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.

Benns: What are two or three big take-aways about basic income policy that Mincome taught you?

Hikel: The biggest single take-away is that whatever a government decides to do, or not do, depends very much on their political evaluation of the policy environment prevailing at any given moment; and that this context can change very quickly. It can go from favourable to neutral to hostile in a short time. Unfortunately, controlled social science experiments take years, if they are done properly, and in that time, the policy atmosphere will most certainly change. This can make the once-possible, unimaginable and the previously unimaginable quite attractive. That is both what happened to Mincome when the governments decided not to analyze the data, and also explains why more than 40 years later, the concept has cycled back into fashion. I cannot guess how long this new phase will last, but those who believe in the idea should be acting quickly.

Benns: What gives you great optimism about the basic income movement in Canada right now?

Hikel: I fear I have spent too many years in and around governments to be awash in the warm glow of expectation. Rather, I do see several new social and economic factors that are prompting renewed and widely-spread interest in the concept. One of these is the precariousness of new job creation paying enough to live decently on, resulting from  great  technological innovation and globalization, given the  associated  job destruction here in Canada  and re-location elsewhere. Also, the movement is now international, prompting, in response, consideration of various forms of basic income in at least half a dozen nations. This in turn legitimizes Canadian government interest. But I would not yet confuse that interest with a firm decision to act.

Benns: Do you have a preference – universal demogrant or more like the negative income tax model which would be universally available in times of need? Why?

Hikel: As to a favoured form of basic income design, that is best left up to governments to decide, based on their policy objectives, their sense of the public interest, the size of the  available spend and the extent to which any new program is used to consolidate or integrate it with existing income support programs. I believe in that old adage ‘perfection can be the enemy of progress.’ A modest program, once introduced and improved by experience over time, can be safely made more generous later.

Benns: One of the biggest concerns heard about basic income is that people will choose not to work. Is there a justifiable fear that soon there won’t be anyone to do the more unsavoury jobs out there?

Hikel: As to the legitimacy of the fear of reducing work incentives, the experiments of the 1970s show varying results. That concern can be largely anticipated and mitigated by finding the right program design, combined with effective operating rules, for a particular province, region, or nation. Differing provincial demographic and economic factors need to be considered here. The same thing applies to  avoiding adverse effects on wage rates and employment. Some of those matters are best left to economists, in consultation with business leaders, unions and community leaders.

The best story Ron Hikel ever heard about the famous ‘Mincome’ experiment from the 1970s has to do with a simple pick-up truck.

Mincome stands for minimum income – something that was given to about a third of the people who lived in Dauphin, Manitoba. It was a bold experiment started by the federal Liberal government to see what people would do with free money from the state.

Ron Hikel was the executive director of the Mincome project, a program that ran from from 1974 through 1978. When a Dutch TV crew showed up at his doorstep last year in Toronto to talk to him about Mincome, they then went on to Dauphin where the experiment had made everyone in the town eligible to apply for monthly income supplementation, based on earned income and family size.

Hikel says they found and filmed a local farming family who, according to the surviving mother and son, Clarke Williams, told the film crew an interesting story. Back in the mid-70s, the family relied on two old trucks but badly needed a new one.

“So the mother put aside enough of the monthly ‘Mincome money’, Hikel tells Leaders and Legacies, “to make the down payment on a new truck.”

Hikel says the family didn’t have to sell off any of the precious livestock they owned and relied upon for income. The new truck was purchased before the end of the Mincome experiment and the family ran the vehicle for 25 straight years.

In the film, Clarke leads the documentary makers out into a field and shows them the old blue GMC truck, with a battery still in it, sitting quietly there to this day.

Hikel says he thinks of this vehicle as the ‘Mincome truck,’ an example of the “productively invested use of the Mincome money to sustain a family’s livelihood and independence, for more than two decades.”

Though Mincome ended prematurely in the late 1970s, momentum continues to build to create some form of basic income guarantee for Canadians to ensure that no one would ever drop below the poverty line. This would ultimately usher in the end of the welfare system.

Jean-Yves Duclos, federal minister of families, children and social development, stated to both CBC Radio and the Globe and Mail recently that a guaranteed minimum income is a policy worthy of discussion.