During the Cross Country Checkup conversation on minimum wage, Stacey Schott, a university student studying agronomy, called from Winnipeg and suggested that an increase to minimum wages across the country would put businesses at a disadvantage and result in reduced hours for employees. Rather than raise wages, she suggests reducing the number of deductions and taxes on low-income earners.

Listen to Schott speak with Checkup host Duncan McCue:

We shouldn't raise the minimum wage. What should be done is decrease the amount of deductions on those wages. As a university student, almost all my friends are in minimum wage jobs. What hurts them isn't the amount they get paid, it's the amount of deductions that are taken off their paycheques.

If you decrease the amount of deductions that someone has to pay, that means they'll have more money on their paycheck. You don't need to increase the minimum wage to give people more money. You can do it through other means.

If you increase minimum wage quite a few businesses will have to decrease the number of people on staff, or decrease the number of hours they work. If you keep minimum wage the same, businesses will be happy and they'll stay in business.

I don't think it's right to put businesses at a disadvantage, especially ones that are barely scraping by. It's not fair to business to increase how much they have to spend, especially if they can't or if they're barely able to make it already.

If you create a two-tiered approach then more businesses will hire university or high school students because they can pay a lower wage, and you won't see as many people who need those full-time hours with the higher minimum wage. The only way you'd be able to prevent that is by legislating it and saying businesses need a certain amount of people over this age. To me, government shouldn't be telling a business what to do.