Although he counts himself lucky not to have experienced poverty firsthand, the Green Party leader of Prince Edward Island, Peter Bevan-Baker, has many friends who haven’t been as fortunate.

When he rose in the P.E.I. Legislature last week and got all-party support for a Basic Income project to be set up on the island, he may have had them in mind when he introduced his motion. The Legislature agreed unanimously to have the province work with the federal government in the hope of running a Basic Income pilot on the island.

Bevan-Baker’s motion had its origins in the island’s May 2015 election. At an all-party leaders’ debate, it was the Green Party leader then, too, who brought up the issue, given it is prominently featured in all Green Party platforms across Canada. What he didn’t expect during that debate was to hear widespread openness toward the idea.

“I discovered, to my delight, that they all thought Basic Income was at least worthwhile exploring. It was a pleasant surprise, this unanimity.”

Bevan-Baker brought it up at least on “a dozen occasions” in the Legislature when opportunities arose. “There were all sorts of possibilities to do so, since Basic Income has the potential to make an impact across all departments,” says the Green Party leader.

He says if a Basic Income were to go into effect, it would have far-reaching ramifications. The obvious one is the virtual elimination of poverty.

“It’s the right thing to do from that standpoint.”

But there are far greater effects it may have to create a thriving society, he notes.

“It would remove the tremendous stress that people feel. It would provide people with enough income to meet their basic needs. It would help with the great mental stresses that people endure.”

Bevan-Baker says there are tremendous collective benefits, and that it’s important to go beyond considering only the economic when measuring. Everything from reduced health care costs, fewer law and order issues, increased civic participation, and better educational attainment are but a few areas of life that should be measured under a Basic Income to see if these improve.

“I believe a pilot project will show that Basic Income is going to improve the collective well-being of our society.

Now, the ball is in the federal government’s court. They would have to work out a partnership with the maritime province in order to make it happen. So far, there’s been no word whether or not federal involvement might happen.

In Ontario, which is embarking on its own Basic Income pilot, Ontario’s Minister Responsible for the Poverty Reduction Strategy, Chris Ballard, told Leaders and Legacies that Jean-Yves Duclos, Minister of Families, Children and Social Development for Canada, “is certainly interested in the pilot, as are my provincial colleagues across Canada.”

When it comes to P.E.I., Bevan-Baker says he met with Family and Human Services Minister Tina Mundy personally many times and he knows she has had discussions with her federal counterparts.

The Green Party leader says this is “an enormous opportunity for the government” for an issue that has widespread momentum across Canada.

“There’s a compelling case for involvement. We don’t even need to use the whole island. We could use smaller pockets, different communities with a rural-urban mix and…it would be a drop in the bucket in federal terms.”

Bevan-Baker says islanders love to refer back to that historically-important week in 1864, when the so-called Charlottetown Conference marked the beginning of discussions to create a united Canada. To this day, P.E.I. is considered the ‘birthplace’ of Canada. They like to draw all sorts of parallels, he says, when there’s a chance for the small province to do something grand.

“But that parallel is well drawn here. It would be lovely symmetry if we were the place to give birth to a Basic Income. We’re less than half of one percent of the national population. We are our own jurisdiction. You can do a really solid pilot project here.”

Bevan-Baker came to Canada at age 23, having grown up in a middle class family from the highlands of Scotland. They didn’t have a lot of material possessions, and he points out that he had “a real sense of the value of things growing up,” which helped to shape him.

Politically, it is that sense of what matters in people’s lives which may have served Bevan-Baker well here — especially if his role in kick-starting a Basic Income project for P.E.I. soon bears fruit.

There are “two sources of benefit” inherent in a Basic Income Guarantee, according to the executive director of the famous Mincome project in Winnipeg and Dauphin, Manitoba.

Ron Hikel, who served as executive director of Mincome from 1972 to 1977, says the first source of behavioural influence is the simple no-strings-attached receipt of the money itself. The second is “the psychological certainty of regularly having enough to live on.”

