Basic income’s about more than welfare reform, it benefits all Canadians

Basic income is about more than welfare reform. Basic income benefits all Canadians. Author Evelyn L. Forget. Certainly, people who now depend on provincial income assistance and disability support will gain from a predictable income sufficient to allow them to live a modest but comfortable life. They will have the freedom to make decisions on behalf of their families without bureaucratic intervention, and the opportunity to plan better lives for themselves and their children. A basic income addresses deprivation at its source while the current system waits to address the consequences of poverty by spending more on our health-care system, special education, child services, and the justice system. However, the greatest beneficiaries of basic income are those of us who do not currently receive provincial income assistance. Basic income is an insurance policy that protects us against life events. Any one of us can get sick or develop a disability at any point in our lives. Any one of us can have a child with disabilities who alters all our well-laid plans. Any one of us may be called upon to provide extra care for a parent or spouse who becomes ill. People used to living an ordinary middle-class life find out quickly enough how much changes when they become dependent on provincial support at current rates. Even those of us who have been lucky enough to have worked at a good job and responsible enough to save money for the future may find ourselves retired a decade before we planned to leave the workforce, or downsized mid-career in an industry we expected to give us lifelong employment. Those who had the foresight to save their money while they were working are doubly disadvantaged; their assets will exceed those permitted by provincial income assistance, and they will be required to spend their savings before they qualify for provincial support. A lifetime of working to save for a comfortable retirement can disappear in a flash. The changing economy means that more and more of us, especially younger adults, are working at jobs organized in very different ways than they used to be. We may face decades of contract work or multiple part-time jobs. Job insecurity might leave contingent workers for long or short periods of time with no income and little money saved. Women, especially, are still subject to the hard clock of biology. Extended maternity and parental leaves are wonderful for people who manage to work enough hours to qualify for support, but many do not qualify because they have lived through extended periods of insecure and part-time work. How do you build a family while relying on precarious work to support yourself? Life happens. Everyone benefits from basic income whether they receive support from the program or not, in exactly the same way that all Canadians benefit from universal health insurance even if they do not now need hospital care, and in exactly the same way we benefit from fire insurance even if our house doesn’t burn down. Basic income is an insurance policy against unpredictable life events. The cost estimates provided by the Parliamentary Budget Office demonstrate that we can afford to provide Canadians with this insurance. Just as it now seems inconceivable that we would ever allow ordinary people in Canada to be bankrupted by the need for hospital care, one day we will wonder why ordinary working people were required to shoulder all the uncertainties associated with life in a changing economy alone. There are other benefits of a basic income that we also need to acknowledge. Poverty—whether it’s the chronic, grinding, and absolute poverty of some isolated First Nations communities, the relative poverty faced by the children of a single mother in urban Canada, or the many challenges faced by middle-aged adults living alone—is tremendously expensive. It is a false economy to deprive people of the resources they need to live a decent life because we as taxpayers have no choice but to pay for the consequences in the form of health care for their chronic conditions that will get worse with poor diets and poor housing. We have no choice but to pay for the costs of foster care when children are removed from homes because their parents do not have the resources to care appropriately for their families. We will pay for special education when families do not have enough money to provide stable and adequate housing for their children, and send them to school well-fed. The costs of poverty are avoidable. While the primary beneficiaries of a basic income may be the families who receive support, taxpayers will benefit as well. We can continue to allocate our money to the agencies that mop up the effects of years of inadequate diets, inadequate housing, demeaning work and poor education in the form of greater health care expenditure, more money for child welfare services, breakfast programs in schools and more food banks. We can fund more mental health centres and addiction agencies charged with treating the consequences of poverty and marginalization. We can reap the social consequences in terms of rising property crime rates and greater alienation. We can watch as populist political candidates prey on the disaffection of our neighbours. Or we can look at our social programs in this country and acknowledge that we are less generous than most other high-income countries, and that we have the capacity to offer a basic income to Canadians if we want to. Despite its benefits and demonstrated feasibility, basic income remains a controversial proposal in Canada. Many of us, especially those of us who are middle-class professionals, want to believe that we are not vulnerable—that people who access social programs are very different from the rest of us. Recognizing our own vulnerability and that of our children is frightening. The idea of a basic income raises for us a series of profound questions that we rarely confront openly—questions about how we relate to one another in society. However, most people who need the support of a basic income are ordinary people who have faced some unexpected setbacks. The only difference between those who would receive support under a basic income and the rest of us is that they have less money. When I began working my way through the 1,800 cardboard boxes related to Mincome at Library and Archives Canada, very few people in this country were talking about basic income. Between the time I opened the first box and the time I published my first analysis of the health effects of Mincome in 2011, stock markets tumbled in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown. The shock spread through the economy as firms went bankrupt, and workers found themselves without jobs and, in many cases, with compromised pensions. A lifetime of loyalty to an employer seemed to count for little. And, worst of all, the social programs that were supposed to provide a safety net—Employment Insurance, the Canada Pension Plan and provincial income assistance as a last resort—weren’t available to many of the people who found themselves needing help, sometimes for the first time in