N.S. affordability crisis deepens as gap between living wage, minimum wage grows: report

A new report indicates Nova Scotia’s minimum wage is getting increasingly more difficult for people to live on, as the rising cost of basic necessities continues to outpace pay increases.

The report, released Thursday, said the living wage is $7.85 to $11.59 higher than what the minimum wage will be next month.

“Working people deserve to work to live, not just live to work,” the report said. “The cost of living is making that even harder.”

According to the report, the living wage is now $26.50 in the Halifax area, $25.40 for the Annapolis Valley, $25.05 for southern Nova Scotia, $24.30 for northern Nova Scotia, and $22.85 for Cape Breton.

On average, those numbers are 14 per cent higher than last year’s living wage calculations.

“These year-over-year increases are the most significant we have seen since we began calculating the living wage for Halifax in Nova Scotia in 2015,” said Christine Saulnier, the report’s author and director of the Nova Scotia chapter of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, in a release.

“Such unprecedented increases are due to overall increases to the costs of living, for shelter and food, in particular.” |Read more https://globalnews.ca/news/9942951/ns-living-wage-report-2023-ccpa/|

#politics #nspoli #LivingWage #inflation #crisis #affordability

A Canadian study gave $7,500 to homeless people. Here’s how they spent it.

The newly published, peer reviewed PNAS study, conducted by the charity Foundations for Social Change in partnership with the University of British Columbia, was fairly simple. It identified 50 people in the Vancouver area who had become homeless in the past two years. In spring 2018, it gave them each one lump sum of $7,500 (in Canadian dollars). And it told them to do whatever they wanted with the cash.

Over the next year, the study followed up with the recipients periodically, asking how they were spending the money and what was happening in their lives. Because they were participating in a randomized controlled trial, their outcomes were compared to those of a control group: 65 homeless people who didn’t receive any cash. Both cash recipients and people in the control group got access to workshops and coaching focused on developing life skills and plans.

Separately, the research team conducted a survey, asking 1,100 people to predict how recipients of an unconditional $7,500 transfer would spend the cash. They predicted that recipients would spend 81 percent more on “temptation goods” like alcohol, drugs, or tobacco if they were homeless than if they were not.

The results proved that prediction wrong. The recipients of the cash transfers did not increase spending on drugs, tobacco, and alcohol, but did increase spending on food, clothes, and rent, according to self-reports. What’s more, they moved into stable housing faster and saved enough money to maintain financial security over the year of follow-up. |Read more https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/21528569/homeless-poverty-cash-transfer-canada-new-leaf-project|

#UBI #homeless #experiment #politics #bcpoli #peerReviewed