by Kate McFarland | Dec 8, 2016 | News
In a unanimous decision on Tuesday, December 7, the Legislative Assembly of Prince Edward Island (PEI), Canada, agreed to “pursue a partnership with the federal government for the establishment of a universal basic income pilot project” on PEI.
Peter Bevan-Baker
CC BY-SA 3.0
The motion was originally proposed by Green Party Leader Peter Bevan-Baker, and received the support of all four political parties in the province, which have been united for well over a year in their support for investigating a basic income guarantee (BIG).
Bevan-Baker drew inspiration from past experiments in Manitoba (the Mincome trial of the late 1970s) as well as the pilot scheduled to begin next year in Ontario. He believes that PEI’s small size — the island has only about 150,000 residents — would make it an ideal setting for an additional pilot study. Hugh Segal, adviser for the Ontario pilot, has also encouraged other provinces, such as PEI, to run their own trials of basic income.
According to Bevan-Baker, a pilot project is necessary “so we can evaluate whether the benefits outweigh the costs” — as quoted in a CBC News report about the successful motion — where the costs, in his view, might include a work disincentive effect as well as financial costs to the government. The main benefit specified in the motion is the reduction or elimination of poverty. However, the motion also mentions many other possible positive effects, including “local economic growth, supporting entrepreneurship, reducing administrative complexity and costs, improving working conditions, reducing crime, improving health, and helping to build vibrant rural communities.” CBC News quotes Bevan-Baker as saying, “A universal basic income could enable the greatest unleashing of human potential ever seen.”
The full text of the motion is as follows:
WHEREAS implementing a universal basic income in Prince Edward Island would significantly reduce or potentially eliminate poverty in the province;
AND WHEREAS a universal basic income would likely have many other positive effects,
including local economic growth, supporting entrepreneurship, reducing administrative
complexity and costs, improving working conditions, reducing crime, improving health, and helping to build vibrant rural communities;
AND WHEREAS all four Prince Edward Island political parties have indicated their support for exploring a universal basic income;
AND WHEREAS the federal government has indicated an interest in exploring a universal basic income;
THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that the Legislative Assembly urge government to pursue a partnership with the federal government for the establishment of a universal basic income pilot project in Prince Edward Island;
THEREFORE BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that Government shall provide an update on the progress of this initiative in every session of this assembly.
The motion is still only an early step toward a basic income pilot in PEI. If the province is to actually implement a pilot, it will require cooperation and support from the federal government. The PEI Department of Family and Human Services has previously issued the following statement:
The Province supports the concept of the Basic Income Guarantee. We have been consistent in our response that any pilot project in this area would require active and committed federal participation. We are always open to partnerships with the federal government to improve the financial well being of the residents in our province.
No specific model for the basic income has been proposed for the (possible) pilot. The Working Group for a Liveable Income — an advocacy group that has been instrumental in promoting BIG in PEI for over a decade — explicitly supports a negative income tax (NIT), in which “if the person receiving BIG gets other personal income, the maximum level benefit will be affected by a reduction rate”. Segal has also recommended an NIT for the Ontario pilot. While ‘universal basic income’ is often used to refer to a universal cash grant with no reduction based on other earnings, in contrast to a NIT (cf. “What is the Basic Income Guarantee?”), it is not certain whether the PEI motion intends the phrase in this sense (which would entail that PEI is pursuing a form of BIG less commonly discussed in Canada).
References
Motion No. 83, Legislative Assembly of Prince Edward Island.
“P.E.I. MLAs effusive in their support for basic-income pilot project,” CBC News, December 7, 2016.
Kevin Yarr, “’A rare opportunity’ for basic income pilot project on P.E.I,” CBC News, November 23, 2016.
Reviewed by Dawn Howard
Photo CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Government of Prince Edward Island
by Kate McFarland | Dec 6, 2016 | News
Andrew Weaver, a climate scientist and member of British Columbia’s Legislative Assembly for the Green Party, has proposed that the province test a basic income guarantee in one or more of its towns.
Weaver outlined his recommendations for a BC pilot in a report in The Tyee. Rejecting Hugh Segal’s recommendation for a three-year pilot in Ontario pilots as inadequate, Weaver believes that the pilots should run for at least five years (“the amount of time it takes to finish a post-secondary degree”).
He also recommends conducting the trials in towns of 5,000 to 6,000 people, preferably with wide income inequality, and possibly testing different implementation in different towns. Regarding eligibility for the pilot, Weaver says that “a Green government would likely determine eligibility based on the tax year before the announcement is made, thus avoiding an influx of people hoping to opportunistically take advantage of the payments.”
