Consider an average Canadian woman earning the average Canadian wage for a single, full-time female employee of $21.85 per hour. Her annual salary is $42,607.
By some measures, that is a lot of money. By others, it is not much at all.
It is a pittance compared to the $2.4 million average annual salary of an NHL player. A woman would have to work 60 years to make that much.
It is significantly more than a person working for minimum wage can pull in. A $10 per hour minimum wage amounts to an annual salary of only $19,500. The average Canadian wage for women is more than twice the minimum value.
And compared to Canadian males, it is still failing to keep up. The average Canadian male does significantly better with an average hourly wage of $25.42 or $49,569 per year. Yes, women are still only earning 85% as much as men on average.
Is $40,000+ a good wage? It all depends on what you can purchase with it and not on the dollar amount. In some parts of the world, you could live very well on $42,000. Those parts of the world, however, are not in B.C.
If you are living in Vancouver and paying $1,300 per month for a one-bedroom apartment, another $100 per month for parking, another $200 per month for utilities, and another $100 for the all-important cell phone, that comes to $20,400 or a size-able chunk of the $36,103 of after-tax income you have. There is not a lot left over to buy food, clothing, or other necessities. And that is not counting the PST.
On the other hand, if you are living in Prince George and only paying $650 for an apartment and nothing for parking, you end up with an extra $9,000 to spend annually.
In comparison, an average male has a greater net disposable income of $41,064 and therefore comes out about $5,000 ahead.
In any case, consideration of the average Canadian salary for women or men leaves a lot of people struggling to make ends meet. Not a lot of room for discretionary spending. The average Canadian is not doing well.
But that is not what I really wanted to talk about this week.
Last week, Jordan Bateman of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation rolled through town with British Columbia's provincial debt clock in tow. As the picture on the front page of the Citizen showed, our provincial debt now stands at something north of $57,674,416,389. That is a large sum by any comparison.
And it is growing at a very rapid pace. Assuming that the picture was taken at around 2 p.m. last Wednesday, by the time you are reading this column, the debt will have climbed by over another $86.3 million dollars. That is more than the budget of UNBC!
Many people have bought into the truthiness about the economy over the past few years. The idea that our economy is growing and that B.C. is prosperous as a consequence. Not really.
We are living well beyond our means. Our provincial debt is greater than our provincial budget. Think about that. If the government was to shut down everything and devote every tax dollar for the next year to our debt, it still wouldn't be paid off.
In the meantime, we wouldn't have any hospitals, schools, universities, etcetera.
But maybe a better perspective on the provincial debt is to consider what we owe individually. Last week, the debt clock set that number at $12,429. By the time you read this, it will be closer to $12,451.
Add in the federal debt - $17,514 as of Friday afternoon - and we are each in debt to the tune of $29,965. This accumulated debt is from political parties that claim to be financially responsible and fiscally conservatives.
(And yes, both the provincial debt and federal debt were decreasing prior to the present political parties taking over.)
Again, to put this in perspective, our debt is some 83 per cent and 73 per cent of the average Canadian after tax income for females and males, respectively. Just imagine if that was your credit card bill! What chance would you have of ever paying it off?
This is the problem with the B.C. Liberal fiscal agenda that has been in place for the past decade. Essentially, they came to power in 2001 with a promise of lower taxes and delivered on that promise. Everyone was happy.
Except that they still had to provide the services that people needed. So, was the solution that the government employed to increase taxes to pay for the services? No. It was to put everything on the credit card with the assumption that some future generation will have to pay.
Not exactly the best fiscal policy, especially for future British Columbians.
