by Kate McFarland | Sep 19, 2017 | News
The 17th North American Basic Income Guarantee (NABIG) Congress will be held in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada from May 24-27, 2018.
The annual congress is co-hosted by BIEN’s two North American affiliates, the US Basic Income Guarantee (USBIG) network and the Basic Income Canada Network (BICN), with locations alternating between the US and Canada. The 2017 congress was held in New York, New York, and drew more than 100 attendees and 50 speakers.
The location of the 2018 congress is notable as one of three sites of a guaranteed annual income pilot project launched by the provincial government of Ontario. The government is currently enrolling participants from the Hamilton, Brantford, and Brant County areas, as well as the Thunder Bay area. A third pilot will begin in the city of Lindsay later in 2017.
During the three-year experiment, individual participants will receive up to $16,989 per year unconditionally ($24,027 per year for couples), an amount of the payments was chosen as equivalent to 75% of the Low Income Measure in the province. The amount of the payments will be reduced by 50% of any additional earned income. (The ) Although distinct from a basic income, the program is similar insofar as it provides regular and unconditional cash payments to beneficiaries. (It differs in that the amount of transfers depends on income and household status.) The effect of the unconditional payments will be examined with respect to health (including mental health), food security, housing stability, education, and workforce participation.
BICN will provide more information about NABIG 2018 on its website and social media when available.
Reviewed by Robert Gordon.
Photo: Albion Falls, Hamilton, Ontario CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 JP Newell
by Kate McFarland | Aug 8, 2017 | News
The 2017 North America Basic Income Guarantee (NABIG) Congress was held June 16-18 in New York. Some papers are now available online.
Event Recap
The annual NABIG Congress is jointly organized by BIEN’s North American affiliates, the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network (USBIG) and Basic Income Canada Network (BICN).
In 2017, the 16th NABIG Congress was held at Hunter College’s Silberman School of Social Work in New York, New York, from June 16 through 18.
The event was the largest NABIG Congress in its history, drawing over 100 attendees and featuring over 50 speakers. Keynote speakers including Frances Fox Piven (Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology, CUNY Graduate Center), Andy Stern (former President of SEIU), Juliana Bidadanure (Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University), Joe Huston (Give Directly), and Chris Hughes (Facebook co-founder). Plenary sessions were also held on Welfare Rights and the basic income movement in Canada, including the guaranteed minimum income pilot soon to be launched in Ontario.
Parallel sessions covered a diverse range of context. As USBIG Chair Michael Howard describes in his summary of the congress (see the July 2017 USBIG NewsFlash), “Quite a few sessions focused on movement building, from local to global levels, including two sessions on grassroots organizing, and sessions on cultural and conversational contexts, communication, and messaging. Other topics discussed included child benefits, women, inequality and economic rents, basic income experiments from New Jersey to Africa, costs and financial aspects of basic income schemes (including blockchains), growth and degrowth, and philosophical and religious arguments for basic income.”
The 2017 NABIG Congress also featured two musical performances. Singer-songwriter Brandy Moore revisited her song “Just Because I’m Alive,” which she originally performed at the 2016 NABIG Congress in Winnipeg. Additionally, John Mize closed the conference by performing his new song “B.I.G.” with his son.
A full schedule of the event can be viewed here.
For additional perspectives on the congress from participants, see “(IDEA/Child Find)+ Basic Income = Equity” by Chioma Oruh (June 20, 2017) and “Recap: North American Basic Income Guarantee (NABIG)” by Ryan M Harrison (June 20, 2017).
Content Available Online
Several papers and presentations from the conference are now available in the USBIG discussion paper archives, including (as of July 2017) the following:
– Barbara Boraks: “Consensus or Discord- It’s Our Choice: A Values Based Framework For a Basic Income Model”
– Karen Glass: “Ontario Basic Income Pilot”
– Rachel Presser: “Why UBI Should Make the Earned Income Tax Credit Obsolete”
– Steven Pressman: “A LITTLE BIG: The Case for Child Allowances”
– Steven Pressman: “Ecology vs. the Economy: Lessons from Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century”
– Sheila Regehr: “Dignity or Degradation: What should be the value base for building a benefit system?”
– Cameron Weber: “The Actually-Existing Welfare State in the USA and One Possible Transformation to a Basic Income”
– Karl Widerquist: “The Cost of Basic Income: Back of the Envelope Calculations”
Additional papers may be uploaded later.
