A full-time worker in the Greater Toronto Area needs at least $27.60 an hour to cover food, shelter, transit, child care and a phone, the Ontario Living Wage Network said Monday. Ontario’s minimum wage is $17.95. The gap is $9.65 an hour, the widest of any region in the province.
Black workers in Ontario start further back. In 2022, Black men earned 77 cents in weekly earnings for every dollar earned by white men, and Black women earned 68 cents, according to a Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives analysis by Sheila Block and Grace-Edward Galabuzi. The same report found that 60% of Black workers hold jobs in the bottom half of wage-earning occupations.
The network released rates for 10 regions on Nov. 9, and every one rose. None is below $21. After the GTA, the highest are $24.75 for Grey, Bruce, Perth, Huron and Simcoe, and $24.10 for Ottawa. In the network’s words, “There is still no region in Ontario where minimum wage is enough to afford the cost of living.”
The living wage is not a law, and no employer has to pay it. It is a calculation of the before-tax pay a worker needs to meet basic costs, after counting government benefits such as the Canada Child Benefit and subtracting taxes.
Two limits on the numbers. The CCPA gap measures weekly earnings, not hourly pay, so it mixes wages with hours worked. And it dates from 2022, so it predates the rent and grocery increases the new living wage reflects.
Put side by side, the figures describe a province where the legal floor sits nearly $10 an hour under what it costs to live in Toronto, and where Black workers were already paid less than white workers before they reached that floor. Black families in Scarborough, Brampton and Ajax do not need another report to know what $17.95 buys.
Queen’s Park can close part of that gap. It can raise the minimum wage toward the living wage, and it can require employers to report pay by race so the underpayment is counted instead of guessed at. The network will publish its next rates in November 2027.
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