Sam Magavern, a volunteer attorney for the City of Buffalo Living Wage Commission will be joining Hamilton Wentworth school board Trustee Alex Johnstone  and Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction Director Tom Cooper on a panel on A Living Wage at the Centre for Civic Governance at Columbia Institute’s The Sharing of Good Ideas! forum on Saturday, May 26 at the Workers Arts and Heritage Centre in Hamilton. 

The panel will follow lunch time remarks by economist Jim Stanford on A Living Wage. Stanford is a researcher with the Canadian Autoworkers and a research associate with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

In April 2010 the City of New Westminster, BC became the first municipality in Canada to pass a Living Wage Policy. At least 140 US cities have successfully implemented a living wage, including New York, Chicago, Boston, Detroit, Cleveland, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Miami and Buffalo. Almost half of the urban population in the US lives in a city covered by a legislated municipal living wage.