Covenant House Vancouver

Imagine you are a young person struggling to get off the streets. You take the right steps by getting help for your addictions, get counselling and learn job and life skills. You are staying in a shelter or maybe on a friend's couch, and you have been working hard to find a job and you do!

Your job pays minimum wage but you are just happy to be off the streets, working and starting over. Now imagine your weekly pay is $320.00 before taxes, your monthly pay is about $1280.00 before taxes. Now imagine trying to live off of that amount of money...think of rent, food and transportation. Even if you have a roommate and live in a cheaper place (pretty hard to find in Vancouver) you are probably spending around $450-$500 on rent, bus pass at least $100, food and basic necessities $200 and other bills at least $100.00.

So just to live you probably need at least a $1000.00 a month and that is bare bones.

That is what so many of your youth face every day. BC has so many young people and families that are the working poor. People working full time jobs but just barely getting by and hardly ever getting ahead. Having the lowest minimum wage in Canada is unacceptable - we live in one of the most high cost areas and our minimum wage has not gone up for years even though the cost of living continues to increase. This greatly affects all of us - please make a stand for a higher minimum wage to benefit all of us in BC.