Time will tell how Ontario's $14-per-hour minimum wage experiment shakes out for a majority of earners and the businesses that employ them.  For the moment, it is possible to believe all of the following without being either a heartless monster or an economic ignoramus:

1. Minimum wage workers deserve the opportunity to make a decent living.
2. This wage increase was pushed through without due consideration for hours worked, benefits, or job totals.
3. Some businesses, mostly larger ones, may be able to find mechanisms to absorb the cost of the increase without cutting those three things.
4. Some businesses, mostly smaller ones, may not.
5. There are other ways to create an environment for well-paying jobs.

Already, though, Canadians have begun to give Tim Hortons the "heartless monster" designation.  Some Ontario franchisee have responded to the wage hike by cutting paid breaks, some health benefits, and other perks.  According to their professional association, this was the best they could do without reductions in prices or supply costs from their head office.  The company fired back, condemning the use of front-line staff "to further an agenda or be treated as just an 'expense.'"

In spite of this, customers are turning on the company at large, declaring January 9 #NoTimmiesTuesday, the day they got their coffee and baked goods elsewhere.  Some decided to extend the boycott beyond a single day, vowing to patronize independent coffee shops from now on.  Protesters, mostly labour activists, descended upon locations across Ontario, armed with bizarrely childish chants.  Marketing experts are aghast at the company's failure to control the damage.

Among the pundits, the most direct attack so far comes from Edward Keenan at the Toronto Star, who remarks that Canadians have finally woken up to the reality that Tims is "just another cold-hearted corporate behemoth" despite years of painstakingly crafted goodwill.  He doesn't sound very happy about this admission.  Therefore, allow me to do the celebrating for him: My friends, our sludgy, reheated, beige, sugar-loaded, self-parodying national nightmare may finally be drawing to a close.

While words like "beloved" and "cherished" and "storied" continue to abound in coverage of Tim Hortons, a Maclean's survey from October 2017 revealed that it was only the fourth-most popular chain in Canada.  It wasn't even the most popular chain with a Canadian headquarters; that honour goes to Mississauga-based Second Cup, coming in second between McDonald's and Starbucks.  Given the paucity of Second Cup's marketing, and their retail footprint (294 locations as of 2016) being only one-twelfth that of Tims (3,665 locations as of 2016), there can only be one answer: People like the product better.

Tims has tried, bless them, with such exciting culinary innovations as "artisan-style grilled cheese" (a basic grilled cheese sandwich with panini press marks), pumpkin spice everything, and espresso-based coffees made with actual espresso.  These transparent attempts to compete with Starbucks have not radically altered the chain's true appeal: that it is convenient, cheap, and tolerably edible.  It's the place we go when we need a quick hot breakfast on the way to school, or a caffeine jolt before hitting the highway, or a box of snacks for the weekly meeting.  We go because it's there.

Tims is far from the only national corporation with more abundance than quality; there's Shoppers Drug Mart, for instance, or CIBC.  The reason we "cherish" it has more to do with the company's ad agency than the company itself.  They have put together a classically Canadian brand that the Conservative Party advertising staff could only dream of: the coffee of hockey players, hockey parents, road trippers, empty nesters, newcomers, pensioners, and people who own both small businesses and dogs.  Tims has less of a customer base than a voting bloc.

But now?  A brand is only as strong as the company's choice to live by it.  In failing to safeguard the interests of its lowest-paid workers, Tims has shot that brand right in its skate-clad foot.  It will take significantly more time for the company to recover from this than they did from the in-store Enbridge ad debacle of 2015.  In that time, its loyal customers may discover coffee they plain like better.  This is good news for those of us who have never liked seeing everything right with Canada reduced to a watery brew, a thawed-out pastry, and multiple visiting moose.

I will close with a question: What kind of "artisan" uses processed cheese in their sandwich?  Really, Tims.

Photo Credit: Jeff Burney, Loonie Politics

Written by Jess Morgan

How?  How is it possible that Kathleen Wynne was able to flip the script yet again and turn herself overnight from a toxically unpopular Premier into the champion of hard-done by, ruthlessly exploited Tim Horton's employees?  What political wizardry is this?  Did someone in the Premier's Office just flip a switch and activate a whole army of Liberal social media partisans that were lying dormant?

Well….yeah.

The suddenness with which this tempest in a Tim Horton's coffee pot dominated the previously barren political landscape in Ontario is suspicious to say the least.  For months, the discourse was dominated by dry, inside baseball talk of trials and complaints over nominations.

