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UCP Leadership Candidate Danielle Smith: Pay Workers With ‘No Skills’ a Lower Minimum Wage

Last December, a few months before launching her bid to lead the United Conservative Party and become Alberta’s next premier, Smith argued some workers should be paid less than the current minimum wage during an episode of “Danielle Smith’s Fraser Forum,” a short-lived podcast hosted by a right-wing think tank called the Fraser Institute.

The episode, titled “Well-meaning and wrong-headed: The morality of the minimum wage in Canada and the US,” was released while she was President of the Alberta Enterprise Group, and a restaurant owner in High River, Alberta.

Joining her was Fraser Institute senior fellow Don Boudreaux, an advocate of insider trading and adjunct scholar for the right-wing Cato Institute based in Washington DC.

“I pushed around a cart at the bingo parlor selling pop and chips. That was my first minimum wage job,” Smith told Boudreaux. “And then I did McDonald’s.”

“‘Time to lean, there’s time to clean’, which stayed with me for life.”

“I’m very glad I had those first two jobs. But you know, maybe this is the problem is that the minimum wage is a blunt instrument to address the wrong problem,” Smith said, before suggesting similar workers should be paid lower wages.

“I have in the past done business advocacy, argued that there should be a separate minimum wage that is lower for someone who has no skills and are entering the workforce,” Smith said. “You can give them an opportunity to enter knowing that they’re going to be less productive than an employee that has been there for a couple of years.”

“There’s often a visceral reaction to that too from those who would argue against it, who say ‘well now, you’re just going to be exploiting young workers’, and I wonder if there’s something of merit to what I’m arguing?”

https://pressprogress.ca/ucp-leaders...-minimum-wage/