened era. Their expose begins on page B1 and continues on B3.

In between, B2 features a quarter page advert from the Global Student Entrepreneur Awards congratulating one Daniel Dubois on his ascension to the Canadian championship of said awards. Young Daniel will be off to the World Finals in Bangkok shortly!

Good luck Dan!

There's a picture of Dan with the six runners up. Every last one is a dude!

WTF? If I was the title sponsor I'd cut them another cheque just to get my logo OUT of their ads!