National
Former Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall on working with (or against) Justin Trudeau

From a FaceBook post by former Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall
Business
Do Minimum Wage Laws Accomplish Anything?

David Clinton
All the smart people tell us that, one way or another, increasing the minimum wage will change society. Proponents claim raising pay at the low end of the economy will help low-income working families survive in hyper-expensive communities. Opponents claim that artificially increasing employment costs will either drive employers towards adopting innovative automation integrations or to shut down their businesses altogether. Either way, goes the anti-intervention narrative, there will be fewer jobs available.
Well, what’ll it be? Canadian provinces have been experimenting with minimum wage laws for many years. And since 2021, the federal government has imposed its own rate for employees of all federally regulated industries. There should be plenty of good data out there by now indicating who was right.
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Historical records on provincial rates going back decades is available from Statistics Canada. For this research, I used data starting in 2011. Since new rates often come into effect mid-year, I only applied a year’s latest rate to the start of the following year. 2022 itself, for simplicity, was measured by the new federal rate, with the exception of British Columbia who’s rate was $0.10 higher than the federal rate.
My goal was to look for evidence that increasing statutory wage rates impacted these areas:
- Earnings among workers in full-service restaurants
- Operating profit margins for full-service restaurants
- Total numbers of active businesses in the accommodation and food services industries
I chose to focus on the food service industry because it’s particularly dependent on low-wage workers and particularly sensitive to labour costs. Outcomes here should tell us a lot about the impact such government policies are having.
Restaurant worker income is reported as total numbers. In other words, we can see how much all of, say, Manitoba’s workers combined took home in a given year. For those numbers to make sense, I adjusted them using overall provincial populations.
Income in British Columbia and PEI showed a strong correlation to increasing minimum wages. Interestingly, BC has consistently had the highest of all provinces’ minimum wage while PEI’s has mostly hung around the middle of the pack. Besides a weak negative correlation in Saskatchewan, there was no indication that income in other provinces either dropped or grew in sync with increases to the minimum wage.
Nation-wide, by weighting results by population numbers, we got a Pearson coefficient 0.30. That means it’s unlikely that wage rate changes had any impact on take-home income.
Did increases harm restaurants? It doesn’t look like it. I used data measuring active employer businesses in the accommodation and food services industries. No provinces showed any impact on business startups and exits that could be connected to minimum wage laws. Overall, Canada’s coefficient value was 0.29 – again a very weak positive relationship.
So restaurants haven’t been collapsing at epic, extinction-level rates. But do government minimums cause a reduction in their operating profit margins? Apparently not. If anything, they’ve become more profitable!
The nation-wide coefficient between minimum wages and restaurant profitability was 0.88 – suggesting a strong correlation. But how could that be happening? Don’t labour costs make up a major chunk of food service operating expenses? Here are a few possible explanations:
- Perhaps many restaurants respond to rising costs by increasing their menu prices. This can work out well if market demand turns out to be relatively inelastic and people continue eating out despite higher prices.
- Higher wages might lead to lower employee turnover, reducing hiring and training costs.
- A higher minimum wage boosts worker incomes, leading to more disposable income in the economy. Although the flip-side is that we can’t see strong evidence of higher worker income.
- Higher wages can force unprofitable, inefficient restaurants to close, leaving stronger businesses with higher market share.
In any case, my big-picture verdict on government intervention into private sector wage rates is: thanks but don’t bother. All that effort doesn’t seem to have improved actual incomes on a population scale. At the same time, it also hasn’t driven industries with workers at the low-end of the pay scale to devastating collapse.
But I’m sure it has taken up enormous amounts of public service time and resources that could undoubtedly have been more gainfully spent elsewhere. More important, as the economist Alex Tabarrok recently pointed out, minimum wage laws have been shown to reduce employment for the disabled and measurably increase both consumer prices and workplace injuries.
Business
Trudeau Liberals pledge $41.5 million for over 100 pro-2SLGBTQI+ projects

From LifeSiteNews
Leader of the People’s Party of Canada Maxime Bernier blasted the funding, noting how spending money while the country is in a “major economic crisis” shows how “Liberal nutcases” are “wasting” taxpayer money on “woke activists.”
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government is using its final days to promise $41.5 million in taxpayer funds to advance 106 pro-LGBT projects “across Canada.”
On January 31, Lisa Hepfner, Trudeau’s Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Women and Gender Equality and Youth, announced “$41.5 million for 106 projects across four different 2SLGBTQI+ funds.”
Today I joined my colleague @s_guilbeault in Montreal to announce a fed investment of $41.5 million for 106 projects to advance equality for 2SLGBTQI+ communities across 🇨🇦 Including $8m for 10 projects aimed at combatting hate and $33.5m to fund 96 projects to address key issues pic.twitter.com/eqrifcTFIg
— Lisa Hepfner (@lisahepfner) January 31, 2025
“This funding will advance equality for 2SLGBTQI+ communities across Canada and address the rise in hate,” claimed the government in a press release.
The government said the money will help “build and sustain resilience of 2SLGBTQI+ communities against hate and discrimination,” with the funds coming as part of Canada’s Action Plan on Combatting Hate, which was launched in the fall of 2024, and follows Trudeau’s Federal 2SLGBTQI+ Action Plan, which is in its third year of operation.
Leader of the People’s Party of Canada Maxime Bernier blasted the funding, noting how spending money while the country is in a “major economic crisis” shows how “Liberal nutcases” are “wasting” taxpayer money on “woke activists.”
“As Canada is on the verge of a major economic crisis, these Liberal nutcases are wasting another $41M on woke activists and mentally ill people who identify as one of the 52 genders. Unbelievable,” wrote Bernier on X Saturday in response to Hepfner’s X post about the funding.
As reported by investigative blogger Pat Maloney, Canada spent $108,594,964 on LGBT ideology in 2022, a number that swelled to a whopping $665,454,357 in 2023.
Maloney reported that in 2024 Canada gave LGBT activists a total of $6,469,076 — an increase from the previous three years, in which a total of $12,548,238 was spent.
Since taking office in 2015, the Trudeau government has consistently pushed an anti-life, anti-family narrative on Canadians.
In addition to supporting effectively unlimited abortion, Trudeau and his government have stood behind even the most extreme aspects of gender ideology, such as the chemical and surgical “transition” of minors.
Trudeau announced in early January that he plans to step down as Liberal Party leader once a new leader has been chosen, which is set to take place on March 9. Parliament has been prorogued until March 24 as a result, although Trudeau could resume it at any time.
Thus far, the two main candidates in the running to replace Trudeau are former central banker Mark Carney and Trudeau’s former Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland.
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