Well, except for a slight blip in the social media landscape before the calendar rolled over, where Liberal MPP Ann Hoggarth told business owners that they were effectively bad business owners who shouldn't be in business if they couldn't handle an increase in the minimum wage.  A seeming gaffe, in the depths of December when many Canadians were getting ready for vacation…..

But then the story of the greedy Timmies' heirs cutting their employees' breaks broke, and Wynne's populist tweet calling those founders out followed suspiciously soon after.  Then came the support from reliably Liberal writers like Bruce Anderson and Michael Coren, and the #15andfairness and #boycotttimhortons and #notimmiestuesday hashtags helpfully provided by members of Canada's labour community.

The efficiency of this process provides a strong case for re-imagining Hoggarth's small business smackdown as a trial balloon for how the current minimum wage war would play itself out.

The NDP was caught completely flat footed by all of the above, despite billing themselves as champions of the minimum wage and having enough of a presence in the labour movement that you would expect that they would have seen this coming.

While Andrea Horwath was photographed standing in solidarity with striking employees in good time, it's clear that she doesn't have a tight enough lock on the unions- raising the possibility of a repeat of the 2014 campaign, where they deserted her for the Liberals.

The PC's and their affiliates fared slightly better, with articles quickly slapped together reminding people that, yeah, sorry, in a free market when wages go up profits go down, or that Wynne went ahead with the increase despite not testing the impact with a study first, or that august institutions such as the Bank of Canada predicted 60,000 job losses as a result of higher wages, or even the fact that Wynne recently appointed the CEO of Tim Horton's to the board of Hydro One.

But none of this could change the fact that Wynne and the Liberals were first off the mark with their lightning quick strike, and that they withdrew quickly from the debate as the PC's scrambled to keep up and fire back.

The right knew it, too, even though it would kill them to admit it.  You could find assorted grumblings about the Premier being in "attack mode" or accusing her of "phony populism"- which is exactly the sort of things that Patrick Brown could not do, lest he be accused of "Trump-style politics."

Not that Patrick Brown would touch this issue with a stale Timbit, mind you.  The risk-averse PCs are so convinced that a single misspoken word from their leader would cost them the election that their leader hasn't uttered a peep which, in and of itself, speaks to how much power and control the supposedly near-dead Liberals still exert.  All we got was a tweet by spokesperson Dan Robertson, retweeted by Brown, which "clarifies" that the PC's support a $15/hour minimum wage, just… more slowly.

How the PC's plan to steer Patrick Brown away from difficult scrapes like this one in the middle of the writ is something they have yet to clarify.

What the PC's should be learning here is that the Liberals can kickstart their machinery whenever and wherever they choose.  And if they are not convinced of the power of the Liberal Re-Election System, consider that this isn't the first time an organized boycott of Tim Hortons was attempted.  Remember how various forces associated with the right in this country targeted the franchise after they bowed to pressure and pulled ads from Enbridge?

I have no evidence of whether this latest attempt to boycott Tim's is a deliberate example of the recent annoying trend of "borrowing from the opponent's playbook".

But even if it wasn't, it shows that the Conservatives may need a shot or two of espresso if they want to match the Liberal pace during the election.

Photo Credit: Inside Timmies

Written by Josh Lieblein

Let me start 2018 with a confession: I may have been wrong about Jagmeet Singh.

I've been bullish on Singh for much of the last year, posting my first optimistic Loonie Politics column on the man back in January of 2017, before he was even a formal candidate for his party's leadership.

At the time, my thinking was relatively straightforward: Singh seemed cooler than Trudeau, more left-wing than Trudeau, less embarrassing than Trudeau, and — thanks to his superficial exoticism — more attractive to modern progressive voters and their preoccupation with demonstrating tolerance.

365 days, several dismal polls, and six disastrous by-elections later, it may be time to revise my thesis.  Even after the obligatory caveats that it's "still early," and Singh still has 21 months to close the deal, all present indicators point towards an NDP stuck in solid third place at best, and the brink of 1990s-style marginalization at worst.

What went wrong?

The thing about retail politics is that voters can easily interpret a politician's supposed talents as flaws, and his supposed flaws as virtues.  A failure to appreciate this was basically the story of Conservative attitudes towards Justin Trudeau.  The party and its supporters perceived Trudeau as an unqualified intellectual lightweight — which he was, objectively — and ran a campaign of teasing and derision.  But they failed to appreciate how, when viewed from more forgiving eyes, Trudeau's inexperience and naïveté could also come off as fresh, untainted, and upbeat — especially in the context of two dour, cynical opponents.

