You wouldn’t know it from today’s headlines about impending job losses, but an analysis of the impact of Ontario’s move to a $15 minimum wage from the province’s Financial Accountability Office shows a net benefit for Ontario workers.
Overall, this is a much more cautious report than what the Ontario Chamber of Commerce and its allies had furnished, noting both the costs and benefits of $15. While the media is focusing on job loss figures (more on this below), the report predicts a big overall rise in incomes. Even if we assume its job loss estimates come true, the FAO says real labour income will go up by 1.3% after taking into account any negative effects, with over 60% of that going to the bottom 50% of households.
Anything raising wages (*cough* CEO pay) will create impacts elsewhere.

On Monday, the Keep Ontario Working coalition spearheaded by the Ontario Chamber of Commerce released an analysis of the impacts of Bill 148 in Ontario, which will introduce a $15 minimum wage by 2019 and a host of other employment standards improvements. The analysis raised many red flags: it focused only on costs, predicting very large negative impacts out of line with decades of research in economics and appeared to include a significant math error. What’s more, the analysis was incomplete: just a few summary slides and no description of how results were derived, the study a black box.
Zohra Jamasi, an economist at the CCPA and I, summarized these concerns in a post at the CCPA’s Behind the Numbers blog. I also outlined the math error, which incorrectly claimed that a 0.7% increase in

We, the undersigned economists, support the decision to increase the minimum wage in Ontario to $15 an hour. Raising the wage floor makes good economic sense.
Today, Ontario’s minimum wage is $11.40 per hour. Adjusted for inflation, this is barely one dollar higher than its value in 1977. Yet over the same four decades, the average productivity of workers has increased by 40%. And the prevalence of minimum wage work is spreading. Around 1 in 10 Ontario workers make minimum wage today, with a large increase in this proportion over the last two decades.
Low wages are bad for workers as individuals. An individual working full-year, full-time on the minimum wage can still fall short of the poverty line. The situation for minimum wage workers trying to support families is no better—and