It's all perspective. A one bedroom apartment in Victoria runs you $700-1500/mo. But a room in a house costs a fraction of that.

That you barely got by on $1200 a month in Edmonton is a testament to your living standards. Not to the ability to prosper on significantly less. I once spent close to a year in a government funded group living volunteer program that traveled around Canada and had a per person living expenses budget under $400/mo to cover everything(accom, food, utilities, transport, entertainment etc etc) and we prospered. My group spent 3 months living in a suburb of calgary within those constraints. We couldn't afford to buy bread(we made everything by hand), but we lived well. This was while everyone was engaged in 40 hour unpaid volunteer work weeks. And they operated on the same per person budget up until two years ago when their funding was ended.

Now this isn't meant to be an example of how to live, but for everyone who says $1600/mo would have you on the street I like to point out that $400/mo had me kneading bread and arguing marx.



And I do agree with you qz that minimum wage is obviously insufficient for a single mother. Reputable licensed non profit childcare will likely cost as much as someone being paid minimum wage earns. But then you're back to fixing a loose screw with a sledgehammer.

I can't find a source I would consider reputable. But the right wing think tanks that come up in google seem to think between 5-10% of all people earning minimum wage are single parents. Definitely not impetus to retool a large part of our economy.