So both the Saskatchewan government and the opposition are both in favor of raising the minimum wage. But do they have a formula or anything? Seemingly, NO! It appears that both parties subscribe to the certerus paribus school of economic thought, where they can arbitratily change a variable and nothing else will change. A word exists to describe such thinking, naive; businesses are going to raise their prices to reflect their added costs.

What we need is a formula that allows for inflation and states what the objective of minimum wage legislation ought to be and guess who has such a formula? ME!!!!

The majority of minimum wage employees are young, inexperienced workers. Therefore, in my humble opinion we ought to be looking at what their needs are and the needs of the society at large and how we can best meet everyone's needs.

I believe the best way to do this is to determine what a single individual needs to survive. We sit down and determine what an adequent, but not extravagant, lifestyle should cost for a single individual and how we as a society can best assist them in achieving their full potential, both for their own benefit and society's. Therefore we must also include the cost of education.

So what I propose is that a person should be able to pay rent, buy food, purchase clothing, pay for transportation, entertainment and also cover the cost of tuition and books at a post-secondary institution, all on the income generated from a 30, not 40 a hour work week. The reason for a 30 hour work week is that I want to give these people the time and financial resources to better themselves without having to incure massive debt.

Working 30 hours a week and taking two or three classes is mangable for most people. No one should ever feel that they do not have access to education based on price or time restictions. An educated society is something that is valued and should be promoted and supported ar all cost.

How I would determine the wage is very simple, it would be calculated backwards from the mean cost of education at the provincially funded post-secondary institutions. In the case of the technical schools it would be the mean cost of all their programs for a given years, in the case of the univesities it would be the mean cost of all the under-graduate programs. By addding these two numbers together and dividing by two we would have our starting point. This number should be 30 % of a person's annual income.

Next we look at the cost of food and housing. Food is easy enough to determine, again 30% is the magic number. In this case it is 30% of Statisics Canada's "basket of goods" for a household of four. The number 30 is chosen over 25 to simply allow for things such as cleaning supplies and other items that are included in the basket, but are consumed relatively equally regardless of the household size. Housing is determined by taking the average cost of renting a legal one bedroom apartment within a 3.5 Km distance from the provincially funded institutions; walking distance.

Transpostation is costs are determined by the mean cost of public transit in the various training centers as well as a five year mean cost of gas and oil only for a new, barebones economy car travelling no more than 10,000 km a year. Purchace, insurance and all other costs are excluded. The logic behind this is that using public transits costs alone is unrealistic in some circumstances, due to it's lack of existence, but at the same time it is assumed that other costs, such as housing in a rural community can offset the added vehicle expenses.

Entertainment can now be calculated in using the simple number of 10%. We simply add an additional 10 % to the now determined wage to allow for entertainment. I know that some have other suggestions, but I stated in the beginning that I was concerned with meeting people's needs and society's needs, not meeting everyone's whims.

I realise I have not proposed a perfect solution, but I believe it is far superior to the ridiculous idea that a simple wage hike is any knid of a solution at all.