Hikel was speaking to Basic Income advocates at a meeting in Peterborough recently when he made the remarks. He says the psychological security of having money from month to month could “significantly reduce both individual and family anxiety.”

(In the current welfare system, recipients must submit to a high degree of invasive questioning, fill out copious amounts of paper work, and then face entrenched stigma – all for a much smaller amount of money that falls well below that of the poverty line.)

“There’s no doubt a properly designed and administered Basic Income could influence people’s lives for the better,” says Hikel.

“We’ve seen a significant increase in mental health challenges and I’m convinced that the certainty of income could lead to better physical and mental health,” Hikel explains.

The former Mincome executive director notes that of all the social determinants of health – those factors that shape the health of Canadians through the living conditions they experience – income is the most important enabler on this list.

Hikel points out that, at the level of the total population, those who have higher incomes are healthier, while those who are the most unwell in society have lesser ability to pay for health care. “And that’s why a general health system operating on exclusively private market terms is neither fair nor viable.”

Ontario’s new pilot on Basic Income

Retired Conservative Senator Hugh Segal’s report on a minimum income for Ontario was released recently, which will see Canada’s largest province set up a multi-year pilot to measure its effectiveness beginning in April, 2017.

In the report to Premier Kathleen Wynne’s government, Segal recommends a monthly payment of at least $1,320 for a single person which is about 75 percent of the province’s poverty line. For those with disabilities, Segal suggests a top-up of $500 more a month.

Hikel says that he would expect to see that the present rate of increase in health care system cost slowing after the introduction of a Basic Income, just as demand for care in Dauphin declined, according to research by economist Dr. Evelyn Forget. He says he would expect better population health in Ontario, too, after a basic income was in place in the province.

Hikel notes that in Dauphin — where Mincome helped establish a reliable income for about a third of the people – data indicated crime also went down during the experiment, including domestic incidences.

He says the big challenge for Ontario will be to get the design of the pilot right, with special emphasis on a top-notch IT system to calculate and deliver regular payments on time and in the right amounts for each family.

With Canada’s 150^th birthday year less than two months away, Hugh Segal is calling for the federal government to get involved in Ontario’s pilot project on Basic Income as a nation-building opportunity.

Retired Conservative Senator Hugh Segal’s long awaited report on a guaranteed annual income was released last week, which will see Canada’s largest province set up a multi-year pilot to measure its effectiveness.

In the report to Premier Kathleen Wynne’s government, Segal recommends a monthly payment of at least $1,320 for a single person which is about 75 percent of the province’s poverty line. For those with disabilities, Segal suggests a top-up of at least $500 a month.

The retired senator notes that while the federal government’s involvement is “not specifically within the remit of an Ontario pilot, it is nevertheless recommended that the federal government consider partnering with any willing province on any Basic Income pilots now being considered or contemplated.”

Segal writes that “a government in Ottawa that is committed to poverty reduction could see a meaningful nation-building opportunity in moving forward with a Basic Income project for the country as a whole.”

The pilot does indeed have worldwide ramifications, given Ontario’s sheer size, both in area and in population. The province is more than one million square kilometres — an area larger than France and Spain combined and it is the largest province by population in Canada, with more than 13.5 million people. This single province generates 37 percent of the national GDP of Canada.

Segal’s recommendation to the government would include strong work incentives built into the Basic Income pilot’s design. He told CBC’s Carol Off that in his vision for the program, “people would be able to go out and earn as much as they like and the normal tax rates of 20 percent or 30 percent would apply.”

“Once they reach an amount where they’re earning as much every month as they’re getting from the actual basic grant, then they would be taxed like the rest of us who earn enough to live without any assistance,” he tells Off.

To read Segal’s full report, click here.

Retired Conservative Senator Hugh Segal’s long awaited report on Ontario’s Basic Income pilot has been released, where he emphasizes the need to understand the full costs of poverty before fairly evaluating the new pilot.

Segal recommends a monthly payment of at least $1,320 for a single person which is about 75 percent of the province’s poverty line. For those with disabilities, Segal suggests a top-up of at least $500 a month.

