by Andre Coelho | Jan 24, 2020 | News
A new report from the Basic Income Canada Network (BICN) details how Canada could improve income security for everyone, with three options for a basic income for adults, while maintaining current child benefits for those under 18.
“We’ve seen interest in basic income grow far beyond theoretical debates. BICN is now frequently asked what it would look like in Canada,” said Chandra Pasma, a member of the BICN Advisory Council and co-author of the report. “Our report clearly shows there are multiple options Canadian governments could use to implement a successful basic income program.”
A basic income is an unconditional cash transfer from government to individuals to enable everyone to meet their basic needs, participate in society, and live with dignity, regardless of work status. The call for a basic income is growing, including from public health and environmental sectors, Nobel laureate economists, marginalized communities and people concerned about precarious work and technological disruption. The urgent need to reduce inequality and its costly consequences has led some researchers, advocates, and politicians to the conclusion that basic income is inevitable.
Statistics Canada’s Social Policy Simulation Database and Model (SPSD/M) was used to model the funding of the options, combining existing resources with changes to the tax/transfer system, including tax fairness measures. All options are based on BICN’s principles and goals–to reduce inequality, including inequality between women and men; prevent poverty; provide everyone with greater income security, including middle-income earners; and ensure the wealthiest individuals and corporations contribute their fair share. Each option in the report, Basic Income: Some Policy Options for Canada, meets these overall goals.
Option 1 is for 18-64 year olds based on household income, operating much like child benefits, with the $22,000/year ($31,113 for a couple) benefit amount gradually reducing as other income increases; seniors benefits remain in place.
Option 2 is similarly income-tested and is for all adults, including seniors.
Option 3 is a universal model, sometimes called a demogrant, that provides the same benefit amount to every individual adult.
“The options vary administratively so don’t get sidetracked by the size of the different up-front costs,” notes Sheila Regehr, Chair of BICN. “It doesn’t mean one is much more expensive than another. The options have similar results for people and they are all funded from similar sources.” The report also notes that other funding sources for a basic income are possible, as well as downstream savings that can help make it even more affordable.
“Basic income in Canada is not a question of possibilities, but of priorities,” said Regehr. “It is clear from child and seniors benefits that it works for many Canadians already. The federal government’s priority now must be to take leadership to make it work for everybody; we are all part of the future of this country.”
To download the full report, click here.
To download a summary of the report, click here.
by Andre Coelho | Nov 10, 2019 | News
Within the context of the wider Basic Income March, organized and executed on the past 26th of October, Toronto also saw a basic income manifestation. This was done simultaneously in other cities, such as New York, Amsterdam, Bogota and Seoul. Attendance was moderate, a few dozen people only, but the message conveyed was strong: that each citizen should receive an unconditional and regular amount of money, just in order to “have access to a certain level of comfort”, as Amélie Payette, one of the demonstrators, put it. Other people, at the venue, also referred to the “obligation to help prepare the future”, in the face of technological developments that are already displacing many people from the job market.
Also present at the demonstration was Alvin Tedjo, candidate to the Ontario Liberal Party leadership, who believes basic income can be what citizens need to cover their basic needs, in terms of nourishment and housing, and to fully participate in the economy. That, according to Tedjo, would allow people to “do their best to fulfill their potential”. Participants at the march also pointed to the fact that parents in Canada already receive a stipend, only conditional to them being parents of under-aged children (Canada’s Child Benefit). That, according to some, could one day amount to a basic income, if extended to the whole population.
The event has been covered by CBS News, shortly reported here.
More information at:
[in French]
“Des citoyens réclament un revenu universel de base au Canada”, Radio-Canada, October 26th 2019
by Courtney Hallink | Oct 31, 2019 | News
Ann Wheatley (from the PEI Working Group for a Livable Income). Picture credit to: CBC
Despite the dismantling of Ontario’s Basic Income pilot after the election of the Conservative Party in the 2018 provincial election, basic income continues to play a critical role in Canadian politics, both at the provincial and national level. Leading up to the 2019 federal election, the Prince Edward Island (PEI) Working Group for a Liveable Income decorated doors across the province with doorhangers that read, “Eliminating poverty matters to voters who live here.” The doorhangers would help spread the message to candidates when they came to do their usual canvasing before the election on October 21st.