Singh's rise could prove the reverse phenomena: a politician whose seeming talents have blinded his supporters to the possibility others may interpret these as his worst deficiencies.

Is anyone really clamouring for a prime minister to Trudeau's left, for instance?  Unlike in America, where "single payer healthcare" has become a popular rallying cry for the further-left, there's no obvious policy way for Singh to contrast with Trudeau ideologically.  Trudeau is already quite far to the left on fiscal issues — indeed, a leading piece of conventional wisdom is that Thomas Mulcair did himself a disservice by advocating Ottawa spend within its means.  For a time, it seemed Singh could possibly get some traction out of advocating "no to everything" on the natural resource front, but championing this cause would require aggressively undermining the pro-pipeline NDP government of Alberta — itself facing an uphill battle for reelection — and perhaps soon the NDP government of British Columbia as well, who have been steadily lessening the flamboyance of their own opposition to various high-profile energy projects.

That leaves personality.  Ideology, after all, is as much about disposition as agenda these days, yet Singh bears no resemblance to the cranky Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn whom Canadian leftists have long fetishized.  Rather than affect a tone of populist, righteous anger, Singh has opted for a Kumbaya mantra of "love and courage" that's little different from Trudeau's own endless roster of maudlin slogans.

Singh's personal style also appears increasingly dated and immature in a way Trudeau, for all his silliness, never did.  The prime minister has an awkwardness about him that can come off as charming, and the ways in which he is obviously a lesser man than his father makes him attractively vulnerable.  The deliberate effort to market him as dorky, with his Star Wars socks and tweets about video games reflects awareness of this.

Singh, by contrast, is a 38-year-old still obsessed with being cool. He overdresses, has obviously expensive tastes, and talks in an obnoxious fratboy manner that begins to grate like sandpaper after the fifth consecutive Instagram story of him hooting at the camera with his arms around his boys.  Speaking as a 33-year-old who recently shaved his mustache in a pique of self-consciousness, the hipster aesthetic Singh embodies reflects an era fast ending, with a shrinking appeal even among its most stereotypical adherents.  It's particularly worth questioning how a man with this much bro-ish swagger hopes to peel young, female voters from the Liberals — one of the most critical pillars of Trudeau's coalition.

Singh's ethnicity is the cloudiest variable.  That Quebec is too racist to vote for him seems a relatively mainstream conclusion, albeit masked by euphemisms about "overt religiosity."  Yet Singh may paradoxically also find himself hampered by an inability to win over left-wing Anglo Canadians who are theoretically most open to electing a nonwhite prime minister.

Barack Obama was as popular as he was because he embodied a compelling American story.  His biracial status, foreign father, and "funny name" congealed into a biography of a man who was an almost perfect synthesis of America's history of race and multiculturalism.  In the eyes of white, liberal America, there was a redemptive symbolism inherent in electing him.  Singh, by contrast, comes off a much more narrow figure.  Sikh culture and politics appears to be the defining interest of his life, and the weird evasiveness he displayed in that infamous interview about Air India demonstrated an inclination to find nuance in what to most Canadians was not a particularly complicated tragedy.  There is a fine line between being the candidate of "diversity" and the candidate of one particular demographic.  The former is compelling and sympathetic, the latter is simply alienating.

I still think it's possible Singh's defining qualities could be aggressively reinterpreted by the press and progressive voters sometime before 2019, just as the dismissiveness that greeted Justin Trudeau's ascension as Liberal boss faded dramatically as 2015 drew closer.  The Prime Minister's numbers will probably have to undergo a dramatic, unforeseen cratering for that to happen, however.  Only then will progressive voters be desperate enough to find hope where they currently see little.

Written by J.J. McCullough

Premier Kathleen Wynne rang in the New Year by popping corks and splashing more money onto an electorate and province already drunk on spending.  Her decrees that Ontario businesses have to pay at least $14 an hour to their employees and everyone under 25 get "free" prescriptions (both of which took effect on January 1) are clearly two more ploys in her bag of goodies to buy desperately needed votes for the upcoming election in early June.

But what is not being asked enough is why these rushed in, makeshift policies are realistic in a province that is the most indebted sub-sovereign jurisdiction in the developed world.  Do Ontarians not realize the province has been running an unsustainable budget for most of the last decade and a half that this Liberal government has been in office?

The last few elections and polls — all be them wildly unreliable — would tell us they don't.  Yes, the polls largely say Wynne's personal popularity stinks, but the party as whole still seems to be in contention despite the scandal-plagued government being well past its best before date.  Easier to have a scapegoat than face the cold hard facts.  Even more importantly than those polls though, in telling us where the province is headed long-term, are other polls suggesting many of Wynne's socialist policies are widely popular with the majority of Ontarians.