The retired senator says any pilot project must understand poverty’s costs, not only in the present welfare and disability payments, “but also in terms of added pressures on our health system, and the Ontario economy as a whole, through its impacts on economic productivity and existing government revenues.”

He writes that measurable outcomes (from the pilot) should include the number of primary care visits (for psycho-social, mental and physical health), the number of emergency department visits, and prescription drug use.

Careful examination of participants’ life and career choices should also be made over the duration of the pilot by participants, “such as training, family formation, fertility decisions, living arrangements, parenting time.”

Other notes of interest for researchers should include education outcomes for participants and their children, and the nature and number of courses taken by adults, he says.

Work behaviour, job search and employment status

Segal says the public’s desire to understand how a basic income might affect work behaviours makes this area important to track, too.

According to Segal’s paper, measurable outcomes with regard to work behaviours should include:

• the number of hours of paid work
• the number of jobs held
• the income earned on the labour market
• the intensity and length of job search activities.

“The impact of a Basic Income on labour market participation remains one of the main concerns of the Canadian population,” he says, pointing to an August 2016 Angus Reid Institute poll, showing 63 percent of the country’s population believes that a Basic Income would discourage people from working.

Segal notes the introduction of a Basic Income pilot for individuals currently receiving Ontario Works would provide additional incentives to join the workforce, by allowing them to keep a substantial part of their earned income in addition to their Basic Income.

“…a careful evaluation of the impact of a Basic Income on people’s decisions regarding work, such as whether to work or not, their weekly hours worked, their job search activities, and the number of jobs they hold, is critical.”

The retired senator says the evaluation of the pilot should seriously explore how labour market behaviours vary across demographic groups, according to the amount in benefits received, and the rate at which they are taxed back, as income earned in the labour market increases.

— More analysis of the Segal report on Basic Income to come.

Part Two

If we hadn’t innovated in the past with respect to our social policy, we would have no Canada Pension Plan. We would have no Employment Insurance. We would have no Guaranteed Income Supplement. These safety nets of our present were unaffordable in our past according to their critics at the time.

Often, what we say is unaffordable is because of a current favouritism to one or multiple sectors of the economy. When we revaluate distribution of income, what seemed impossible or unaffordable begins to look like one giant step forward for humankind.

Every brilliant new idea is frightening at first. Like when the first horse saw the first locomotive. And how could we do without trains now?

A horse, a horse, a kingdom for a horse: why we need our social safety nets 

We would have had a dramatically more devastating financial crisis if we had not had these and other social safety nets that acted to maintain an economy that you and I are all part of. Since we say past is prologue, we had better learn from our past. The future becomes the present quickly.

Einstein taught us that time is relative. Where will the next Einstein come from?

During the great depression, unemployment was more than 25 per cent in Canada. In some cities, it was 50 percent. Without our safety nets, things would have been worse. We’re still facing the after effects. Today, some studies show that the rise of the machines will eliminate more than 50 per cent of our jobs. Imagine a crisis born out of a crisis we still haven’t dealt with.

When we talk about not having enough money now, what will we talk about then, when we have less money than now, and more unemployment, a smaller middle class, and, worst of all, a much bigger precariat?

We need to do the right thing now.

Design different 

Years ago a commercial presented us a machine, and that commercial asked us to ‘think different’ about a machine (and conceptually, about ourselves). Now, that we have designed machines to soon think differently, so differently that they are learning to think not only as fast as us but even faster, it’s also time for us to think about the design of a better society.

And then, to design it.

That’s exactly what the basic income movement is working toward.

It’s really up to us whether the rise of the machines is a revolution in human existence for the better or for the worse. If there was one thing we learned about the ‘iron horse’, it was that this new ‘horse’ didn’t wait for the future. The future was already there, and it would not be shod by a blacksmith. It would run on steel wheels and rails and carry cargo and human beings. It still does.