The Liberal Party, led by Justin Trudeau, emerged as the winner in the election, forming a minority government after only securing a narrow victory. The Liberal Party, who officially supports a basic income guarantee, won in all ridings across PEI. Regardless of the setback in Ontario, basic income continues to be an important issue to Canadian voters.
More information at:
Yarr K.,“‘Sorry to have missed you’: Poverty activists turn tables on door-knocking politicians”, CBC, September 30th 2019
“Canadian federal election 2019: Live results map and riding-by-riding vote counts”, Maclean’s, October 21st 2019
by Guest Contributor | Oct 24, 2019 | Opinion
For the past 3 years, my primary goal has been to get the Liberal Party of Canada to include Unconditional Basic Income (UBI) on its electoral platform. (Support for this policy is already in the official Party program.) The election was held on Monday, October 21st and UBI was never mentioned. My ultimate goal is to see UBI implemented in my lifetime.
I ended up fighting on two fronts and losing on both.
The first front consisted of my lobbying efforts within the Liberal Party. I was hoping I could convince them to include a promise to implement UBI as a commitment to the electorate should they win re-election. When I got cold feet and neglected to contact the guy who was writing the platform, my project was probably doomed. Plus, several weeks into the 6-week election campaign I changed strategies. On September 19th an independent report by UBIWorks was published. It presented the case that the Canada Child Benefit was a UBI. I stopped presenting Basic Income as an experimental policy to be tested and, instead, argued that it was a fait accompli in Canada, hiding in plain sight. My efforts to get the press to ask questions and to stimulate debate among the Liberal candidates came to nothing.
Despite high-level contacts within the Party, I had the impression that my message was not getting through to the right people. In hindsight, it is equally possible that my suggestion was being heard loud and clear in the right quarters and that appealing to their electoral self-interest rather than their consciences was spot on the best approach. After all, while I was emphasizing the economic impact of the Child Benefit for GDP growth, job creation, corporate profits, and tax revenue, the platform kept droning on about poverty reduction, a subject that people would rather not think about because they find it depressing and it makes them feel guilty. Perhaps Liberal strategists, who were staking their reputations on their message, simply rejected my proposal as not being something that would, at this point in the campaign, help them win reelection. Was this a mistake that partially explains why the Liberals lost their majority in the House of Commons? It would be pretentious of me to suggest this.
However, today’s flop may yet bear fruit in the next electoral cycle in 4 years. This is what cooler heads than mine thought from the outset.
While all this was going on, a second front was opened with my allies in the Basic Income community. To bolster my position that UBI already existed in Canada under another name, I tried to convince famous people in the movement to lend their credibility to this argument. I was flabbergasted by the strong and nearly universal resistance I encountered: no, the Canada Child Benefit could not be called a Basic Income, full stop.
While two or three people got on board immediately, most of the cognoscenti insisted that what I was advancing was inconsistent with the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) definition of UBI for a variety of reasons. Theoreticians and experimentalists alike, as well as activists, flatly refused to go along with my plan to leverage this unique opportunity to change the narrative about UBI. I thought: “I’m caught in a paradigm shift, as it happens!”
Some argued that the Child Benefit was not universal because it was only earmarked for kids. Yang’s Freedom Dividend which excludes minors still qualifies as a UBI, though. Others claimed it violated individuality because it was given to families, as though it makes any sense to hand $500 to a toddler. However, most objected on the grounds that the Child Benefit is means-tested. This was the breaking point where everything I was trying to do simply collapsed. I never saw it coming.
The Canada Child Benefit is not means-tested, it is income-tested. People outside Canada are colour-blind to the distinction. Income-testing is just not part of their paradigm. Means-testing is an evil policy tool that allows bureaucrats to arbitrarily deprive vulnerable people of funds and services that they need and have a right to receive. It grinds them into the ground and makes an example of them to terrorize everybody else. Income-testing is a horse of another colour.