their lives. In the context of that economic upheaval, the story of a little Prairie town called Dauphin captured the imaginations of people around the world. I’ve been fortunate enough to talk to people in places as different as Finland, Portugal, Korea, and Norway. I’ve told stories about the people who participated in Mincome to audiences in Paris and Geneva. I’ve travelled across Canada and the United States, speaking in church basements and lecture theatres, town halls and hotel ballrooms. Everyone is captivated by the idea of a very ordinary little town that experimented with basic income and eager to hear of its effects on the lives of the strong, hardworking and very ordinary people who lived there. Most of these people were not on welfare when Mincome came along. They were farmers and labourers, hairdressers and shopkeepers. When Mincome was introduced, they were able to offer their children more opportunities and to plan for their futures with greater certainty. But they were still farmers and labourers, hairdressers and shopkeepers. They didn’t quit their jobs, and their lives didn’t change dramatically. Things just got a bit easier for ordinary people who worked really hard to provide for themselves and their families. When universal health insurance was introduced in Canada, its greatest support came from middle-aged women—people who had lived long enough to know that life doesn’t always unfold according to plan. I think it is telling that the strongest and most vocal support for basic income also comes from middle-aged women, whether they live in Tampere or Seoul, Barcelona or Dauphin. We can afford a basic income. The logistics of implementation are not insurmountable. It is merely a question of will. Do we want to offer one another the economic security a basic income can provide? Basic Income for Canadians: The Key to a Healthier, Happier, More Secure Life for All, by Evelyn L. Forget, James Lorimer & Company Ltd., 231 pp., $24.95. Copyright@2018 James Lorimer & Company, reprinted with permission of the publisher. 'Income insecurity is the defining characteristic of the lives of too many people, and not necessarily the people we imagine': Forget What drew you to this topic? "I first came across basic income as an undergraduate at Glendon College in Toronto. It was 1974, and I found myself, almost by accident, in a first-year economics class. My professor, Ian McDonald, introduced the topic of guaranteed annual income as it was then called, and talked about an experiment called mincome that was being conducted in Manitoba. With charts and graphs, he showed us how the current system of income assistance creates walls that prevent people from becoming independent; if they earn a little money, they lose not only their welfare cheque but also all the benefits, such as drug and dental care, that accompanies income assistance. He explained that working was no guarantee against poverty; low-waged workers struggled to provide for themselves and their families. He used the tools of economics to show us how families were always worse off when they received support directly in the form of goods such as food than they would be if they received the equivalent amount of money. People who have money, he reminded us, have the opportunity to spend that money however they think best and people always know better than bureaucrats or charities what their families need most. The greatest gift of income security, though, is the ability to take risks and to imagine different outcomes. If mincome was successful, it would create income security for many more families and allow young people in particular to imagine different kinds of lives than their parents lived. "Over the course of that year, I came to better understand my own relationship to money. My father had died when I was twelve, and my mother found herself with three young kids to support and few job skills. She worked hard, and relied on Mother’s Allowance for the first little while. I never went without, but I learned very quickly the importance of money. In particular, I understood how important it is to have your own money under your own control. "Years later, I found myself working as a health economist in Winnipeg’s downtown teaching hospital. It doesn’t take very long to realize that many of the resources of the health-care system are being used to treat the consequences of poverty—the effects of years of poor housing, and poor diets, and demeaning work, and marginalization, and all of the things that accompany poverty. It seemed obvious to me that we could either go on treating the consequences of poverty, or we could invest a little bit of money upfront and make sure that people have enough money to live a decent life with dignity. So I went looking for the mincome data, which had never been fully analyzed." Why is your book important and who should read it? "I believe income insecurity is the defining characteristic of the lives of too many people, and not necessarily the people we imagine. The economy has changed dramatically in recent decades. We still have pockets of poverty and deprivation, but we have even larger numbers of people who are trying to negotiate the changing labour market. Entire industries are being challenged by technology, by artificial intelligence: what do we do about the people who are displaced? There are plenty of jobs to fill, but it isn’t easy to turn a factory worker into a nursing home attendant, or a miner into a network analyst. Our social programs were all designed at a time when most people worked in standard, full-time jobs with benefits. Now, these jobs are disappearing and being replaced by part-time and contract jobs. Many of these jobs pay too little, or offer too few guaranteed hours, to ensure that even full-time workers can escape poverty. Some people may do well when they are working, but they can never be sure that their contract will be renewed. A basic income can fill the gaps between our social programs. It’s a promise that, no matter what happens in your life, you will have enough to live a decent life. "We’ve seen what happens to countries in which too many people feel left behind by the economic changes that are taking place. "I hope that Canadians from many backgrounds will read this book, including policymakers at the federal and provincial levels. I interviewed a lot of people, and I think some readers might be surprised by the extent of economic insecurity that exists among working people. We’ve often been told we can’t afford a basic income, but the evidence I present suggests that the net program cost is very similar to the costs of other social programs that we’ve decided we can afford. "Most of all, I hope everyone can see that a basic income is an investment in the kind of society we want to build. Whether we support the program or not, this is a conversation we need to have as Canadians." The Hill Times

Basic income’s about more than welfare reform, it benefits all Canadians

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Basic income’s about more than welfare reform, it benefits all Canadians

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