When it came to the so-called Fair Hydro Plan unveiled last year, most Ontarians supported the plan.  Never mind that the auditor general blasted the plan and found that the government could've reduced the amount spent on interest payments by $4 billion (yes, BILLION) if they hadn't serviced the debt in an "unprecedented" way in order to keep the cost off the books this year — all so the Liberals can falsely claim they've balanced the books.  No, short-sighted Ontarians rejoiced in screwing themselves over in the long run in order to get quick and slight relief now.  Ultimately this was the government's choice, but they wouldn't have done the wrong thing if it wasn't popular with the electorate.

The same goes for the latest two socialist policies.

Although there has been uproar over the implementation of the minimum wage hike, it was not over TD Bank and the Bank of Canada projecting job losses of  90,000 and 60,000 jobs respectively over the hike, but instead from the Tim Hortons heirs cutting paid breaks and benefits to help offset the huge additional cost of paying an additional $2.40 an hour to every employee making minimum wage.  Reading the top comments from the initial CBC report and the nearly 100,000 shares of the article suggests the vast majority of the proletariat seem to think business people are evil for trying to keep a restaurant profitable.  The overwhelming sentiment of Ontarians was that business owners are greedy fat cats and that they should fork over more money to their workers, no matter how low-skilled the job.  No one seemed to take into consideration that these owners had given their employees additional benefits and paid breaks, things they weren't required to do, without the government intervening and demanding they do so.

Now, none of us know how much the aforementioned Tim Hortons location is making as its net profit annually, but if we do some simple math using the increase in the minimum wage we can see how disruptive and costly this can be to a small business owner.  Let's say this location had 10 full-time employees making the former minimum wage and two supervisors making around the new minimum wage of $14 an hour last year.  If each employee works on average 2,000 hours in a year that means those 10 employees at minimum wage will need to be paid an additional $4,800 each or a total of $48,000 extra spent on wages.  But then the owners would also need to spend additional money giving the supervisors a raise as well so they're still making more than the other rank and file workers. (And this doesn't factor in the new three weeks of paid vacation for employees with an employer for over five years.)  And then there will be another rise next year of an additional dollar an hour which will add tens of thousands more in additional wage expenses for this type of employer.  To think a business, especially a small family business (the wealth of the Tim Horton heirs is irrelevant to whether or not this particular restaurant is still in itself profitable after the wage hike), should just eat the tens of thousands in additional costs, and only be given half a year's notice, should be seen as absurd and unrealistic by the electorate.

Yet the average Ontarian and Liberal MPPs like Ann Hoggarth have no sympathy for small businesses, the lifeblood of any healthy economy.  No, instead they think all these business owners are fabulously rich and should be able to afford high taxes, a steep minimum wage hike and out of control hydro rates.

Although the Ontario Progressive Conservatives have pushed back a bit on this suicidal anti-business mentality, they too sense a restless proletariat that have an insatiable hunger for more and more from their government.  How else can one explain PC Leader Patrick Brown's used-car-salesman pitch of the People's Guarantee, a socialist manifesto that promises more and more stuff and tax cuts without any concrete counter proposals to pick up the province's pants and tighten the belt?

But back to another one of Wynne's socialist programs, "free" drugs for everyone under 25.  Wynne and the Liberals have been selling this hard in the past few days, with the Premier making a big show of it at pharmacies and the government pumping out heart-warming stories of Ontarians grateful for free prescriptions for themselves or their children.  What's missing in this picture is that many hospitals have bed shortages at the moment and many parts of the healthcare system are in disrepair.  So completely subsidizing prescription drugs for Ontarians under 24 probably shouldn't be the top priority for the government right now, especially when subsidization almost always increases the thing being subsidized, which in this case means more young Ontarians becoming dependent or addicted to drugs instead of finding cheaper and/or preventative measures to address their health problems.  But apparently Ontarians want a magic pill to fix everything.

