Growing support for cities to adopt living wage

New developments since my recent post calling on municipalities to lead the way on adopting living wage policies:

First, over just over 100 candidates have responded to the Open Letter issued by the Living Wage for Families campaign, covering almost every Lower Mainland municipality. Almost all have expressed support for this proposal or at least indicated interest in exploring the implications for their city.

In Vancouver, COPE has said it is supportive of undertaking a city study to investigate the feasibility of passing a living wage policy. Vision Vancouver and the NPA are a little more cautious, saying they are interested, but want to find out more before deciding how to proceed.

In Burnaby, both main parties have expressed a clear interest in exploring the possibilities of a living wage policy. Both Richmond and Surrey have a number of candidates running on a living wage platform, while the City of North Vancouver has already unanimously agreed to study this issue.

In the outer suburbs of Maple Ridge, Pitt Meadows and Coquitlam a large number of candidates have expressed an interest in pursuing this issue.

You can see all the candidate responses here.

Second, today our friends at the Columbia Institute Centre for Civic Governance released some very interesting poll results related to the municipal elections. Among the results: 67.1% of respondents asked about a Living Wage said they would favour their municipality adopting a bylaw. You can read more results here.

Hopefully we will see new activity on this front after Saturday.

Topics: Employment & labour, Municipalities, Poverty, inequality & welfare