On Monday, the Keep Ontario Working coalition spearheaded by the Ontario Chamber of Commerce released an analysis of the impacts of Bill 148 in Ontario, which will introduce a $15 minimum wage by 2019 and a host of other employment standards improvements. The analysis raised many red flags: it focused only on costs, predicting very large negative impacts out of line with decades of research in economics and appeared to include a significant math error. What’s more, the analysis was incomplete: just a few summary slides and no description of how results were derived, the study a black box.

Zohra Jamasi, an economist at the CCPA and I, summarized these concerns in a post at the CCPA’s Behind the Numbers blog. I also outlined the math error, which incorrectly claimed that a 0.7% increase in prices would amount to $1300 of new spending on average per household per year, on Twitter.

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