At the tender age of 16 or so I got one of my first jobs picking fruit in the Okanagan. I was paid 75 cents-an-hour and I couldn't have been happier. It sure beat the pittance I was making delivering the Trail Times.

A few years later, I was getting $1.25-an-hour fighting forest fires. I was positively ecstatic with my wealth. Then I got a job at the former Celgar pulp mill in Castlegar. $2.10-an-hour -- that put me in outer space. Every time an hour went by, I said to myself I'm two dollars richer! The next thing I knew, I had bought my first car, an old 1953 Austin with a wig-wag turn-signal arm that came out of the door jam. How cool!

Life was good then. The resource industries were humming in B.C. Jobs were everywhere. In those days, we in the Kootenays actually looked down on our poor Alberta cousins instead of being owned by them. And when you think of it, the $2.10-an-hour I was making at Celgar was more than a quarter of what the B.C. minimum wage is today. And that was 46 years ago.

Something is wrong with this picture.

And it's not hard to say what it is. B.C. now has the dubious distinction of having the lowest minimum wage in Canada along with New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, but both of those provinces have announced they're raising their minimums later this year which will leave "the best place on earth," as it says on our license plates, alone in last place.

Who can be proud of that?

Not the estimated 63,000 people in the province making the $8 minimum. Nor the 293,000 making less than $10-an-hour which is rapidly becoming the standard across the country. According to the B.C. Federation of Labour, more than 60 per cent of the almost 300,000 making less than $10-an-hour are women and more than two-thirds of these are 20 years old or older meaning they're likely living apart from their parents and supporting themselves.'

Try doing that on less than $10-an-hour. And if you're a single mother with children, God only knows what you do to live.

Now, I would be the first to admit that organizations like the B.C. Federation of Labour have an axe to grind here. Then again so does the BC Chamber of Commerce and other business organizations that support the minimum wage at the level it is. So let's not get carried away by the politics of the issue and discuss it on a more basic level.

The minimum wage in this province has now been frozen for more than eight years. That's a long time by any measure. It's true that increases in the cost of living have slowed for several years, but now they're picking up again and this is no time to be living on a frozen minimum wage.

Perhaps when the $10 minimum was first introduced it was higher than what it should have been. Business people will argue there's a correlation between the minimum wage and jobs and I accept that. Set the minimum wage too high and you kill jobs. That's not rocket science.

But if you accept the above, you've also got to accept that there has to be a point at which the minimum wage is too low. If the minimum wage is no longer a livable wage, something is obviously wrong. One of the "wrongs," aside from the liveability issue, is that it will kill the incentive to work at all at a minimum wage job. And what will flow from this? More people on welfare, which is the last thing anyone would want. Growth in the numbers of the "working poor," which in some ways is worse than being on welfare and a greater need to import workers from abroad which can present problems of its own.

In other words, setting the minimum wage at the right level is a very difficult, but important public policy function. Some provinces are tying it to the cost of living, which is a step in the right direction. Others are working on defining a "living wage" and developing complicated formulas to determine this.

But the B.C. approach seems closer to Queen Marie Antoinette –- Let them eat cake." If Charles Dickens was alive today, he'd probably use Victoria as the setting for A Christmas Carol with Premier Gordon Campbell acting as Scrooge.

Surely we can do better than this?