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.

In May 2016, Reza Hajivandi and a bunch of others interested in social issues ended up in the same space under the North York Community Housing Leadership and Community Engagement program in Toronto.

Through the course they were taking, they discussed and learned what community leadership and participation meant. As a last step of fulfilling the course’s requirements, they had to apply their skills and then both advocate and engage with the community on one issue. They chose Basic Income as their issue.

In addition to reaching out to communities on the street, emailing politicians, and the Prime Minister’s Office, they created a petition on change.org.

“Our goal was to get about a 100 signatures while different group members provided different estimates with the highest being 2,000,” says Hajivandi.

To their shock, in 24 hours they had over 20,000 petitions, with thousands of comments through their ‘Canadian Initiative for Basic Income.’

“It was encouraging and overwhelming at the same time,” says Hajivandi. “Given the reception, and our passion for social issues, we felt that we needed to go on, and continue with the project beyond the course. Here we are today, and we have been able to continue with our petition, make connections, advocate for an effective Basic Income policy, and currently, we are in the process of finishing up our draft policy proposal for a Basic Income.”

With his passion for learning within the social issues, Hajivandi also saw this as an excellent opportunity to actually apply his skills for a real, tangible cause.

“I think this is a very important issue because we may be at a critical juncture where changes to the welfare system are more necessary than ever before,” he says.

He says that poverty, unemployment, and to a certain extent, “precarity” have always existed in Canadian history. On the flip side, he notes that government policy to battle these challenges have also always existed.

“However, the high rates of poverty, precarity, expensive living conditions today coupled with an incapable welfare system means that more Canadians are suffering every day and expect change,” he says.

Hajivandi notes that under a neoliberal framework, governments usually seek to cut more and spend less on social services. He sees a Basic Income as a way to both appease people and reduce spending.

“At this critical juncture a radical reform of social security could have major implications,” he says.  If done effectively, Hajivandi says a Basic Income can help Canadians out of poverty and “remove the conditions and surveillance mechanisms” of the existing welfare security system, which have only exacerbated poverty.

A basic income (also known as a guaranteed annual income) would ensure no one ever drops below the poverty line. It ensures everyone an income sufficient to meet basic needs and live with dignity, regardless of work status.

Articles appeared on Benns’ independent, non-partisan news site, Leaders and Legacies, over a two-year period. After gathering all of the articles and question and answer sessions together, Benns says he realized he had more than 70,000 words and a 290-page book to share – Basic Income: How a Canadian Movement Could Change the World. The book is available exclusively through Amazon.

Featuring scores of interviews and articles with prominent Canadians, including federal Green Party leader Elizabeth May, Senator Art Eggleton, and retired Senators Hugh Segal and Michael Meighen, there are also interviews with MPs Scott Brison and Dan Blaikie, as well as big city mayors like Calgary’s Naheed Nenshi and Edmonton’s Don Iveson. Benns also interviewed researchers, academics, educators, and medical doctors, along with average Canadians — to get them to imagine what their lives would be like under a basic income guarantee.

“This is one of the most talked-about and compelling social policy initiatives being considered by Canadian politicians now,” says Benns, who also does communication work for the Basic Income Canada Network (BICN).

“Basic income is part of a vital conversation we need to have about inequality in Canada.”

He points out Ontario is about to announce an ambitious pilot project to test basic income policy over a multi-year period, with the federal government watching closely. Quebec is considering its own initiative, as is Prince Edward Island.

“If Canada, as a wealthy G7 nation, decides to kick-start a basic income program, this could have profoundly positive ramifications for inequality around the world.”

To purchase Basic Income: How a Canadian Movement Could Change the World, click here.

October 16 is World Food Day. First observed in 1979, World Food Day honours the creation of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) on October 16, 1945 in Quebec, Canada.

This year’s theme, Climate is changing. Food and agriculture must too, builds upon the FAO’s vision of achieving food security for all through regular access to enough high-quality food to lead active, healthy lives.

The FAO’s three main goals are:

• The eradication of hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition.
• The elimination of poverty and the driving forward of economic and social progress for all.
• The sustainable management and utilization of natural resources, including land, water, air, climate and genetic resources for the benefit of present and future generations.

By creating resilient, productive and sustainable global agricultural practices, and reducing food waste, the FAO hopes to end global hunger by 2030. Realistically, climate change aside, is it even possible to end global hunger?

As a teen I read Frances Moore Lappe’s book, Diet for a Small Planet. I remember thinking it made complete sense to reduce meat consumption in order to improve global food security. It took a little longer for me to realize that greed and politics have far more to do with the ongoing global hunger crisis than a lack of bounty. Forty years later not much has changed – we just have better methods of tracking the problem as it continues to grow in size, scope and severity.