In Canada, we have a progressive tax system just like the one Adam Smith himself proposed: “It is not unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue but something more than in that proportion.” That is why no one questions the practice of taxing back from the rich funds equivalent to the Child Benefit from which they derive no important advantage and thereby recover some of the cost of a program, which is immensely useful for everybody else. Conscientious objectors to means-testing will insist that even when this claw-back is done specifically for the purpose of recouping UBI, it does not infringe on the principle of universality because it is done in separate operations, the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing. In Canada, we tend to view this as an elaborate and unnecessary fiction. Covering up the mechanism does little to hide the process which serves no other purpose than to claw back UBI from the rich.
In the FAQ on the BIEN definition of Basic Income, we read under the caption Is Basic Income paid irrespective of income?
“Taxable “means” may need to be taxed at a higher average rate in order to fund the basic income. But the tax-and-benefit system no longer rests on a dichotomy between two notions of “means”: a broad one for the poor, by reference to which benefits are cut, and a narrow one for the better off, by reference to which income tax is levied.”
The second notion is used universally to assess the Canada Child Benefit, which is why we use the term income-tested and not means-tested. My argument failed to convince. How it is possible, on the one hand, to clearly distinguish the two notions and, on the other hand, still insist on using the same term to describe them?
I think we are confronted with two incommensurable competing paradigms in both the political sphere and the academic domain. The old paradigms have accumulated a thick crust of unresolved problems such that business-as-usual can no longer operate smoothly. In politics, poverty reduction continues to dominate social policy discussions even though it no longer provides useful solutions. In the UBI academic community, a rigid definition stifles progress towards implementation by ensuring that the ideal program remains unattainable. I will be fleshing out this argument at a later date.
I have not lost hope that the politicians will eventually learn to frame UBI as a powerful economic stimulant and an entitlement for all Canadians, especially the middle class. The academics too, will at some point loosen their church-like grip on orthodoxy and accept a leading role in promoting social justice, down in the trenches.
However, I would hate to end up like Moses, who never did reach the promised land, and spent 40 years not getting there. I do not have that kind of time. I will be quickly making new friends in the party that holds the balance of power and leveraging these connections to achieve my goal of seeing Unconditional Basic Income implemented for all, in my lifetime.
Pierre Madden
WhatsApp/Cell: +1 514 238-0044
https://www.basicincomemontreal.org/
https://www.revenudebasevilleray.com/
https://www.patreon.com/PierreMadden
by Andre Coelho | Oct 16, 2019 | News
Basic Income seems to be a hot issue to debate at the local elections run in Thunder Bay (Ontario, Canada). Ever since the cancellation of the Ontario basic income pilot project, by the Doug Administration, discussions over basic income type of policies have been growing in number and intensity. Thunder Bay was one of the localities over which the pilot was being run.
At Thunder Bay’s Chamber of Commerce, last week on October 9th, political candidates from all six colors (Liberals, Conservatives, NDP, Greens, People’s Party and Liberatarians) agreed, at least in principle, on the necessity of implementing a basic income over time. Although differences existed between the candidate’s approach to it, all agreed that something needed be done about poverty in Canada, and that people needed assistance to cope with the ever-changing nature of work and life challenges. The Libertarian candidate, though, underlined that, according to him, basic income was unlikely to be implemented in Canada within the next four years. The Ontario interrupted basic income pilot project was mentioned several times over the event, since it represents the most palpable reference as a basic income experiment within Thunder Bay’s territory.
More information at:
Leith Dunick, “Candidates argue merits of basic-income guarantee”, tbnewswatch, October 9th 2019
André Coelho, “Canada: Report “Signposts to Success” shows how beneficial the cancelled Ontario basic income experiment was being”, Basic Income News, June 5th 2019
Kate McFarland, “ONTARIO, CANADA: New Government Declares Early End of Guaranteed Income Experiment”, Basic Income News, August 2nd 2018
