I would of went with something like... "Swinging a hammer at my crotch doesn't mean that I will hit myself in the balls, there are a hundred different possible results that could cause that not to happen.  Still given the choice I would avoid swinging a hammer at my crotch."

7.25 is the minimum here, still does not matter as fast food pays more then that here.

Yeah, that would have been one way to go. I was just at such a loss after hearing someone actually say, "Making the making of things more expensive doesn't necessarily make things more expensive," that the only thing that came to mind was to encourage him to attempt to conceive a child with himself.

I think people who claim businesses are "greedy" for not hiring people at minimum wage don't really understand the challenges of small business ...

A family member of mine runs a small business that has a lot of revenue but a combination of low margins and high costs leave him with a very modest wage at the end of the year. I've discussed it many times with him that as the owner/manager it is his job to find a way to reduce costs and to make the business scalable but he is running into the problem that he doesn't have the time to because he has to do all the menial tasks (up to and including cleaning the bathroom). Now, if he could hire someone at $7.50/hour to work 40 hours a week he could free up the time to do the work he needs to do and (hopefully) recover the cost of this employee through increased savings or reduced costs elsewhere; but at the market rate that is closer to $15.00/hour all hiring someone to do this job will do is reduce his (already modest) income.



If you're a small business owner and you're income is $40,000 per year, what is the impact of a $10,000+ increase in labour costs going to be on how you run your business?

Is there some kind of government assistance he can get?  At my other job, we were a start up company, my bosses would go to the government and get research grants.  My father's employer, worked out a deal with the government where he'd send employees home ever friday and get them unemployment for one day to save costs.

From my understanding, no ... but I realistically don't know.

In my experience, government funding tends to go to a handful of groups; well funded tech start-ups (I know the provincial government will match venture capital to some start-ups up to $1.5 million), politically motivated pie-in-the-sky schemes (something like "Harvesting unicorn farts as green energy" is far more likely to get government funding that anything that will actually turn a profit), or politically connected medium or large businesses.

My impression mostly comes from experiences in my career ... I've worked for a couple of tech start-ups and government funding was mostly redundant because we needed to be well funded to get it, and I've worked at a medium sized company were "surprisingly" we received a $4 billion contract we weren't qualified for because the CEO was a golfing buddy of the Premier of Alberta and contributed heavily to his re-election campaign.

Gotta love politics, damn Albertan bastards! :P.  Didn't realize we both live in Canada.  It is different from province to province, since for whatever reason job creation isn't a federal problem.

The funny thing these people are ignoring is the actual increase itself. If it were a measily $0.25 (like it was 2 years ago in Illinois) then okay, maybe businesses would eat that. But this is an extra $1.50! A near 20% increase! That's huge!