• 1/3 of all food produced for human consumption is never consumed because waste happens in production, packaging, distribution, sales, and consumption. That’s equivalent to $750 billion.
• 1.3 billion tons of food valued at $31 billion is wasted annually in Canada alone.
• When the additional costs of energy, time and water are calculated into the equation the actual cost of food waste in Canada is closer to $107 billion annually.
• In 2015 food banks helped over 1.7 million Canadians.
• 1 in 6 food bank clients are, or have recently been, employed.
• 110,000 Canadians in rural communities rely on food banks.
• 47 percent of children living in northern Canada don’t know if there will be a next meal.
• World food waste releases carbon dioxide in amounts equal to 700 million cars annually.
• Food waste in landfills releases methane and contributes to climate change.

So, it’s clear individuals can significantly reduce their ecological footprint by reducing the amount of food they waste, but how does that evolve into eradicating hunger in Canada and around the world by 2030?

First of all, Canadians shouldn’t have to wait another 14 years for food security. However, compared to the lack of progress made to reduce child poverty across the country over the past 25 years and this becomes a relatively more palatable timeline.

To replace hunger with food security Canada needs:

1. A guaranteed basic income to ensure every Canadian can purchase adequate amounts of culturally appropriate food.
2. A living wage and conscious move away from the practice of precarious employment as the norm.
3. All provinces to follow British Columbia’s lead to end the claw back of child support from sole custodial parents on social assistance. This includes Ontario where the Wynne government announced in February 2016 that this practice would end, but has yet to implement the change.
4. A national food policy that includes creative solutions for issues of food insecurity unique to northern regions.
5. To support local family farm and co-operative initiatives producing a wide variety of genetically diverse crops to mitigate the effects of climate change. To stop corporations from patenting life.
6. To ensure corporations are held accountable when their genetically modified products contaminate non-GMO farms, gardens and neighbourhoods.
7. To protect farmland from development because a country that can’t feed itself is at the mercy of its supplier and in this case the US isn’t looking too friendly if Donald Trump becomes president. In 2006, 7.3 percent of Canada’s land was considered arable, but a mere 5 percent was considered prime or dependable.
8. Increased incentives for low input farms, certified organic farms and community supported agriculture.
9. Stop bottlers of water, corporations, mining companies and golf courses from using public water or acquiring aquifers for private use.
10. A national housing strategy including federal investment in affordable housing.
11. A national pharmaceuticals strategy.
12. A national child care strategy.

Once we ensure food security for Canadians what role will we play in ending global hunger? How do we stop food from being used as a weapon of war? How do we prohibit corporations from buying up large tracks of land to grow cash crops at the expense of locals’ food security? How do we prevent corporations from patenting life and holding farmers hostage using designer seeds and terminator technology? How do we put an end to corporations buying up water rights? How can we continue to justify our role in perpetuating climate change when it places poorer countries at even greater risk of food insecurity?

Greed and politics will continue to prevent us from ending world hunger unless a universal change of consciousness occurs. Our self-centered, self-serving means of national and international production and distribution have failed to lessen hunger here at home and around the world. Climate change remains secondary to creating jobs and growing the economy even though these goals needn’t be mutually exclusive. War continues to rage within Canada in the form of the oppression of women, Indigenous peoples, racialized and visible ethnic groups, workers, and the poor.  If we can’t significantly address these home grown issues, how do we expect to make a positive international contribution to ensuring global food security?

Improving individual, national and international food security requires a complex set of solutions addressing the intersecting causes that can be quite unique to each individual and country based on their experience of oppression and discrimination.

World Food Day is a stark reminder that simply producing more food, or wasting less of what we produce, will never get food into the mouths and bellies of those who desperately need it yet can’t afford to grow or buy it.

This article originally appeared on Raise the Hammer.

In a recent 2015 paper, Ronald Labonte and David Stuckler argue that the rise of neoliberalism has led to bad economics which in turn has imperiled population health.

They argue that cuts to health and social protection systems under neoliberal nations (like Canada and the US) pose major health risks. As well, structural changes to a new globalized labour market has led to precarious work and rampant under-employment.

Analyses show, say the authors, that the reduction in “social protection spending” by governments were found “to be the main cause of increases in poverty and inequality” in affected countries. By increasing or failing to reduce inequality, they write, any earlier health gains were slowed down or reversed earlier gains. This affected vulnerable populations such as “the poor, rural populations, women, and children.”

Labonte and Stuckler (from the University of Ottawa and University of Oxford, respectively) argue that there are four policy reform areas that can be made to stop this decline and improve health outcomes.

• Re-regulating global finance
• Reject austerity measures
• Restore and increase progressive taxation
• Tax financial transactions at a global level (for instance, bond and share sales alone, taxed at just .05 percent would yield $410 billion to $8.63 trillion for global health, social development, and climate change initiatives.)

