Having been one of the first countries to test out a guaranteed basic income back in the 1970s, Canada is once again planning to experiment with this idea, via a proposed pilot program wherein low income participants will receive an average of $1,320 monthly without conditions.
The project, which is to be launched in Canada’s largest province, Ontario, in fall of 2017, is laid out in a paper authored by Hugh Segal, a former senator and now special adviser to the province. According to the official proposal, the program’s aim will be to answer the most common questions and concerns regarding a basic income, including:
- Can basic income policies provide a more efficient, less intrusive, and less stigmatizing way of delivering income support for those now living in poverty?
- Can those policies also encourage work, relieve financial and time poverty, and reduce economic marginalization?
- Can a basic income reduce cost pressures in other areas of government spending, such as healthcare?
- Can a basic income strengthen the incentive to work, by responsibly helping those who are working but still living below the poverty line?
Needless to say, given how counter intuitive this idea is to so many people, it will be good to have these matters addressed.
Granted, the previous basic income program I referenced in the beginning, which involved a small town in Manitoba, had yielded encouraging results:
People in the town received a set income of $9,000 a year (by today’s standards) from the government. Evelyn Forget, an economist and professor at the University of Manitoba, who looked over the data from the study says there was a 9% reduction in working hours among two main groups of citizens.
Here’s the kicker: New mothers were using their additional income to extend their maternity leaves and spend more time with their infants, and teenage boys were using that income to stay in school.
“When we interviewed people, we discovered that prior to the experiment, a lot of people from low-income families, a lot of boys in particular, were under a fair amount of family pressure to become self-supporting when they turned 16 and leave school. When Mincome came along, those families decided that they could afford to keep their sons in high school just a little bit longer,” Forget told PRI in an interview.
Of course, Ontario’s bigger and longer (at three years) program should produce even more substantive data for policy makers to consider. And thankfully, it won’t be the only game in town in this regard: Finland, the Dutch city of Utrecht, and Kenya are at various stages of rolling out their own basic income programs.
Whatever your stance on the feasibility of this idea, I think we can all agree that the more evidence and data we have, the better.