Rutger Bregman, in a recent CBC interview, said:

“They [mainstream media and government] ignored the idea. It all happened on a local level … If you look at progress in history or equal rights for men and women or the civil rights movement or the arrival of democracy, progress always starts on the periphery and then moves to the centre … you’re always at the beginning regarded as unreasonable, unrealistic and your ideas are regarded as unaffordable… Every milestone in civilization starts that way …”

Recently, the IMF has said this about basic income:

“We have implicitly assumed so far that income from capital remains highly unequally distributed. But the increase in overall output per person implies that everyone could be better off if income from capital is redistributed. The advantages of a basic income financed by capital taxation become obvious.”

In the future, unless we are designing a society for the betterment of machines, we have to think about what driverless machines are for. If the machines that drive us will soon be driverless, then we should work hard to design into the outcome of their increased productivity the ability to carry our society.

That is a machine worthy of invention. That is innovation.

Driven to design the betterment of the human being

In the end, as always, it will be our minds that make our world a better place for every man, woman and child. That’s why we are driven to design the machines in the first place, not for the betterment of the machines, but for the betterment of the human beings.

To do less will lead us to social, moral and economic bankruptcy.

With every decision we make, we improve or degrade our future in a way that will have great effect. We will determine our future, whether we design a solution like a basic income guarantee, or we let the status quo put us out to pasture. If we are to spend a new future out to pasture, let it be by our own design, where we have focused on re-framing our worth while benefiting the many. Let’s harness all our human creativity to create a better world because soon the machines will work and think and dream of sheep.

Part One

Some critics of basic income argue that people will become lazy should we implement basic income in Ontario or Canada. Is there any logic to such thinking?

Is it logical to use deprivation to keep people in jobs that don’t pay? Do we really expect a growing precariat to believe in society if societal attitudes are to carry a big stick when it comes to poverty? Does the mother, the student, the recently unemployed, the person now working a low wage believe in social justice? What happens when people stop trusting in governments, the stock market and other institutions?

We used to use a whip to drive our horses and our buggies forward. Is that how we want to treat our fellow human beings? By using a big stick?

How well did the big stick of days gone by function when there was no longer a horse pulling a carriage? How well did it function when the horse doing the work was now an ‘iron horse’, and that ‘iron horse’ was born in assembly? Especially, as the human hands of assembly are becoming robot hands. And, as we are learning that one day the robots may even dream.

What if the horses that were replaced by the locomotive were human beings?

When it comes to the creation of policy, even if we have laudable intentions like, ecological sustainability, the development of green technologies, equality and helping people out of poverty, we can’t leave others in a state of precariousness. We have to measure our policy by how many it will lift up. We also need to moderate the detrimental effects of technology.

We have problems …

This year ‘… a parade of CEOs met in secret to examine the sorry state of publicly traded companies’. They included Warren Buffett amongst them, who has said: “The rich have come back strong from the 2008 panic and the middle class haven’t and that effects demand and that effects the economy,” speaking to CNN. “We don’t need to have the extremes of inequality that we have. The people at the bottom end should be doing better. I think it behooves this very rich country to have less inequality than we have.” Buffett’s always been very good at simplifying complex topics.

While Buffet may have been speaking specifically about the U.S., is Canada not a rich country? Wouldn’t less inequality be a laudable goal for Canada as well?

While you may not agree with everything the above group of privileged individuals think, the fact that they think there’s a problem should tell you that there is one. It’s impossible to deny there’s a problem as some later data will show.

Even if you don’t believe the evidence before your eyes or the thousands of advocates for improvement on social policy, the precariat, basic income, etcetera, take a look at how Canadians feel about things and extrapolate that feeling out to how such feelings will affect the economy if you believe the economy will take care of itself. Has it taken care of itself since the financial crisis?

… And we have trust issues

So, we’re not only facing a dilemma brought on by our technology, but one of wealth redistribution, one where people have deep distrust of government, how we raise capital and invest to improve our future. Studies show serious problems:

• Trust in public institutions has declined especially in the wake of the financial crisis.
• The decline in the financial sector is especially large.
• Countries that experienced the largest rise in unemployment saw public confidence in national governments and the finance sector decline ‘particularly dramatically.’