The government projects the free prescriptions for everyone under 25 will cost the province $465 million per year.  But knowing this government's less than stellar track record in predicting the overall cost of their programs, expect the bill to run much higher.  Fellow Loonie Politics columnist and Ontario pharmacist Josh Lieblein has been interested to see how this new drug plan would play out.  At the end of last year, Lieblein studied the government's database that allowed Ontarians to search what would, woudn't and "may be" covered under the new drug plan.  When Lieblein told me there were quite a few drugs in the "may be" category I suspected the Liberals were just trying to keep some suspense, at the inconvenience of pharmacists, before they declared they were giving away the whole shebang.  Sure enough this seems to be more or less the case, as Lieblein hasn't had to disappoint anyone under 25 yet, whether it be requests for birth control pills, Adderall, or anti-anxiety medication; the drug companies must be thrilled.  (Of course I could get behind a drug plan like this if it was just for life or death medication, but to give away so many drugs for free to youth doesn't seem like what the doctor ordered for our health care system.)

With all of the above in mind I'm reminded of a quote from a much more venerable female politician than Wynne will ever be and who would be appalled by Ontarians demanding more and more from their government: "The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money."  Wynne and the other parties seem content to continue to drive the province off the cliff, unless Brown intends to get serious about making cuts if he gets elected.  But ultimately it comes down to whether or not Ontarians and the press stop daydreaming and tell our politicians to change course.  Otherwise they'll wake up to an irreversible nightmare.

Written by Graeme C. Gordon

There are a few events during the year in which politicians virtually have no choice but to participate.  Canada Day.  Remembrance Day.  Their winter holiday of choice, and also Christmas.  The annual riding barbecue.  The Stampede.  Pride.

Yes, Pride.  In the 48 years since the first "Gay Liberation Marches" took place in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Atlanta, Pride parades have grown in political importance, to the point that non-attendance is essentially out of the question for elected officials with name recognition, or those looking to get some.

Yet one such person has announced his refusal to attend, nearly seven months before Pride Toronto.  Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer, branded early as a social conservative, says "Not everybody marches" to signal support for LGBTQ rights.  He says he has chosen to do so in other ways, such as condemning Russia for its persecution of LGBTQ Chechens.  And he has said repeatedly that he will not reopen debates on such contentious social issues.

All this might be enough for anyone paying careful attention to his announcements.  Most voters do not.  For those who may only skim the headlines, skipping Pride signals outright contempt for the LGBTQ community  which it may well be, in some cases.  In the case of moderate so-cons like Scheer, it signals too much discomfort with the parade itself to make the simple gesture of showing up.

In this, he is not alone.  My fellow Loonie Politics writer J.J. McCullough wrote about his own discomfort with the evolution of Pride in 2014:

Looking at photos of America's earliest Pride parades is a window into a different world.  The marchers of those days, calmly holding hands with their same-sex partners in sensible polo shirts and penny loafers, were certainly subversive, but only to the extent they were seeking to remind a society in denial of the unavoidability of their existence . . . Just as society is most eager to assert its tolerance, Pride redefines the deal.  Endorsing the acceptance of ordinary people distinguishable only by what gender they love now demands an additional stamp of approval for all-purpose indecency and licentiousness.

It's not hard to imagine that Scheer, he of the Moose Jaw honeymoon, might have a problem with public displays of anyone's sexuality.  Or perhaps, like last year, he is unhappy with how politicized Pride has become in other areas, most notably the controversy over police attendance.  Or perhaps he'd simply rather be fishing.  Whatever his reason for not wanting to go, he has a right to it.  I sympathize as someone who has not voluntarily attended any kind of parade since a trip to Disney World about 14 years ago.

Unfortunately for Scheer, politics often requires attendance at events you don't particularly enjoy or care about, especially for a party leader.  If he were still only the MP for Regina — Qu'Appelle, or even just the Speaker of the House of Commons, his absence might have gone unnoticed.  But he is running to replace Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who never met a photo opportunity he didn't like.  If he's going to depend on disaffected Liberals for victory in 2019, showing up at Pride, even in only one city, may be the most obvious way for Scheer to assure them that he is not the rabid so-con the governing Liberals wish he was.

What message is he sending to Conservatives by turning down his open invitation to Pride this soon?  Should we interpret it as an intentional wink to actual rabid so-cons?  More likely, it's an accidental admission that Scheer hasn't learned how to pick his battles.  It's one thing to invite people to say you lack compassion for the working poor when you question the economics of a minimum wage hike.  It's also one thing to open yourself up to cries of misogyny when you believe in your heart of hearts that life begins at conception.  In either of these examples, you're at least standing on principle.  But this?  Scheer is saying that he is willing to face accusations of homophobia, however predictable and unfair, because Pride makes him feel icky for some reason.

If he can't suck it up for a few hours on a summer weekend, he's in the wrong business. Besides, nobody will ask him to take off his shirt.

Photo Credit: CP24

Written by Jess Morgan