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 ... Read More »
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 ... Read More »
Roderick Benns recently interviewed Dr. Gary Bloch about basic income. Bloch is a family physician with St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, and co-Chair of the Ontario College of Family Physicians’ Committee on Poverty and Health. His clinical, educational, program development, and research interests focus on the intersection between poverty and health, and specifically on what primary care providers can do to ... Read More »
After attending Basic Income congresses both nationally and internationally for about a decade now, the chair of the Basic Income Canada Network (BICN) says the latest Winnipeg, Manitoba congress beats them all in at least one area – the diversity of people attending. “In the 10 years I’ve been going I’ve never seen anything like this one,” says Sheila Regehr ... Read More »
The problem of poverty – a deprivation among plenty — has blighted Ontario since our province’s beginnings, and has remained one of the more intractable problems of public policy. Poverty’s reach continues to impair hundreds of thousands of individuals, families and children. Recent evidence has suggested that, despite government spending commitments and some improvements in certain indicators, poverty is becoming ... Read More »
Roderick Benns recently interviewed Michael Vertolli, a PhD student at Carleton University who studies artificial intelligence in relation to human cognition. He believes that basic income is one of the only ways to move forward in a future of large-scale automation. Benns: What is the connection between automation and basic income? Why should we be considering this social policy change based on ... Read More »
Roderick Benns recently interviewed David Calnitsky, who is a Canadian PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, completing his thesis on the Mincome experiment with basic income. The experiment took place in the 1970s in Dauphin, Manitoba. He has recently published part of it as an article: “More Normal than Welfare”: The Mincome Experiment, Stigma, and Community Experience.” ... Read More »
The economy is in trouble so we’re in trouble. We’re worried about a general slow-down in activity, job losses, high personal debt levels, inequality, precarious employment, the hidden costs of underemployment and poverty, and so on. There’s a lot of debate going on about what to do. While many and varied prescriptions are being put forward, everyone from left to ... Read More »
This is an excerpt from a speech recently given by Senator Art Eggleton. We have immense challenges in our country when it comes to poverty. We have families that struggle to pay rent. We have children that can’t afford school supplies or to go on school trips. We also have many that can’t afford to put good food on the ... Read More »
After a groundswell of support from mayors across the province, including pressure from health units and organizations of all social policy stripes, Ontario will proceed with a basic income guarantee pilot project. The location of the pilot has not yet been announced but the recent provincial budget document makes clear that the government pledges to “work with communities, researchers and ... Read More »
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