This exerpt is from "Raising the Floor: The Social and Economic Benefits of Minimum Wages in Canada" by Michael Goldberg and David Green, for the left-of-centre Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

History

Early minimum wage legislation in Canada, it has been argued, was motivated by a desire to protect women from exploitation. This notion of protecting potentially vulnerable workers, Guest suggests, was rooted in the earlier British minimum wage laws, the early factory acts, and concerns about child labour.

In 1918, British Columbia and Manitoba became the first provinces in Canada to pass minimum wage legislation. In both provinces, the legislation covered only women. Most of the other provinces passed similar legislation covering women in the 1920s. BC was the first province to amend its minimum wage acts to include male employees in 1925, with most other provinces following suit by the mid-1930s.

The structure for setting the minimum wage in these initial minimum wage acts was based on subsistence living (a very restrictive notion of a poverty level). The early acts also set different minimum wages to take into account family size. A family of four or five was used in the case of a male employee, and a single person with no dependants in the case of a female employee.

The notion of a “living wage” was extensively revisited in a series of reports on social security developed during the Second World War. Leonard Marsh, in his Report on Social Security for Canada, identified two major categories that could affect the adequacy of family income. The first involved those situations requiring special expenditures such as births, deaths, accidents, and major illnesses. The second concerned the failure of the market to relate wages to the size of a worker's family.

For Marsh, the threat to income adequacy among the working poor would have to be addressed through minimum wage laws and worker retraining. Charlotte Whitton's proposals, in response to the March report, were also based on a “living wage policy guaranteeing every adult male a wage sufficient to support him, his wife, and two or three children.”

Ultimately, the concept of a “living wage” through differential minimum wages based on family size was not adopted. Instead, the Family Allowance was established to recognize the additional costs to families with children, and the provinces were eventually left responsible for “topping up” inadequate market income through provincial income assistance programs.

Minimum wage laws eventually came under federal and provincial employment standards legislation. While current employment standard legislation in Canada does not address the notion of a “living wage,” the legislation is designed to protect workers. The current BC Employment Standards Act (1995) states:

The main purpose of the Act is to ensure that employees in British Columbia receive at least minimum standards for conditions of employment and compensation, including wages, termination pay, and vacations. To accomplish this basic purpose, the Act establishes a set of rights for employees and obligations for employers.

The BC Employment Standards Act is in keeping with Canada's commitment to international agreements. As a recent Vancouver Sun editorial notes:

In accordance with international agreements, we have a Canadian code that sets minimums for workplace standards to avoid Third World kinds of sweatshops. Child labour is outlawed. Minimum wages must be paid. Hours of work are regulated. Workers have the right to organize. Provincial laws build on those nationwide minimums.