A severe recession with its tight fiscal aftermath is not a time when one expects improvements in social policy, when major programs like welfare and Employment Insurance struggle to cope with burgeoning caseloads and cost. But there is a bright light on one of Canada’s oldest social programs − minimum wages, which have risen substantially in recent years in every province and territory except one (British Columbia). And BC just announced an end to its freeze on the province’s minimum wage, starting with an increase on March 16, 2011. In January 2003 the Caledon Institute of Social Policy published the first comprehensive analysis of minimum wages in Canada, Minimum Wages in Canada: A Statistical Portrait With Policy Implications. The report plotted trends in adult minimum wages in Canada’s ten provinces and three territories from 1965 through 2001, and investigated the size and key characteristics of the minimum wage workforce nationally and in each province. The Caledon study also calculated the national minimum wage, using a weighted average of provincial and federal rates. The purpose of this measure is to show the national trend in minimum wages, blended according to each province’s relative weight in the workforce. Actual trends in minimum wages vary to a greater or lesser extent from one province and territory to another.