Having a strong social safety net, one that is comprehensive and adequate to pay basic needs, places pressure on employers to pay well and provide safe work environments to attract and keep their employees. By reducing benefits to basically starvation levels, that pressure is removed, and unscrupulous employers can reduce wages to next to nothing (min wage in BC is literally one-half it should be in relationship to the cost of living that it was thirty years ago) and boost their profits. It is no coincidence that the BC Liberals are also mindlessly opposed to raising the minimum wage to a fair level--perhaps because their business group friends and donors tell them not to.

There is also the co-relation between hard right ideology, ignorance, and open malevolence for the vulnerable.

And the $610 figure is misleading: if I'm not mistaken, the rates have not increased more than a hundred dollars in nearly forty years. The cost of living has more than tripled.