The Green Party of British Columbia won its first seat in the provincial legislature in the 2013 general election, when Weaver was elected to represent Oak Bay-Gordon Head district in the Greater Victoria region. Overall, the Greens received about 8% of the popular vote. The next British Columbia general election will be held on May 9, 2017. Kamloops This Week reports Weaver as declaring that if the Greens were to take office, they would attempt to implement a basic income pilot by the end of the first year. At present, however, this remains a very big “if”.
A series of posts on Weaver’s blog, contributed by Sarah Miller, explore the idea of a basic income and its implementation in British Columbia:
References
Andrew MacLeod (November 26, 2016) “BC Greens Pitch a Five-Year Basic Income Pilot Project” The Tyee.
Jessica Klymchuk (November 30, 2016) “Green Leader Weaver visits Kamloops, chides NDP for accepting corporate donations” Kamloops This Week.
Reviewed by Dawn Howard.
Photo (Sandon, British Columbia) CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Jasperdo
by Kate McFarland | Nov 29, 2016 | News
A basic income pilot in Scotland is appearing ever more likely in light of meetings in the council area of Fife and city of Glasgow held in late November.
Interest in basic income has been growing in Scotland in 2016. In March, the country’s largest political party, the Scottish National Party (SNP), passed a motion supporting basic income. In May, interest in the idea was further stoked when Professor Guy Standing, co-founder of BIEN and Professorial Research Associate at SOAS, delivered the Angus Millar Lecture for the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) Scotland. Standing’s lecture, which focused on the topic of a basic income for Scotland, was followed by a roundtable event involving civil servants of the Scottish government, local authorities, and members of think tanks and community groups.
These discussions eventuated in the scheduling of multiple BI-related events in November, timed to coincidence with Standing’s return to Scotland to give the Kilbrandon Lecture at the University of Strathclyde. These included two meetings on basic income pilots — one with the Fife Council, the other with the Glasgow City Council — in addition to the official launch of Citizen’s Basic Income Network Scotland (CBINS), BIEN’s Scottish affiliate.
Fife Council Meeting
On Friday, November 25, the Fife Council held a roundtable event in Dunfermline to discuss ideas for a pilot in the council area.
The event brought together councillors, civil servants, members of CBINS, and other individuals interested in basic income.
Standing attended the meeting and delivered an overview of pilots conducted in other parts of the world and their potential implications for Scotland. Following Standing’s presentation, participants discussed next steps toward implementing a pilot, and decided to convene a group to carry out an initial feasibility study in early 2017. Then, if the group determines that sufficient funding can be secured, it will move forward with a formal design process.
Jamie Cooke, head of RSA Scotland, also participated in the meeting. Commenting on the progress made in planning the pilot, he says, “This is a significant step forward for basic income in Scotland, giving a very realistic chance of a pilot taking place in Scotland within the next couple of years.”
The Fairer Fife Commission, an independent commission created by the Fife Council, initially recommended a basic income pilot in a report published in November 2015, where it was one of 40 policy recommendations for achieving a “fairer Fife” by 2030. Specifically, it encouraged the Fife Partnership, Fife’s community planning board, to select a town in the council area in which to run a pilot informed by global best practice (e.g., at the time the report was written, the pilot devised by the Dutch city of Utrecht). The pilot was included among the Commission’s anti-poverty proposals, which otherwise focused largely on promoting work and employment.
Glasgow City Council Meeting
Glasgow City Council building, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 小豪豪 Wu
Glasgow, Scotland’s largest city, is also considering a basic income pilot.
On Thursday, November 24, the Glasgow City Council convened a meeting to discuss ideas for the city.
According to Cooke, discussions at this meeting demonstrated that the city has “a more developed and enthusiastic support for basic income” than advocates had previously realized, and the council agreed to continue to look into the idea.
Speaking at the launch of CBINS on Saturday, November 26, Glasgow Councillor Matt Kerr announced that the council had instructed its officers to begin researching and designing a local pilot study.
More Information
Fairer Fife Commission (November 2015) “Fairness Matters”
Report proposing a basic income pilot as one strategy to address poverty in Fife.
Kathleen Nutt (November 22, 2016) “Trial for a basic income for all may go ahead in Scotland,” The National.
Initial media announcement in advance of the Dunfermline meeting on a basic income pilot for Fife.
Thanks to Jamie Cooke at RSA Scotland for much of the information contained in this article.
Reviewed by Genevieve Shanahan.