How is this new normal of high unemployment world-wide and economic malaise perpetuating the lack of public confidence in national governments and financial institutions? In an increasingly global world where information is shared quickly, public trust issues in government and organizations are shared at the speed of light, too. This creates a vicious downward spiral for an economy since economies depend on trust in order to function at a near-optimal level for the greatest number of people. When people feel that they’re in a rigged casino, they ask themselves, why should I play fair? In order to gain support for policy shifts, government needs to win trust in order to win support.

In order to do the right thing, you have to be trusted to do the right thing.

Where are the horses now? 

Machines and what they replace are a great analogy for what is going wrong in our society on so many levels.

A hundred years ago, you replaced a horse with an efficient new machine. Today, you replace a human being: one that thinks, feels, creates, and often, has a family. It’s up to the privileged to understand that privilege comes with the responsibility of upholding a trust. That trust is about making things better for as many people as we are able. Privilege involves thinking about the future and constant improvement. This is not simply through the constant improvement of machines. It’s through the constant improvement of society and the social policies that make society just.

The next innovator may be living in the deep end of deprivation 

We don’t only need to retrofit factories for an age of automation. We need to retrofit society. We need to think deeply about how many people are falling into poverty. We need to understand that the next Einstein or Da Vinci may not be sitting amongst the one per cent or even the middle class. He or she may be one of the people who dream and dream from the deep end of deprivation within a society that at the moment is not quite ready for the new prime time.

How much does the loss of one potential Einstein/Da Vinci cost society?

We have to ask ourselves as we watch people lose jobs, policy makers tell us that we are in a ‘new reality’, and robots begin to do things like learn what they couldn’t do before, well, we have to ask ourselves to learn how to do things better than we did before. If the robots are learning to dream of electric sheep then we better learn how to make our own dreams come true.

Paradigms aren’t only about the implementation of technology: paradigms are about implementing the designs that make our world a better place for men, women and children because of what the efficiencies of technology have enabled us to do for one another.

We have spent a lot of our creative energies marketing machines. Today, it’s time to believe in the human being. By glorifying the machines, we’ve forgotten that they were designed to serve us.

We have to do things better by creating more value, by challenging our social policy, and by making sure that if the middle class is shrinking and has shrunk, we are going to do things better. (In Toronto, where I live, 66 per cent of neighbourhoods were middle income in 1970. That number has shrunk to 29 per cent.)

We need to create strategies that will help people grow and think differently so that they are ready for the challenges of the future. Because the future is here.

Right now.

Benns: We’re set to introduce a pilot on basic income here in Ontario. Are you optimistic this multi-year project will lead to a full-fledged model for the province and a measurable increase in people’s health?

Bloch: I am cautiously optimistic. I think a pilot like this is a big investment, and wouldn’t be undertaken if there weren’t at least some intent to follow up on the findings longer term. I am definitely optimistic that the pilot will find improvements in health, along with other markers of social and personal well-being. I am concerned that any reasonable broader scale-up is likely to happen after the next provincial election, which could easily leave the pilot orphaned under a new government that doesn’t feel invested in its outcomes. That said, there seems to be significant interest in Basic Income provincially, nationally, and internationally, and a pilot can only add fuel to the fire of interested politicians and advocates into the future. So at minimum this will help build the pressure.

Benns: How do you counter the ‘Protestant work ethic angle’ that we face here in Canada (and the US) about whether or not someone really ‘deserves’ a basic income?

Bloch: In my experience, having worked for over a decade as a family physician with some of the lowest income residents of Toronto, I have yet to meet those mythological beings who are happy to sit back and live comfortably on government assistance. Most people know that engaging in society, through employment and other means of social involvement, makes them happier and healthier. Those who have the most trouble finding and maintaining jobs often have very good reasons for doing so — caring for children or other family members, dealing with disabilities, histories of adverse life experiences, and more. Everyone has a story, and once we are willing to hear those stories, we quickly become disabused of the false stereotypes that underlie this misconception.

Benns: There are many people who work to mitigate poverty that say why not just top up our existing programs properly, since that infrastructure is already in place. Is this good enough?