It is their second point, on rejecting austerity, where it is obvious that a basic income could be of global help and consequence, even though the authors themselves do not make this point. The authors note that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) discovered that for “every dollar in new government spending, up to $1.70 in economic growth would occur.”

A basic income would put more money into the hands of more people. The cost of this is clearly outweighed by the fact that people with low incomes must spend all the money they earn each month, making it an obvious win for the economy. Wealthier people hang on to more of their money, or, in many cases, even move it offshore where there is less taxation.

Labonte and Stuckler write that government spending in health and social protection not only “improves health equity and contributes to social stability but also boosts economic growth.”

Countries that increase social spending during economic recessions recover much faster. Austerity in hard times make things “worse for the poor, but better for the rich.”

Clearly, Canada and other neoliberal nations must make seismic shifts in economic and social policy. One of the best things governments could do is institute a basic income guarantee which would serve not only to mitigate poverty, but also stimulate economic growth for the country.

Four panelists met in the southwestern Ontario city of Guelph Wednesday night to debate the merits of a basic income guarantee. When the dust settled, there may have been more common ground than first imagined.

The central question of the evening was ‘Can a Basic Income Guarantee Eliminate Poverty?’ Sheila Regehr, chair of the Basic Income Canada Network, kicked off the evening with a 20-minute introduction about basic income. She was then in conversation with Peter Clutterbuck, from the Social Planning Network of Ontario, Noah Zon, Director of Policy and Research, Maytree, and Dr. Nicola Mercer, Medical Officer of Health, Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph Public Health.

Regehr promoted and defended basic income on many levels, pointing out that Canada already has two forms of basic income policy in place – Old Age Security (OAS) and the Canada Child Tax Benefit. She pointed out that income guarantees for seniors and children worked in tandem with good public services to provide a better quality of life.

“We know seniors are better off. We know children and parents are better off. We have generations of evidence here,” she said.

The BICN chair also pointed out that increasing rates of technological change and automation are creating a new reality and challenge for human labour, with employment much more insecure. She says a basic income would promote a fairer distribution of work, wealth, income and better civic participation.

Clutterbuck offered the most qualified support of the evening, pointing out that poverty wasn’t only about income, although that was one aspect. It is also about poverty of exclusion from the community, he said, and lack of employment chances.

“The idea of de-linking labour from income security is a bit troubling to me and I think…it undermines community advocacy movements,” Clutterbuck says.

Clutterbuck emphasized that we “can’t just pretend paid labour is not important.”

He also questioned why our society allows the deterioration of good jobs to occur, pointing out that good paying and meaningful work can help people “get far beyond the poverty line.”

“But workers need more rewarding jobs, with opportunity planning,” he said.

Clutterbuck did say that a “basic income should be part of a balanced discussion, and then it could have a role.”

“Income security should be situated within a wider discourse with employment opportunities.”

Clutterbuck hopes the forthcoming pilot administered by the Ontario government could demonstrate how a basic income could work in tandem with other supports. In this way, the income security and community supports become interdependent, able to withstand future political scrutiny, he says.

Dr. Nicola Mercer, Medical Officer of Health, offered her clear support for a basic income, stating that poverty is “making people ill.”

Citing decades of research as far back as the Whitehall study, which examined mortality rates over 10 years among male British Civil Servants aged 20-64, Mercer says it’s clear that income security would tremendously help with population health.

She pointed out that in her city of Guelph, one neighbourhood is challenged with a 30 percent poverty rate for children. This same neighbourhood “has no grocery store, no library, and no daycare.”

“It is really an impediment,” she says, because if families don’t have the income to have a car to access the services they need it creates layers of problems.

“Everything is compounded. An unequal distribution of wealth makes for an unequal distribution of health,” Mercer says.

Noah Zon, for Maytree, says not all basic income policies are created equal, something that all panelists agreed on.

“The wrong kind of basic income could make people worse off,” if it corresponded to an erosion of public services.

In pointing out the efficacy of the Canada Child Tax Benefit, Zon says that “we know people use money remarkably well” to help their families, agreeing that this form of a basic income – including the OAS for seniors – have been successes.

The Maytree researcher says that the cost of bring up all families in Canada over the poverty line with a basic income could be $300 billion dollars though, and that’s after factoring in the elimination of welfare systems. (However, Zon seemed to be referring to a demogrant model here, rather than the more widely accepted and more affordable negative income tax model, in which some monies are clawed back as people work.)

“I’d rather focus on the gaps in our existing benefits though…rather than choose a modest version of a basic income just because it might be more affordable,” he said.