Photo: Mingling after Plenary (credit: Basic Income Guarantee Minnesota)
Reviewed by Russell Ingram
by Ashley | Jul 28, 2017 | News
Pictured: Sam Haque, founder of Wise Media, social entrepreneur in Canada. Credit to: Steve Russell, Toronto Star
Mowat Centre Report shows how basic income can be a transformative support network for social entrepreneurs to solve society’s deeply entrenched issues. An online platform could help do this. Of course, HostiServer the best for websites trying to project a strong online presence could be useful. Moreover, the report suggests a thriving social mission ecosystem can be an outcome of basic income that be integrated and measured in ongoing pilots.
Canada is one of many countries leading the world in the new stage of paradigm shift politics by piloting universal basic income in its communities. Anchor institutions have been weighing in on special topics for researchers to consider as basic income pilot projects are ongoing. For example, University of Toronto’s Mowat Centre recently published a report titled, Basic Income Examining the Potential Impact of a Basic Income on Social Entrepreneurs. Authors Michael Urban and Christine Yip highlight the three main pathways basic income may impact social entrepreneurs, including by:
- “Reducing barriers to entry into social entrepreneurship, thereby helping create a more diverse and representative social entrepreneurship community.
- Enabling social entrepreneurs to build their organizations and their own capacities by adding to and improving their skill sets.
- Helping to protect social entrepreneurs against illness and provide the psychological space required for social innovation to occur by reducing individuals’ financial stress and anxiety”
A basic income could help derisk social entrepreneurship “for those whose life circumstances have reduced their ability to absorb the potential downsides of risk-taking.” Poverty as a whole costs Canada between $72 billion and $84 billion annually. A snapshot of experiences of historically marginalized populations in Canada include:
- Indigenous Peoples (including First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples) are overrepresented among the population of people experiencing homeless in Canada
- The United Nations has called housing and homelessness a national emergency in Canada
- The cost of socioeconomic disparities in the healthcare system account for 20% of all healthcare spending
- One third of food bank users were children in 2016
- 20% of families of color are experiencing poverty compared to 5% of white families
- All seniors receiving the Guaranteed Income Supplement live below the most basic standard of living in Canada calculated at $18,000 per year, whereas seniors receive about $17,000 per year
While precarious employment has increased by 50% in Canada over the past two decades, Mowat Centre posits that universal basic income can empower historically marginalized people to be social entrepreneurs. More importantly, the report suggests empowering this population is particularly important as they can use their lived experience with some of society’s most deeply entrenched social issues to recommend new models of living that are more sustainable and equitable for future generations.
Due to these new policy and economic structures supported by social entrepreneurs, this would lead to a paradigm shift in social interactions that would introduce new ways of thinking and co-existing:
“A basic income could help to shift society from a system where an individual’s worth is determined by the amount of money they earn to one where individuals earn esteem through the ways they choose to use the money to which everyone is automatically entitled. When conceived in this basic way, a basic income represents a validation of every individual’s inherent worth and, by extension, a validation of and support for their freedom to choose the life path that they see as most appropriate for them and the contributions they make to society in doing so.”
By helping to potentially further support role models and community leaders making positive impacts in their neighborhoods, a basic income is able to make social entrepreneurship a more appealing and viable career path. This may attract a critical mass of people to integrating principles of social entrepreneurship into their ways of living, beyond their career. A basic income can help sustain social entrepreneurship by providing financial protection from unexpected losses in income. Another positive effect is bolstering the holistic health and wellness of a social entrepreneur by reducing stress and anxiety created by financial insecurity and instability. Chronic stress and anxiety can lead to chronic illnesses such as depression, cardiovascular disease, obesity, and diabetes among others. Living with anything like this can be hard for anyone, especially if they are not sure how to deal with it. It then comes as no surprise to find that some people may have checked out sites similar to https://www.canadacannabisdispensary.co/product-category/edibles/ (as medical marijuana products are known to have relaxing properties) in the hopes of finding alternative ways of managing how they are feeling.
Particularly among historically marginalized populations, these chronic illnesses are disproportionately prevalent, which adds to how, under the current structure, they experience increased barriers to social entrepreneurship. By alleviating these stressors, a basic income could be a pathway in healing historical trauma and inequities between classes of people. It could also allow people to access options like CBD pills without worrying as much about the potential finances.