Cover Photo: Castle and walled garden in Pittenweem, Fife, CC BY 2.0 Glen Bowman.
by Kate McFarland | Nov 20, 2016 | News
Eight, a charitable organization based in Belgium, is preparing to run a basic income pilot in Uganda (as previously announced in Basic Income News). The two-year pilot is set to launch in January 2017, and will form the basis for a documentary.
Documentary filmmaker Steven Janssens and sociologist Maarten Goethals founded the charity Eight in 2015, with the vision of reducing global inequality and allowing all people the opportunity to flourish. Eight euros per week is the amount needed to provide a basic income for one adult and two children in impoverished areas, such as parts of Uganda.
According to Janssens, the founders were inspired partially by their own experiences in work and travel, and partially by research and writing on basic income — including the writings of Philippe Van Parijs, Sarath Davala and Guy Standing’s book on the Indian basic income pilots (Basic Income: A Transformative Policy for India), Rutger Bregman’s Utopia for Realists, Eldar Shafir and Sendhil Mullainathan’s Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, and the results of other basic income pilots, such as those in Dauphin and Namibia.
Two-Year Pilot of Village-Wide Basic Income
As a first step towards its vision, Eight is preparing to launch a pilot study in the Fort Portal region of Uganda in January 2017. The two-year pilot will involve the distribution of unconditional cash transfers to all residents of an undisclosed village of 50 households.
Eight officially registered the village for the pilot in July, and marked this accomplishment by publishing video footage (a “moodclip”) from the location:
https://vimeo.com/181199016
The amount of the basic income has been fixed at approximately 30 percent of the average income of lower-income families in Uganda (read more about the decision here), amounting to 18.25 USD per month for adults and 9.13 USD for children (small changes to adjust for inflation are possible before the pilot is launched in January). Eight is cooperating with a local bank and local telecom operator to arrange for the disbursement of payments using mobile phones.
The organization will be primarily investigating the impact of the basic income along four dimensions: education participation of girls and women, access to health care, engagement in democratic institutions, and local economic development.
Anthropologists from the University of Ghent, Belgium, are helping to develop and conduct a study of the effect of the basic income, and are presently collecting data on the state of the village prior to the initiation of the pilot. They will compare these initial data with data collected during and after the basic income intervention.
Janssens emphasizes that the study is truly a pilot — intended to inform more and larger basic income trials: “Important to mention is that it is really a pilot project. From our experiences with this pilot we will learn and adjust where necessary, because in the long term we want to scale-up to more villages as our organization grows.” He adds that, after two years, “the priority of Eight will lay in the possibilities to scale up in a good way.”
Village One: The Documentary
Eight does not only plan to publish the results of the pilot study in journals. In addition, it will create a cinematic documentary, Village One, which will trace the story of the introduction of the basic income and its effects on the community over the course of the study.
Currently, Village One is anticipated to be released in October 2018. Janssens — who describes the documentary as “like a siamese twin” to the pilot — plans to disseminate it through television, the Internet, and film festivals.
https://vimeo.com/136620874
Musician and actor Jenne Decleir has already begun composing the soundtrack to Village One. In a short video, Decleir encourages others to join the cause and donate eight euros a week (“the cost of three servings of french fries, without any sauce”):
https://vimeo.com/170170494
Eight has received a sufficient amount in contributions to fund the entire first year of the pilot and two-thirds of the second. At present, Eight is still collecting donations for the remainder of the second year and the documentary.
Visit eight.world and follow Eight on Facebook and Twitter for more information.
Thanks to Steven Janssens for input on this article and Genevieve Shanahan for review.
Images & videos used courtesy of Steven Janssens.
by Kate McFarland | Nov 14, 2016 | News
The Nordic Conference on Basic Income Pilots was held in Christiansborg Palace, the seat of the Danish Parliament (Folketinget), in Copenhagen from September 22 to 23.
The Alternative — a green political party that currently holds nine seats in the Danish Parliament — was the official host of the conference. BIEN’s Danish affiliate, BIEN Danmark, organized the event.
All 148 seats in the conference hall were filled for the two-day series of lectures on basic income pilots, which sold out in the preceding week.
BIEN co-chairs Karl Widerquist and Louise Haagh were among the presenters. Louise, who wrote a Basic Income News feature on the conference, opines that, overall, “the Nordic conference went some way to create a new platform for a more positive debate about BI in the wider society.”
Karl describes the conference as “exhilarating”: “People were there from all the Nordic countries, each of which has a very active movement for basic income. The idea is getting very close to the centers of power in several Nordic countries.”
