Home » Basic Income/Healthy Communities » Potatoes and Poverty: Basic income, not Band-Aids, is needed says retired prof

Potatoes and Poverty: Basic income, not Band-Aids, is needed says retired prof

By Roderick Benns

In the mid 1960s, a young, untrained social worker named Roberta Hamilton was given the task of visiting families in Leeds County on behalf of the Children’s Aid Society. The rural Ontario poverty she encountered more than 50 years ago was devastating.

Some families had only potatoes for dinner. Many couldn’t find work. Farming on the rocky hills and outcrops of the region ensured the harvest was scarce. With the exception of a cheese factory in Plum Hollow, industry was scarcer still.

Procuring welfare for these desperately poor people was difficult. At the time, says Hamilton, “it was the reeve of the township that decided whether a family should get the pittance or not.”

“I witnessed the humiliation of my clients who had to beg for the most basic necessities – and I begged on their behalf,” she says. As well, I “often bought groceries for a destitute family.”

For the hard-working farmers of the county, says Hamilton, who were also trying to manage their own small crops, the notion of welfare rubbed them the wrong way.

“Providing welfare was like giving their own hard-earned cash to their ‘dissolute’ neighbours,” she tells Leaders and Legacies.

Hamilton says the housekeeper of one reeve told her that sanitary napkins were a luxury that poor people should not buy.

It was during this time that Hamilton realized that poverty was a problem “not to be solved by social workers with a bag full of Band-Aids.”

That year marked her strong commitment to democratic socialism, a commitment that has not wavered since. She followed the recommendations of the landmark David Croll report from the Senate Committee on Poverty closely. She became convinced about the importance of a Guaranteed Annual Income.

“Everyone, I decided, should be entitled to a decent living, no matter the circumstances of their life,” she says.

Hamilton went on to become a sociology professor and taught at at Queen’s University in Kingston for 25 years, where she still resides today. When she retired, she turned her attention away from university politics and towards something bigger – the vision of securing a basic income guarantee for Canadians.

She says it’s easier for people to wrap their minds around the idea and give support to the notion of a living wage instead of basic income, “because we  are so wedded to the idea that  people who don’t have paid employment are parasites and lazy.”

They believe that work “is the ticket for all life’s material goods and needs from housing to food to education.”

“There are many reasons to challenge this view,” the retired professor notes, including the fact that any society “that purports to be interested in social equality and the worth of all human beings needs to distribute resources fairly.”

“A good society needs to distribute income to everyone — those raising children, people with a disability, artists and musicians, young people looking to find some sort of berth in the economy, those with mental health problems…the list goes on,” she says.

Hamilton says the biggest roadblock to mentally accepting the idea of a basic income guarantee is the fact that most people assume everyone would stop working.

“But when you ask people who think this if they would stop working if they had a basic income, they look at you as if you were crazy. It’s only those ‘other’ people who would choose not to work.”

She says in her experience, those ‘others’ are few and far between, and even those few who might choose not to work don’t make a lifetime habit of this.

“Perhaps some people would reject jobs that provide wages below the poverty line, miserable conditions, and no benefits. So employers would have to rethink their employment strategies. What a good thing that would be.”

 

 

 

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