Bloch: Canada is blessed, and cursed, with a dizzying, complex array of income support programs. A few people find an adequate social safety net in there, but far too many fall through the cracks or get lost in the rules and bureaucracy. I am involved with efforts in Ontario to improve the income security support structure in this province, and I am hopeful we will make some positive changes that will provide both a higher level of support, and a simpler system to navigate, but this will require a broad and sustained commitment by government to implementing these changes.

A basic income program may hold the potential to simplify and supersede at least some of the existing programs. That said, a basic income program could easily suffer from some of the same pitfalls as people face now, especially in providing an income that is inadequate to meet the needs of individuals and families. So, there may be other acceptable approaches to building a decent social safety net, but the idea of a basic income is attractive in that it could meet the goals of making income supports simple to access, portable, and (if it is structured appropriately) adequate to protect health and well-being; and it could do so without the stigmatizing and dehumanizing principles underlying our current system of social assistance .

A family doctor says basic income policy represents an acknowledgment “of the right to live a decent life.”

Dr. Danielle Martin, a family physician and Vice President Medical Affairs and Health System Solutions at Women’s College Hospital in Toronto, says increasing social assistance amounts would not achieve that goal because of the punitive way the welfare system operates.

“Rather than loading all kinds of rules onto people about their eligibility and policing their behaviour,” basic income allows for the living of a decent life that “decouples income support from complex eligibility rules.”

A basic income guarantee ensures everyone an income sufficient to meet basic needs and live with dignity, regardless of one’s work status. In Canada, the most common form of basic income discussed is a ‘top up’ approach where no Canadian would drop below a set threshold in order to remain above the poverty line.

In an interview with Leaders and Legacies, Martin says understanding why someone might ‘deserve’ a basic income is old thinking in a world that has drastically changed. Given that we’re at a “very different point now in our history” with globalization drastically changing labour markets, Martin says these dynamics are forcing people into uncomfortable transitions.

This means we “need programs that support people to transition from jobs that have become outmoded as industries face disruption,” says Martin. “I think we need to stop thinking about a basic income as an alternative to work, and start understanding it is what makes it possible to work for many of our friends and neighbours.”

Martin says the Brookfield Institute estimates that more than 40 percent of the Canadian labour force is at risk in jobs where automation is becoming more prevalent, which is also a global reality.

She says when we look back at the famous Mincome experiment, as well as other more recent experiments with basic income, “the notion that a basic income reduces the incentive to work has been largely disproved.”

“It isn’t anti-work,” Martin says, “to suggest that Canadians should be able to meet basic needs and protect their health while they strive to do the best for themselves and their families.”

Like other basic income advocates, Martin is interested in seeing how the much anticipated Ontario basic income pilot will be unveiled later this fall in Canada’s largest province.

“We’re starting out with some very thoughtful advice around how this pilot should be designed and effectively rolled out in the province, so I am optimistic,” it could lead to a full-scale program, she says.

Martin notes there is a “real opportunity” to learn about how we can re-think not just social assistance, but low income supports.

“Around the world from Finland to Utrecht, we’re seeing more countries launching pilots like these to test the effects of new guaranteed income models, so it’s clear that the time is right to explore redesign.”

She believes it will only lead to more lasting change if the pilot is structured well, though, which means “a lot is riding on it.”

For instance, she says the public needs to be engaged and they need to understand the purpose of the pilot, and all rhetoric needs to be countered with evidence.

Social justice thinker, R. W. Connell, once said that: “Statistically speaking, the best advice I would give to a poor child eager to get ahead in education is to choose richer parents.”

Connell’s advice goes beyond education, though. Income is the building block for not only education, but our very health and wellness. Income and its distribution is the most important of the social determinants of health.

Support for basic income can be found within local, provincial, and national public health organizations. The Canadian Public Health Association, for instance, is calling on the federal government to “take leadership in adopting a national strategy to provide all Canadians with a basic income guarantee.”

Ontario and Alberta public health associations have also indicated their support. This includes individual health units from municipalities across Ontario that also want to see the realization of a basic income as a means to improve population health.