PROFESSIONAL VIDEOGRAPHY
A professional film crew recorded videos of all presentations, panel debates, and Q&A sessions, which are compiled in the YouTube playlist Nordic Conference on Basic Income Pilots 2016:
On the first day of the conference, speakers included (in order of appearance), Guy Standing (BIEN co-founder and honorary co-president), Olli Kangas (Kela), Sjir Hoeijmakers (Vereniging Basisinkomen), Bjarke Friborg (the academic union Dansk Magisterforening), Anne Marie Frederiksen (consultant for the Danish municipality Aarhus), Torsten Gejl (MP for the Alternative), Nicole Teke (International Coordinator of the French Movement for a Basic Income), Karl Widerquist (BIEN co-chair), Niels Meyer (former Professor of Physics at the Technical University of Denmark), The Society Think Tank, and GiveDirectly.
The second day saw presentations from (again in order of appearances) Nanna Kildal (Research Professor affiliated with Uni Research Rokkan Centre), Thomas Boje (Department of Social Sciences at Roskilde University), Torsten Gejl (same one as before), Annika Lillemets (Swedish MP for the Green Party), Finn Sørensen (MP for the Red-Green Alliance), Louise Haagh (BIEN co-chair), Christian Engström (former Member of the European Parliament for the Swedish Pirate Party), and Martin Jordö (Swedish journalist and politician).
In addition to the series of lectures and debates, a special dinner was held at the end of the first day–featuring entertainment by the 14-member swing orchestra Zirkus. Zirkus was also responsible to creating a special trailer that was publicized in the week before the conference:
Commenting on Zirkus’s live performance, conference organizer Karsten Lieberkind (BIEN-Danmark) says, “This band is something special, both in terms of visual performance and music. I think everyone was in a state of amazement.”
IN THE PRESS
The Swedish online magazine Syre, which publishes content on social issues from a green-oriented viewpoint, printed a review of the Nordic Conference on Basic Income Pilots (in Swedish). Indeed, the conference was the magazine’s cover story for the month.
In addition to presenting a general summary of conference, the Syre review focused on participants’ views about the relationship between basic income and organized labor, soliciting opinions from Guy Standing and Malmö basic income activist Göran Hansson. The author also speaks to Thomas Boje about basic income and democracy, and Karl Widerquist about the rise of the recent basic income movement in the US.
Read Karsten Lieberkind’s English translation of the review here on Basic Income News.
REFLECTIONS FROM ORGANIZER KARSTEN LIEBERKIND
Torsten Gejl, MP for the Alternative and an enthusiastic supporter of the conference, has shared these words from Karsten (read Torsten’s full post here):
“To me, this conference is the culmination of not only the preparations for the conference itself but of a process, a gradual but inevitable change in the mindset of many people. maybe in society as a whole, a change in our conceptions of work and labour, that work is not synonymous with labour and that people contribute to society in all sorts of ways. It is about time that we recognize this as a fact.
“Also, it is the realization that people have a right to life, as stated in the the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In a civilized society, this must, at all times, be an unconditional, non-negotiable fact. And nobody, no individual, no group, no organisation, no society or state should ever be allowed to come between a person and his or her basic needs for survival. Thanks, Karl, for those words.
“And a final word about the Alternative. We may have slightly different views on how to approach the idea and implementation of an Unconditional Basic Income (Ubetinget Basisindkomst), but we most certainly agree on one point: that by trusting people you get so much more in return than you could ever get by exercising power and control.”
Karsten Lieberkind with Louise Haagh
Credit: Michael Husen, BIEN Danmark
As Karsten relates in communication with Basic Income News, the conference has resulted in new connections and correspondence between BIEN-Danmark and the Alternative.
Additionally, the event helped to inspire BIEN-Danmark to pursue efforts to engage labor unions:
“We have long enough been in the defensive about our cause when it comes to labour unions, so now is the time to be in the offensive as we have a program that will actually prepare labour unions for the future.”
Dansk Magisterforening (DM), the Danish Association of Masters and PhDs, is one national labor union that is open to the idea of basic income. As Bjarke Friborg, the co-chair of DM, explained in his talk at the conference, the union does not endorse basic income; however, DM has a positive attitude toward pilot projects and perceives a “shared agenda” between DM and the basic income movement.
Summarizing the upshot of the Nordic Conference on Basic Income Pilots, Karsten says, “I think the most important thing that came out of this conference is that we have established very good and friendly connections with both DM and the Alternative, based on mutual respect and recognition. Also, it has strengthened the ties between the Nordic basic income movements to the benefit of future cooperation.”
Thanks to Karsten Lieberkind for information and input for this article.
Article cover photo: Christiansborg Palace CC BY 2.0 Kristoffer Trolle.
