[Flash Walken]

Originally Posted by steve9981

I personally know of individuals who have worked minimum wage or close to for decades only to become successful later in life. It's all about how you save and invest.....not everyone working 40 hours/minimum wage is below the poverty line.

A worker getting paid $10.45 per hour, 35 hours per week for the full year would earn $19,019. Note that with the minimum wage increase only kicking in mid-September, this is slightly more than a minimum wage employee would actually earn, but I wanted to keep the calculation simpler.

An annual income of $19,019 is below the poverty line for a single individual with no dependents in all but rural areas. For reference, only 12% of BC’s population lived in rural areas in 2014.

In Metro Vancouver, a worker struggling to get by on minimum wage will be almost $5,500 below the poverty line for a single person this year. For a single parent with one child, the gap between minimum wage income and the poverty line would be over $11,000. About 53% of BC’s population lives in Metro Vancouver, according to BC Stats.

In one of BC’s bigger cities — cities like Victoria, Abbotsford, Kelowna, Kamloops, Nanaimo, Prince George — a full-time, full-year minimum wage worker would be about $2,000 below the poverty line for a single person. Even in small towns with population under 30,000 — including Cranbrook, Powell River, Port Alberni, Williams Lake — a full-time, full-year minimum wage worked won’t clear the poverty line.

http://www.policynote.ca/bc-minimum-...rs-in-poverty/