And the long-term, upstream savings from having a secure, basic income in place are considerable. As basic income advocate Rob Rainer has written, we are “bearing massive cost from poverty, inequality and economic insecurity.”

He writes that Canadian spending on health care tops $200 billion a year and that about 20 percent of this—or $40 billion plus—is due to what are called “health inequities between lower and higher income Canadians.”

Rainer also points out that the cost of poverty—in health care, criminal justice, and lost productivity—has been estimated at 5.5 to 6.6 percent of Canada’s Gross Domestic Product.

“Our GDP is now in the range of $1.5-$2.0 trillion a year, meaning that poverty costs in the range of $82-$132 billion per year. Thus it stands to reason that as poverty is reduced, potentially sharply by Basic Income, the savings are going to be substantial,” Rainer writes.

Education

From an education perspective, there are few better positioned than Dr. Avis Glaze to comment on the need for basic income policy to address poverty. Glaze has worked at all levels of the school system in Canada and was also Ontario’s Chief Student Achievement Officer and the founding CEO of the Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat. She also pioneered character education, among other innovations, in Canada.

Glaze says if we want to ensure Canada is a tapestry of safe and healthy places to live, work and raise our children, “then we must address poverty in a systematic and intentional manner.”

“A basic income would be essential if we want to close achievement gaps,” says Glaze.  “From an educational perspective, this seems to be one of the most intractable issues in education, not only in Canada, but internationally.”

In a previous interview with Leaders and Legacies, Glaze noted she has always encouraged her colleagues in education to speak out more about social policy.

“Let’s take principals, for example. Many studies show they are a respected group in society. When I speak to them, I ask ‘how are you engaging in political action?’”

Glaze says most educators would not describe themselves as “political.” She says there are many reasons for this. Many do not speak directly to the media. They have school trustees and communications departments who speak on behalf of the school district.

“But if we think about politics as the ability to influence decision making and to enhance life chances of our students, we must become more political, seeking every opportunity to bend the ears of politicians.”

Here in Ontario, the Honourable Hugh Segal has been tapped to deliver a discussion paper to the province by the fall to help inform the design and implementation of a basic income pilot. Just how the Province plans to evaluate the pilot is unknown at this time. However, looking at the implications and outcomes within education and population health will be crucial as we move this innovative policy idea from theory to reality.

About 59 percent of Canadians believe basic income is unaffordable, according to a recent . It’s not the first time a populace has been dead wrong about the facts. In the U.S., 42 percent of Americans still think  in spite of blatant facts to the contrary. If our brothers and sisters to the south can be so wrong about something so apparent, we can certainly be just as wrong about something equally obvious.

Even on the face of it, the claim that basic income is unaffordable collapses.  How is it possible that a country where just over eighty people have as much wealth as the bottom third of the nation can’t afford to feed and shelter the population? Corporate Canada is hoarding over six hundred billion dollars. If we just gave everyone in Canada ten thousand dollars, they’d still have half of that left over. I don’t even need to go into a conversation of savings from other programs, or the savings from eliminating poverty to see that we have the capital to fund this. Why do we still believe that a policy as necessary as basic income is unaffordable?

I can hear the nay-sayers now. “Rich people and corporations don’t just sit on that money. They invest it! That’s how the money trickle’s down!” The trouble with this line is that, if it ever was true, it certainly isn’t now. Offshore holdings, which certainly aren’t an investment in Canada, have ballooned. Even more stunning is the fact that our banks are beginning to sell negative yield bonds, and the wealthy are buying them. Is it any wonder our economy is grinding to a halt?

So the majority of Canadians still believe that we can’t afford what is fundamentally affordable because the small minority hoarding the money would rather lose money on holdings they aren’t using instead of helping the people who enriched them. That’s an astounding position to take. We would rather throw money away then give it to fellow citizens who are in poverty.

It’s not a position any rational person can sustain. Our country is built on principles of solidarity and society. We erected our social security nets, and universal healthcare system because we understand, intrinsically, that to help our neighbors is to help ourselves. Basic income is no different, and just as affordable.