Zon cited the Alaska Permanent Fund which gives about $2,000 to each resident per year, a dividend from oil development, as an example of a modest basic income that would be ineffective.

Shared values, health, and community

Regehr emphasized that the basic income guarantee would have to be “designed well, based on the values we share.”

“A basic income also has the potential to have positive community-wide effects,” as has been shown in India, Regehr says.

From a mental health angle, Regehr says “we can make the choice to throw money at mental health now, or we can first take a huge mental health strain off of people first with a basic income.”

Better employment

Clutterbuck cited the example of the activist federal governments of the early 1970s that helped create meaningful work opportunities for people. As a young history teacher who graduated into a large glut of teachers in 1971, he says that new and different opportunities from government allowed the flourishing of careers, like his, in the non-profit sectors. This helped build communities and contributed to better social cohesion.

Pointing out there are now robots that spend time with people who have Alzheimer’s, he wonders “why we’re not paying people to be with people?”

“This is an example of making better employment decisions.”

Food Security

Mercer points out that research shows that women who have food security issues tend to be more overweight than those who do not. As well, they often raise daughters with mental health issues.

“Moving people out of poverty requires more than a basic income,” but a basic income is a great start, she says.

Out of Poverty

Zon says recent changes to the Canada Child Tax Benefit by the federal Liberals have moved 397,000 people out of poverty this year.

“And that’s a strong case for a basic income,” he adds.

The ninth annual Basic Income Week surpassed all expectations in Canada with a plethora of basic income-related activities of note. This reflects only a limited cross-section of activities:

Ontario Basic Income Pilot

Nowhere is the discussion about basic income more developed than in Ontario where the government is poised to release the parameters of a basic income pilot this fall. No one knows yet where the pilot will be set up, or in how many locations, nor the number of people this will affect. Retired Conservative Senator Hugh Segal acted as special adviser for the project and has already reported back to the Province on his recommendations.

Segal has long been an advocate for a basic income guarantee and has spent 40 years of his professional life arguing for the policy as a way to mitigate poverty.

Pilot Lessons

A well-received academic paper from Dr. Evelyn L. Forget, Dylan Marando, Tonya Surman and Michael Crawford Urban is called Pilot Lessons: How to design a basic income pilot project for Ontario. Forget – who is an economist and professor at the University of Manitoba – is well known for her analysis of Canada’s Mincome project from the 1970s which was held in Dauphin, Manitoba. This new report makes a series of recommendations for how to design the pilot that the Ontario Government has promised to conduct.

“Taking into account recent changes to the structure of the labour market and the impending effects of technology and automation on jobs, Pilot Lessons explores how a basic income could impact entrepreneurship, innovation and society’s relationship to work. Combining these analyses of past experiments and the current context, the report makes recommendations on how Ontario could best design a basic income pilot project.”

Poll catches fire across country

Originating out of a community engagement project in a low-income neighbourhood in Toronto, a Change.org poll was started with modest expectations but quickly caught on across the country.

Canadian Dimension

In its summer 2016 edition, Canadian Dimension Magazine has released a basic income-focused edition. As they note in their preamble:

“Passions are running particularly high in Canada at the moment, with governments in the two largest provinces proposing to put some form of basic income on trial in the new few years, in addition to the major basic income initiatives afoot around the world. Few will argue there is no need for fundamental reform of Canadian social assistance and income security programs. One-in-five Canadian children live in poverty, a rate that is double in Indigenous communities.”

Basic Income in Manitoba

To mark Basic Income Week in Manitoba, the Basic Income Manitoba group launched its new website here.

New paper argues for Basic Income through OAS example

A new academic study by Lynn McIntyre, Daniel Dutton, Cynthia Kwok, and Herb Emery argues that the Old Age Security (OAS) program and its supplement for those with low incomes act as a type of basic income guarantee for older Canadians, which has had a measurable impact on food security.

“One measure of extreme poverty is food insecurity. This study…shows that guaranteed annual income is effective in decreasing food insecurity among low income seniors in Canada. Turning 65 and being eligible for this funding is associated with, on average, a 15 percentage point drop in food insecurity compared to baseline,” they write.

Guelph event on Basic Income 

Basic Income Canada Network Chair Sheila Regehr will be the keynote speaker at an event on Sept. 28^th in Guelph presented by: Guelph Community Health Centre, Guelph and Wellington Task Force for Poverty Elimination and CFUW Guelph. The evening, which is open and free to attend, is billed as: 

Can a Basic Income Guarantee Eliminate Poverty?

Regehr will be “in conversation with Peter Clutterbuck, from the Social Planning Network of Ontario, Noah Zon, Director of Policy and Research, Maytree, and Dr. Nicola Mercer, Medical Officer of Health, Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph Public Health.

For more details on the event click here.