However, the Mowat Centre also mentioned a list of outcomes from a basic income that social entrepreneurs and ongoing pilots should consider to create the necessary supports to ensure this social ecosystem can thrive:
- Allocate additional resources from basic income to expanding sufficient support system for social entrepreneurship to ensure accessibility to career pathway and mitigate amount of well-intentioned, but ultimately unproductive business models and innovations
- Consider incentives for cross-sector partnerships in social entrepreneurship to prepare the broader political, economic, and social infrastructure in communities to absorb the potential increase in effort by empowered social entrepreneurs to fulfill their missions
- Ensure sufficient accountability mechanisms through adoption of universal impact measurement practice, training/coaching, and peer-mentoring for social entrepreneurs to achieve quality and standard metrics that are customized to their business model to support the monitoring of outcomes and social impact
- Consider social entrepreneur wage and labor policies to ensure equity between employer, employees and volunteers
- Consider ongoing measurement of social impact in the field based on lived experience of historically marginalized populations to ensure that basic income is not assumed to have solved social issues like poverty or barriers to social mobility, but rather there are metrics to offer ongoing evaluation of status of social issues to inform innovations
More information at:
American Psychological Association, “Understanding chronic stress,” July 2017
Canada Without Poverty, “Just the Facts,” July 2017
Laurie Monsebraaten, “Basic income hailed as way to give people chance to chase their dreams,” Toronto Star, 25th May 2017
Michael Crawford Urban and Christine Yip, “Basic Impact: Examining the Potential Impact of a Basic Income on Social Entrepreneurs,” Mowat Centre, May 2017
by Kate McFarland | Jul 26, 2017 | News
Dutch journalist Rutger Bregman, whose bestselling book Utopia for Realists was influential in generating interest and support in basic income in The Netherlands, spoke on basic income at TED2017, held April 24-28 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
The overall theme of this official TED conference was “The Future You,” including talks by scientists and engineers on artificial intelligence and robotics. Bregman was among the speakers selected to discuss a “human response” to such technological developments.
Despite the conference’s focus on AI and automation, Bregman does not frame basic income as a response to technological unemployment. Instead, his starting point is to challenge the idea that poor people are poor because they are lazy, irresolute, or inexperienced in handling money. As reflected in the title of his talk, Bregman argues that poverty doesn’t result from a lack of character but simply from a lack of cash–and that, correspondingly, the best way to end poverty is just to give money to the poor. To bolster this claim, Bregman outlines the findings of Canada’s Mincome experiment, a four-year experiment of guaranteed annual income conducted in Manitoba in the 1970s. Bregman further argues that basic income would liberate not only the poor but also the many other individuals who, in the current economy, are forced to work long hours in unnecessary and unfulfilling jobs.
The talk met enthusiastic response from the audience, who applauded at lines such as Bregman’s remark that the government should do away with paternalistic bureaucrats overseeing welfare programs and just give their salaries to the poor people they’re supposed to help. Bregman wrapped up to a standing ovation.
The video of “Poverty isn’t a lack of character; it’s a lack of cash” was later uploaded to the TED website–where it had surpassed one million views by early July.
Watch the Complete Talk Below:
Cover Photo (Bregman at TED2017 – The Future You): CC BY-NC 2.0 TED Conference
by Andre Coelho | Jul 23, 2017 | News
John Horgan and Andrew Weaver. Credit to: British Columbia New Democratic Party.
Since the 30th of May 2017 that British Columbia (BC) political parties NDP (New Democratic Party) and Greens have an agreement signed to collaborate in the present regional legislature, which can be read in the NDP webpage. This comes after an historical regional election process which saw the end of the Liberal Party majority in BC, held since 2001.
This event is also relevant because the unprecedented agreement refers basic income as part of its agenda. At the end of its Section 3 – Policy Initiatives, under the subtitle “Making life more affordable”, it can be read: “One aspect of the poverty reduction strategy is to design and implement a basic income pilot to test weather giving people a basic income is an effective way to reduce poverty, improve health, housing and employment.”
Other issues covered by the agreement are the maintenance and improvement of public services (mainly health and education), rolling out of environmental protection policies such as expanding the polluting emissions tax and measures to set better democratic mechanisms in BC. It becomes clear from this general political party agreement that basic income is a part of a broad set of policies which aim at improving British Columbians lives, while protecting the environment and established public services.
More information at:
Rob Shaw, “NDP, Greens take aim at Kinder Morgan, Site C in power-sharing deal”, The Province, May 29th 2017
